Documenting the toll of AIDS

Citing the rare opportunity to save early records of such a significant event, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission awarded a shared $170,000 grant to the historical society and UC San Francisco's special collections library. The federal agency also gave about $195,000 to the ONE center, much of it used for the AIDS material. The painstaking work has taken three years.

The history is contained in dry records compiled, for example, by the California Department of Health Services and in passionate protest fliers from groups that include Mobilization Against AIDS. It is found in diaries and in old copies of Diseased Pariah News, a gallows-humor magazine that outrageously suggested giving Boy Scout merit badges for Kaposi's sarcoma and thrush infections.

No matter the source, nearly every file carries an emotional wallop: Often it was panic and outrage as the death toll mounted in the 1980s and early '90s and later it was anxious relief among those lucky enough to receive, and tolerate, new drugs that can keep the virus that causes AIDS under some control.

The materials arrived in many ways. Some government and agency employees rescued records from the shredder. Some compulsive savers, facing death, donated letters, pamphlets and protest buttons because they feared relatives would discard them after their funerals.

And some items showed up without a clear explanation. For example, in the middle of state records about a safe-sex education pamphlet, ONE archivists found a November 1985 letter from a woman to her gay adult son.

She had just seen the television movie "An Early Frost" about a young man telling his parents he has AIDS, and she wrote: "Am I worrying too much about this AIDS problem? If you can alleviate any of my fears about the disease, please do."

Items like that resonate, said Palmer. "With an archive, you have to be clinical. You look at it as a record, not like being a doctor or a nurse," he said. "But it still affects you, the sheer complexity of the situation and all the real lives hanging in the balance."

Many donors, of course, are dead.

A Silver Lake man meticulously clipped together 1990 bills for the anti-HIV drug Retrovir and Zovirax to treat herpes, along with paperwork for Medicare Part B, and gave them to ONE. The man, who died in 1995 at 68, apparently wrote on the envelope with a black marker: "Medical Bills (Partial) The Cost of AIDS."