In 1985, after the shocking assassinations of the first two openly gay politicians, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, gay man and political activist Cleve Jones began to understand a need for communal unity. At the end of one of the candlelight marches, he asked the crowd to write down on individual notecards the names of loved ones that had fallen victim to AIDS. He then read the names at the end of the march and then taped the notecards onto the Federal building. Jones immediately recognized the similarity between the notecards and a patchwork quilt, and thus was born the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Beginning at a small local level in San Francisco, soon became an internationally acclaimed project giving family members, lovers and friends to commemorate those close to them that had died of AIDS. Above is the patch that friends made in honor of Randy Shilts, the author of And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic among many others. Today there are over 41,000 individual patches that travel around the world in sections for public viewing in efforts to raise money for research and treatment. Randy Shilts left his mark within the San Francisco gay community and the literary community and will continue to live on just as
 the band still plays on.