logo
livingroom

decorative bar

biographies


corner Last update of this page: September 16th 2018 corner
Duane Kearns Puryear
(December 20, 1964 - 1991) U.S.A.

send e-mail

Activist

separator

One of the most requested panel in the entire 50,000-panel quilt reads: "My name is Duane Kearns Puryear. I was born on December 20, 1964. I was diagnosed with AIDS on September 7, 1987 at 4:45 pm. I was 22 years old. Sometimes it makes me very sad. I made this panel myself. If you are reading it, I am dead."

panel
© - The Names Project - AIDS Memorial Quilt, Washington D.C.,.

Puryear made that panel at a quilt-making workshop at Resource Center Dallas, where it hung until he took it to Washington, D.C. in 1989 for a quilt display on the National Mall. On his flight home, he left it in the overhead bin and the original was never seen again. When he died in 1991, his mother made a replica from this picture and it is her replica that is part of the quilt.

According to Stephanie Poole's 1998 article, "The Making of an AIDS Quilt," the process of making his own quilt panel was Duane Puryear's first act as an AIDS activist: "In creating this [panel], with needle and thread, Puryear completed the most significant reidentification possible. He identified himself as dead. Duane Puryear was sixteen when he contracted HIV. He was twenty-two when he was diagnosed with AIDS."

He once said that his goal was to be "the longest living person with AIDS. In 1991, at the age of twenty-six, he died. He had lived with HIV for ten years. During [that] time, he became an activist... he worked on an AIDS hotline... he became a lecturer. In Dallas, he founded the speakers bureau, which [became] an important part of the Dallas AIDS Resource Center." By the end of 1991, over 156,000 people in America had died of HIV/AIDS-related diseases.

separator

Source: http://lgbt-history-archive.tumblr.com/

Click on the letter P to go back to the list of names

corner © Matt & Andrej Koymasky, 1997 - 2018 corner