By John Brantingham
FROM: Cultural Daily

A Quilt for David by Steven Reigns feels like a sacred book to me. I lived through the AIDS crisis and the disinformation and fear mongering that went along with it. This poetry collection chronicles the difficult story of a dentist, Dr. David Acer, who contracted HIV and continued to practice on patients during the 1980s. Some of his patients contracted AIDS and sued him. 

A Quilt for David is about the pain of AIDS and the politicalization of the crisis. It is about much more than just David Acer but the ways that people used the fear and pain of that time and homophobia for their own benefit. It doesn’t present any answers, but with a shockingly straight-forward and almost stoic style exposes the many problems when medicine and discrimination and the law meet and are used for personal gain.

I was a teenager during the 1980s, and over the years I have forgotten how politicians used the epidemic to create little petty moments to add to a power based on misinformation. Reigns writes, “In the holocaust of AIDS, William F. Buckley Jr. suggested tattooing the infected. To serve as a warning, like cautionary tape, road flares, or traffic cones” (15). Buckley, the famously ultra-right conservative, used the deaths of these people to bring about a return to some of the anti-gay discrimination of the Holocaust. He must have known the kind of dangerous precedent that he was setting. He must not have cared. He talks, too of Reagan’s refusal to even speak about the crisis. The fallout of these kinds of statements and disinformation was a fear that kept people in the shadows and made the crisis worse. Read Rest of Review Here