Documenting the toll of AIDS

Archives in L.A. and San Francisco collect personal and official records of the costs and lessons of the epidemic.

By Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times
January 2, 2008

Twelve years after a Silver Lake man died, his pharmacy receipts and medical bills sit in a Los Angeles archive with a hand-written message declaring: "The Cost of AIDS."

In a San Francisco library, a massive photo collection capturing the exuberance of gay liberation in the 1970s and its tragic collision with AIDS fills many cartons.

Bureaucratic paperwork recording what critics said was government's unconscionably slow response to the disease shares shelf space in both cities with old boxes of condoms, safe-sex pamphlets and editions of a satirical magazine aimed at amusing people with HIV/AIDS.

Those items and much more are included in three enormous archives in Los Angeles and San Francisco that document and memorialize the AIDS epidemic and its effect in California and beyond. Thanks to federally funded efforts that were recently completed, hundreds of thousands of previously unsorted documents and artifacts now are cataloged for visiting scholars, with summaries being readied for wider Internet exposure.

"It is important for us to see not only how AIDS was treated medically but to document historically people's responses to it . . . who the heroes are, who the villains are. Because how we treated this epidemic may give us some guidelines on how we treat the next one, whether it's avian flu or whatever comes up," said Michael Palmer, an archives project director at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives.

Read the rest.