Uncoupled: What Is The Quilt Mike References?

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In Netflix’s Uncoupled, Michael (Neil Patrick Harris) makes an offhand comment about not having unprotected sex because all he can think about is his “name on that quilt” and the younger guy he's with doesn't know what he's talking about. The scene takes place in one of many disastrous attempted hookups reminiscent of Sex and the City in Uncoupled. The context of the scene is somewhat humorous, but the reference itself speaks to a deeper trauma that affects the gay community.

While regaining his footing in the gay dating scene after the abrupt end of his 17-year relationship with his partner, Colin, Michael has a meet-cute with a younger man at a grocery store. Back at the other guy’s apartment, Michael is thrown off by resistance to using a condom. Michael tries to explain his concerns about sexually transmitted diseases and being added to “that quilt” over his prospective partner’s insistence that protection is unnecessary for gay men in the modern day. Similarly, when Michael is later pressured to let someone Botox his butthole, he bails on the coercive situation.

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The quilt Michael references is the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. This interactive memorial commemorates those lost to AIDS with quilt panels made by their loved ones. The Quilt consists of nearly 50,000 panels with the names of over 105,000 people lost to the epidemic across three decades. Michael is in his 40s and would have reached his teens in the 1990s, while the other man is a millennial and likely in his 30s, so Michael has a greater awareness of the AIDS epidemic from 1981 to the early 1990s, especially through friendships with surviving gay elders like Jack (André De