Remembering Pandemics, Commemorating Covid-19

As the UK launches a consultation exercise over commemorating the coronavirus pandemic, we could do worse than look to the example of HIV and the AIDS awareness ribbon.

In 1991, a group of New York-based artists met to discuss creating a symbol for HIV/AIDS. By the early 1990s some 200,000 Americans were living with HIV – the majority of them men – and the Visual AIDS Artists Caucus wanted to raise awareness of what it meant to have AIDS or care for someone with the disease.

The symbol they came up with was a piece of red grosgrain ribbon, twisted in a simple loop and hand-stitched to a gold safety pin.

The AIDS ribbon was adoped in 1991 as a symbol of compassion for people with AIDS and support for education and research for effective treatments.

One of the first celebrities to wear the red ribbon was the British actor, Jeremy Irons, at the 45th Tony Awards. But it wasn’t until June 1992, when Gay Pride activists marched down Fifth Avenue as part of the “Celebrity Ribbon Cavalcade”, that the red ribbon became an international symbol of compassion for AIDS sufferers and their carers. At a tribute concert at Wembley Stadium for the Queen frontman, Freddie Mercury, who had died of AIDS the previous November, 10,000 red ribbons were distributed to the crowd and soon red ribbons were being projected onto the Eiffel Tower and hung from the White House.

I thought of the red AIDS ribbon this week when a row broke out in the UK between rival groups of the Covid bereaved following the issuing of a public consultation document on commemorating the coronavirus pandemic. One group, Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice (CBFFJ), had proposed a red heart as the symbol for mourning while Yellow Hearts to Remember favoured a yellow heart.