On the eve of 1987's Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, surviving families and friends of people who have died of AIDS prepare panels to be added to a large-scale memorial quilt project. Drawing from the sea of names memorialized, director Robert Epstein focuses on the lives of six people. Alongside the intimate profiles offered, through news footage and interviews, Epstein puts the AIDS crisis in the larger context of social and government response to the disease.

A short film mostly comprised of two sources: research footage from 1988 about the beginnings of the HIV epidemic from the perspective of medical professionals, and an interview with Cleve Jones in 2003 as he looks back upon his activism, and the state of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 2000s.