Roy Cohn was a truly horrible man, someone responsible for the establishment of the modern far-right in the same way Reagan was. A cutthroat prosecutor who was instrumental in McCarthyism, a man who trained both Trump and Rupert Murdoch, a Jew who sent Jewish communists to the electric chair, a gay man responsible for the death of many of his own, an AIDS victim who insisted till his dying day it was liver cancer. In some sense, the most consummate form of the American politician in all the most negative meanings.
And the AIDS Memorial Quilt has to contend with this. It had to answer a question that is maybe too difficult to truly answer: How do we memorialize a persecutor who died of the same thing he persecuted us for? So, here is Roy Cohn’s square. Amongst the always-colorful, emotional, lovingly rendered tributes that make up the quilt, Cohn’s sparseness stands out like a sore thumb. Unadorned, even the writing on the quilt looking more scrawled than designed. And that writing? “Bully. Coward. Victim.”
What else is there to say, really? He was all three of these things. An evil man. A man invested in protecting himself above all. A man who died as part of a tragic and politicized epidemic. These three words are all that can be written, I think. To write more, to write a eulogy, even a negative one, is to collapse the uncertainty of how complex accounting for the worst of humanity can be. Because Cohn was a victim. In many ways. And that does not morally redeem him; it never could. But to say he wasn’t is just as intellectually dishonest as saying he wasn’t a terrible man. So instead of collapsing this discomfort into a single tidy obituary (problems in childhood! self-hating because of his marginalized identity! “controversial”!) what we choose to memorialize is that very discomfort, that a man who is “one of us” could do so much harm to us, even to the point of causing his own death.
Which brings me to the other aspect of this square. You see, the initial concept behind the AIDS Memorial Quilt was that the squares function as headstones: many AIDS deaths didn’t get graves and funerals, certainly not ones that were honest about the deceased, and so the quilt was created to allow people to memorialize their loved ones without support of the mainstream death institution.
Now, Cohn does have a gravestone. Of course he does, he was a powerful politician. What he didn’t have was anyone to care. Oh sure he had close friends, a strong network of notable Republicans like the aforementioned Donald Trump. Can you imagine any of those people decorating a quilt for him? Leaving flowers on his grave? Talking of him fondly, even?
Thus, the other lesson of Roy Cohn’s square on the quilt. A vivid, visual representation of the bleak isolation of hyper-conservatism. The greying out of your own life, until it kills you and all that is left are the torn rags of a legacy. A legacy that remembers you as a troubling, evil man.
Rest, Roy Cohn, and may the maggots eating your flesh provide more nurturance to the world than you ever did.