It was 1991 in New York City’s East Village and people were vanishing. Mostly young men, often creative types — one day they were in their studio sculpting or lugging paintings down the street and the next, gone.
“Nobody wanted to talk about what was happening,” remembers Marc Happel, who then worked as a freelance costume designer. “No one wanted to talk about how these people weredying of HIV or AIDS. They just” — his voice cracks in his design studio and tears begin to roll down his face. “They just disappeared.”
The world would later learn of the devastating toll that AIDS wrought on the LGBTQ community. By May of 1991, 174,000 people were living with the disease and it was the second-leading cause of death for men 25 to 44. (Today, about1.2 million Americansare living with HIV.)
But in the early ’90s, information was scarce, compassion even harder to find, and — on a national level — there was no discourse. It’s hard to imagine today, in this age of ubiquitous activism, but as Happel, today 65, recalls, “There was no conversation. No one cared.”
Marc Happel.Allison Michael Orenstein
Happel was living with his then-partner Harvey Weiss (they married in 2019). They had watched friends die since 1980, when AIDS first appeared in the U.S. — first mysteriously, then secretly. Symptoms, such as skin lesions, became publicly identifiable which spawned fear and paranoia.
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While it was his initial idea, Happel emphasizes the collective ideation and execution. “It was very much from the very beginning that was one of the things that we really felt so strongly about, is that we all came together to create this, not one single person.”
Visual AIDS
A color was chosen — red, for blood — and a template was created. The instructions: easy. Cut a ribbon to six inches. Fold it in half into an inverted V, and pin it to your lapel. The intention: powerful. “If people knew about what it was, it reminded them. If people didn’t, it made them say, ‘What is that?’ So then it started a conversation.” And because no one owned the rights — a decision was made early not to copyright the design — everyone was able to own the cause.
One last minute idea in the summer of 1991: theTony Awardsceremony was approaching. Ribbons were placed backstage. AfterJeremy Ironswalked out at the Tony Awards in 1991, the cause went international. And, finally, people started talking.
source: people.com
