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.
At that research center, which is affiliated with USC and situated in a former fraternity house on West Adams Boulevard, Palmer and other librarians have just finished indexing and filing an estimated 200,000 items in the AIDS History Project. The material includes minutes of the Los Angeles County Commission on AIDS' first meetings in 1987, along with early posters encouraging condom use with pictures of musclemen asking: "Are You Man Enough?"
The other projects, more advanced in online postings, are at UC San Francisco's library and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Historical Society in San Francisco.
"Most fundamentally, it means this history won't be lost," said Paul Boneberg, executive director of the historical society, situated in a downtown Mission Street building. "Our collections tell the story of average people and smaller organizations caught up in the greatest national disaster of modern times."
