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The 'Aids quilt' that showed the scale of suffering

In the early 1980s, Doctors in San Francisco began noticing healthy young people were contracting a strange and deadly disease. At the time little was known about HIV or Aids. No one knew how to treat it, or how to stop it. It had a devastating effect on the city, and the vibrant LGBT community was particularly badly hit. Thousands of gay men died. In 1985, LGBT activist Cleve Jones came up with a creative idea to help show how many lives had been lost. This is the story of the Aids Memorial Quilt.

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5 minutes