A Stitch in Time

It was in Ally Van Tillo’s nature, his husband Ian Van Tillo says, to play down the significant contributions he made to gay and visual culture. Ally Van Tillo, founder of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1989, did not consider his career as an organiser to be remarkable. “I was good at what I did”, he said in a 2025 interview with David McLean of queer publisher Bona Varda, “but I was not unusual. There’s loads of ‘me’ up and down the country who were doing this in their local community. We had to.”  

The Quilt is a large-scale textile, made up of 336 individual panels, memorialising approximately 600 people who lost their lives to AIDS. To look at the Quilt is to see the sheer number of ways it is possible to remember someone. While most of the panels are the same size (3ft x 6ft—0.9m x 1.8m—representing the dimensions of a standard grave plot), they are distinct in style and colour. Some are elaborate, others rustic. There are gentle pastels and loud pinks, swatches of leather and leopard print. There are song lyrics and funereal quotes from war poets; notes of love and inside jokes, tributes to past intimacies. It is a “piece of magic”, activist and author Michael Bronski wrote upon first seeing the US Quilt, upon which Van Tillo based his, “a totem or visual incantation to life”, containing “representations of men’s lives that gave me something to live with in the future; a talisman of hope”. 

Van Tillo passed away at the end of August after a long illness. Just before he died, he was quietly bestowed with one of the most meaningful honours that exists within the queer community: being canonised as a saint by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the LGBTQ+ activist group founded in San Francisco in the late 1970s. While he never wished to be lionised for his work, it was a fitting testament to a figure whose story is worthy of wider recognition.  

Ally Van Tillo was born in Renfrewshire in Scotland in 1959 and taken from his young, unmarried birth mother, as was common at the time, to be placed for adoption. His parents, John and Elizabeth Hume, lived on the west coast of Scotland, but moved back to their hometown of Edinburgh, where Van Tillo attended George Heriot’s, a prestigious independent school.  

“To look at the Quilt is to see the sheer number of ways it is possible to remember someone”

His early teenage years in the city provided opportunities for exploration. “His mother was a pianist for an am-dram company,” Ian says, “and his dad was an electrician, and they were very progressive,” both aware and accepting of his sexuality from a young age. “I think that gave him a lot of self-belief,” Ian says, and consequently “he didn’t suffer from the same self-doubts that a lot of queer people suffer from. He never apologised for himself”. 

After a short stint in Australia working at the Oxford Bar, a well-known gay venue in Sydney, he came back to Edinburgh in 1983 to start his own establishment. Ally’s bar, Key West, was a spin-off of Fire Island, Edinburgh’s beloved gay discotheque. He was confronted with HIV/AIDS early in the crisis. “My customers were dying,” as he told McLean, “so I sold the bar and went into fundraising.”  

Working with the education charity Scottish AIDS Monitor, Ally set about raising money, funding pamphlets countering disinformation about the disease (such as the idea that HIV could be spread through kissing), Scotland’s first AIDS hospice and co-founding the gay newspaper Scots Men. Ally was never remunerated for his organising, Ian tells me, and nor did he see himself as having been ordained to take on this role. He simply saw that he had “the drive, skills, the time and the personal financial backing to be able to make this a reality”. The Quilt was a natural next step.  

First conceived by Cleve Jones in San Francisco in 1985, the AIDS Memorial Quilt engaged the politics of the moment in a different, more tactile, register. It conjured the homely comforts of a blanket, and all its associations with childhood and domesticity. This was partly why the idea was greeted with cynicism by some activists at first, Jones remembers. Critics “called the Quilt the death tarp” and argued that “we’re not going to end AIDS by sitting at home and making quilts all day”. Much of that criticism ceased when the Quilt was first unveiled, at which point its sheer power was inarguable. Unfolded on the National Mall in Washington DC in October 1987, it made tangible the number of lives already lost, in all their touching particularities. It was, Jones recalls, “a mechanism for healing, an expression of grief”. 

Van Tillo heard about the Quilt and set up a workshop in an HIV/AIDS support centre where volunteers began making panels. As the UK project grew, he moved to a space in Leith where panels from around the country could be collected and stored. It was important that fabrics were available for people to use, so that making a panel to remember a loved one was accessible to everyone, regardless of means… or sewing skills: some panels are simply blocks of coloured fabric, with a name or a message (“For a friend with love”) while others are multi-coloured, elaborately embroidered (spinning planets; a rose garden with a black cat; a map of the westernmost tip of Cornwall). 

Van Tillo was diagnosed with HIV in 1990 and lived openly as HIV-positive, despite the hostility it could bring, even appearing on the BBC’s talk show Kilroy to talk about living with HIV. He met his husband Ian in Birmingham, and they toured the Quilt together throughout the early 1990s. Ian remembers the poignancy of the displays up and down the country and that they had a “beautiful, ethereal quality”. The Quilt was not only a living history of “everyday queer people”, he remembers, but an artwork “about loss and about unseen people from all walks of life”.  

“Making a panel to remember a loved one was accessible to everyone, regardless of means”

The threading of a needle is a common metaphor in writing about AIDS; the unspooling and unravelling of a life, a body, a community. In The Thread, an autobiographical novel by French writer Christophe Bourdin from 1994, soon to be published in English for the first time by Pushkin Press, it is a central image: the “invisible thread that still holds together all the belongings, as disparate as they may be, accumulated, over a lifetime, of a single person”. The Quilt enacts a moving act of assemblage, stitching together names, stories and literal belongings: fabric from people’s clothes; personal such as like jewellery, letters, CDs and photographs.  

Today, the Quilt acts as a living record of what was lost. But it is also, as Jones argues, “a weapon”, a reminder that there are new battles ahead. “Everything we went through with AIDS in the 1980s and Clause 28, we are revisiting now with trans bullying,” Van Tillo said in his interview with McLean, and he remained passionate about attacks upon trans communities. “Get ready. We’re going to have to fight once more.”  

Just a few weeks after his death, the UK Quilt returned to Scotland, where it all started, for an exhibition at Glasgow’s Tramway. Later this autumn, panels will be displayed in Brighton and London, where it will continue to reach new audiences.—[O] 

Main image: Quilt 18. Courtesy UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Partnership.