Richard Van Truss first stepped onto Augustana College’s grounds as a student in 1982. He later passed away in 1995 from AIDS. According to his former classmates and friends, he was a joyous, intelligent, stylish, athletic and wholesome person.
The Tredway Library Special Collections decided to honor Van Truss’ life through a panel for the National AIDS Memorial Quilt, inspired by Kat-Jean Glusick’s senior inquiry project, which uncovered queer history and joy in Augustana’s archives.
Since the AIDS crisis began in June 1981, millions of lives have been lost. During its early years, the illness was heavily stigmatized as a “gay disease” because of its association with queer lives.
To advocate against the stigma and shed light on the human lives lost due to the crisis, the National AIDS Memorial Quilt first appeared on the Washington Mall in 1987 and returned multiple times. It grew into a national and global memorial through tours and exhibits across cities and countries.
Each quilt is personalized to represent someone who passed away from AIDS, and is usually made by someone or people who were close to the subject in their life. To further advocate against the stigma and remind the public that these were human lives, the 3×6-foot panels are approximately the size of a grave.
In present-day Augustana, the event brought students, faculty and community members together to create a panel in Van Truss’ honor while also displaying existing sections of a previously made quilt, which included a panel recognizing local activist Robb Dussliere and other queer lives lost to the AIDS crisis.
In the research process, Glusick found many archival records that showcased traumatic experiences, prompting a shift to uncover and preserve moments of queer joy. Van Truss’ story was first discovered while conducting interviews, which were a direct result of that joy.
“I think it’s important that stories like Richard’s are shared and not kept private because when you keep things private, then they’re not talked about,” Glusick said.
Originally from Chicago, Van Truss had the opportunity to bring all of his passions to Augustana. On campus, he was involved as a cheerleader, a member of Gamma Alpha Beta (GAB), campus ministries and choir, while also participating in theater and student leadership through Representative Assembly, similar to Student Government Association, as a First-Year and sophomore.
Kai Swanson, special assistant to the president, similarly entered the Augustana community as a student in 1982 and was also a member of GAB at the same time Van Truss was.
During that period, Swanson’s dad, Richard Swanson, served as the campus chaplain. With his Mormon background and involvement within Campus Ministries, Van Truss was frequently present within those spaces. That space is how Swanson first became familiar with him, but he started to have more interactions with Van Truss in the fall of their sophomore year.
However, through the stories Glusick heard from Swanson and other people, such as his college roommate, Dan Gilkison, who was the only peer Van Truss came out to, one thing remained: He had an infectious joy and humor. This was even evident in the days when he had gone back home to Chicago to reside with his mom after getting really sick with AIDS.
“That last time in the hospital room, Richard [was] still funny. He made [our friends and his mom] laugh that very night,” Swanson said. “That’s very special.”
By bringing Van Truss’ story back to the present, the event served more than a remembrance. Through the creation of his quilt panel, those in attendance and who coordinated ensured that his story would no longer be hidden from archives, but instead live on through memory, community and continued conversation.
Augustana art professor Anne Heide, who taught the embroidery section of the event, gave people the opportunity to incorporate Van Truss’ favorite things onto his quilt, such as music notes, Chicago White Sox baseball, theater masks and GAB’s Greek letters. Additionally, pictures of him cheering, with his uniform and incandescent smile, as Swanson referred to it, are also on the quilt.
Event coordinators Micaela Terronez and Kaitlyn Goss-Peirce said that they were honored to help with this project.
In a world that has seen millions of deaths from individuals who have contracted HIV and AIDS, and is also generally described as more “accepting,” stigma still remains. The personalized quilts not only give people the opportunity for interaction, but send a message that they were human beings who just as much had passions and goals.
“It humanizes them,” Terronez, Special Collections librarian and instructor, said. “You see the number of how many people have lost their lives, but when you can actually see the individual panels and learn about the people and who they were, it’s harder to deny.”
Other lives, such as Dussliere’s, were honored. Within the Quad Cities, he worked to educate and advocate against the misconceptions and fears that surrounded the disease, speaking to the community.
He opened the DeLaCerda House in Rock Island, which served as a transitional home that housed homeless individuals who suffered from HIV and AIDS. His efforts were televised in segments from the award-winning WHBF News program, “Robb’s Life.”
Dussliere’s story highlights efforts to educate and advocate within communities during the AIDS crisis, while Van Truss’ story documents the experiences of a student at Augustana whose life was also impacted.
For students, Van Truss’ story can hit close to home.
“I hope to remember his smile, that he was a real person and millions of people like him were left untreated because there was so much stigma around HIV and AIDS,” Glusick said. “Stigma does kill.”
At liberal arts colleges such as Augustana, which prioritizes providing foundational knowledge in many disciplines, students have the opportunity to either explore or be involved in their many passions.
Van Truss’ involvement on campus is a direct reflection of that, Goss-Peirce, research and instruction librarian, said.
“He lived up to the potential of a liberal arts college very well. These liberal arts are supposed to encourage ways of thinking and doing that are holistic and broad,” Goss-Pierce said. “You’re going to be doing things that are very dissimilar. And so his wide range of interests, his wide range of hobbies, really lives up to that as well.”
Beyond his various passions and hobbies, Van Truss’ legacy continues to be remembered over 40 years after returning to campus and nearly 31 years since his death, impacting the lives he was a part of.
“Almost everybody who comes to Augustana is different when they leave … Richard was one of those people [who left an imprint],” Swanson said. “He took a bunch of knucklehead fraternity boys, and maybe not exactly when we were 20 or 21 but a few years later, when we were 30, [and he] made us better people.”
The quilts will be displayed in Special Collections until June 8.