Through its newsletter CDL “highlights new collections on Calisphere that feature community voices and stories. These collections are made available in close collaboration with local community members and broaden our worldview through the diverse narratives and myriad perspectives that resonate in the collections.
Spotlight on the AIDS History Project
The UCSF Archives & Special Collections was a pioneering repository that collected materials documenting the HIV/AIDS epidemic, one of the most significant public-health events of the late twentieth century and an ongoing challenge throughout the world.
The AIDS History Project (AHP) began in 1987 as a joint effort of historians, archivists, AIDS activists, health care providers, and others to secure historically significant resources reflecting responses to the crisis in San Francisco. Starting in 1991, the Archives received several grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to fund the survey, acquisition, arrangement, and description of carefully selected records from numerous San Francisco-based agencies and organizations whose work focused on the AIDS crisis.” Continue reading: https://cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2019/10/30/diverse-narratives-and-myriad-perspectives-new-collections-on-calisphere/
This is a guest post by exhibit curator Sabrina Oliveros
When HIV/AIDS first seized the nation’s attention in the early 1980s, it was a disease with no name, known cause, treatment, or cure. Beginning as a medical mystery, it turned into one of the most divisive social and political issues of the 20th century.
On
October 1, 2019, UCSF Archives & Special Collections is opening the exhibit
They Were Really Us: The UCSF Community’s Early Response to AIDS.
Featuring materials from the Archives’ extensive AIDS History Project Collections, the show highlights ways individual
professionals affiliated with UCSF acted to address HIV/AIDS following its
outbreak. Their responses included working in and with the larger San Francisco
community – and continue to impact HIV/AIDS care and research today.
The
exhibit title comes from a statement by Dr. Paul Volberding, who co-founded the
country’s first dedicated AIDS Clinic in 1983; he now serves as the Director of
UCSF’s AIDS
Research Institute:
“The
patients were exactly our age… all those other ways that we tend to separate
ourselves meant very little when you realize that the patients had gone to the
same schools, they listened to the same music, they went to the same
restaurants. So they were really us… which added to the commitment that I think
all of us had.”
Early
milestones
The first proofs of that
commitment are traced through displays on the main lobby (third floor) of the
UCSF Library.
Here, papers, slides,
photographs, and artifacts help outline early milestones in HIV/AIDS research
and care. These include the foundation of the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Clinic at UCSF, which
sought to understand the mysterious “cancer” that turned out to be AIDS; the
discovery of the HIV virus in 1983 by Dr. Jay Levy; the establishment of the
outpatient and inpatient AIDS clinics at San Francisco General Hospital; and
the development of the holistic San Francisco Model of AIDS Care.
Pioneering and compassionate,
this model treated people with AIDS not simply as patients requiring medical
attention, but as complex individuals also in need of psychological, social,
economic, and political support.
Excerpts from the diary of Bobbi
Campbell – a UCSF nursing student
who championed the People With AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement – help tell some
of these individual stories. So do a selection of newsletters and other
materials that lend voices to persons with AIDS.
A
loaned section of the AIDS Memorial Quilt caps off the displays.
Community
voices
The
outbreak of HIV/AIDS devastated the city of San Francisco; it also mobilized the
community. Exhibits on the first floor of the library showcase the work done by
community organizations that, beyond the medical front, fought HIV/AIDS.
Reproductions
of posters – mostly from UCSF’s longest-running partners, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Shanti Project – represent outreach and educational
campaigns necessary to combat the disease. Materials from Mobilization Against AIDS and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power
(ACT-UP) speak to the political battle that AIDS became.
On
the fifth floor of the library, displays touch on two more milestones following
the 1980s.
The
first, UCSF’s sponsoring of the 6th International Conference on
AIDS, is one of the many
examples of how physicians and researchers have expanded their work on a global
scale. Revisiting this 1990 conference is timely, as the 23rd
International Conference on AIDS
will take place in Oakland and San Francisco in July next year – the first time
the conference will be in the Bay Area in nearly three decades.
The
second milestone, the founding of the AIDS Research Institute in 1996, puts a
focus on the UCSF’s continuing efforts to find a cure, and end HIV/AIDS once
and for all.
Garrett is a Peabody, Polk, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. The collection features her research on HIV/AIDS and public health, correspondence, memorabilia, photographs, book and article drafts Garrett won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for her work chronicling the Ebola virus in Zaire published in Newsday. She is also a bestselling author of the book The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. Garrett has worked for National Public Radio, Newsday, and was a senior fellow for The Council of Foreign Relations. She has won many awards including the Award of Excellence from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Bob Considine Award of the Overseas Press Club of America. Researchers are already using the collection and have found great interest in her work.
AIDS Education, MSS 2013-03, carton 25, folder 6
The collection is organized into seven series which include research and subject files, correspondence, newsletters, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health and The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance drafts and notes, conferences, non-print material, correspondence, and memorabilia
Scrapbook, MSS 2013-03, oversize box 104
You can view the collection finding aid on the Online Archive of California. If you would like to visit the UCSF Archives and Special Collections and work with the complete physical collection, please make an appointment with us.
This is a post from intern Harold Hardin, working on the NEH grant-funded project The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic.
Sue Rochman papers, GLBTHS 2005-13 miscellaneous research papers
The Sue Rochman Papers (Collection 2005-13 at the GLBT Historical Society) contain critical information regarding the systematic oppression of incarcerated people living with HIV/AIDS in the first decade of the epidemic. The collection at just over 350 pages consists of interviews, newspaper clippings, and often most compellingly, correspondence from incarcerated people living with HIV/AIDS. Given the ongoing wave of HIV criminalization (a recent famous example being the case of Michael Johnson, who, incidentally, was released this month after spending five-years of a thirty-year sentence in Missouri, for allegedly seroconverting several partners with HIV without revealing his HIV-positive status) Micheal Johnson and Greg’s Smith’s cases among others were rallying cries for HIV/AIDS activists bringing to our collective attention the ongoing histories of HIV criminalization. It is particularly important to look back at the particular ways in which this stigmatization of people living with HIV/AIDS began within the prison system and consider an early case of which the Sue Rochman Papers document. In this way, we can further contextualize our current historical moment in regards to the continuing criminalization of people living with HIV/AIDS–particularly the ways in which black gay men are overwhelmingly impacted by this deleterious trend. The correspondence between Ms. Rochman and various incarcerated people in several different prison locations (Attica prison in New York, Chino prison in California among others) echo similar findings. The correspondence notes the systematic way in which prison officials valued “security” to the detriment of the lives of incarcerated people living with HIV/AIDS. Confidentiality rights regarding seroconversion status were routinely trampled and ignored at the behest of prison officials. There was little to no basic health information regarding the spread of the disease. Incarcerated people with HIV/AIDS were often isolated in poor conditions, with little medical attention by qualified specialists in HIV/AIDS. The widespread abuse of incarcerated people with HIV/AIDS by prison guards themselves was also well documented. Having the disease in prison not only meant living in such conditions but additionally meant being socially ostracized through officially sanctioned segregation–barred from participation in vocational programs, college classes, and not allowed to have family visits. A jail in Fort Worth, Texas went as far as mandating LGB incarcerated populations wear colored wrist bands to identify their sexual orientation from afar. From such systematic forms of discrimination it is unsurprising then that HIV criminalization was birthed in such an environment. The Rochman papers document the case of Greg Smith who in 1990 was convicted of attempted murder, assault and terroristic threats. Charges were filed after he allegedly bit and spat on a guard in a New Jersey jail in 1989. He maintained his innocence throughout the trial famously saying after his sentence was read, ‘I never bit an officer, and I’ll say that until the day I die. I may die in the next year or two, but I’ll die proud. I told the truth.” His case was taken up by ACLU via ACT UP prison-activist Judy Greenspan and a significant amount of Rochman papers covers Greenspan’s media campaign and legal filings. Smith, who ultimately died in prison in 2003, was an ACT UP activist, black and gay. His case is viewed as an early example of the compounding effects of race, class, sexual orientation and HIV status-indeed of HIV criminalization.
This is a guest post by intern Harold Hardin, who is working on the NEH Grant-Funded Project The Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic.
I came across recently a sardonic, humorously bizarre little zine in the Beowulf Thorne papers (GLBT Historical Society, 2003-10) called Diseased Pariah News (DPN). DPN was a zine created during the early 90’s that used gallows humor to humorously educate/entertain mostly gay (often white) cisgender men about HIV/AIDS among other gay men’s health issues. Humor is not something I would immediately associate with AIDS/HIV. Certainly, in the popular imagination AIDS and humor couldn’t be further apart. Queer white, cis, men living with HIV/AIDS in popular media depictions are generally akin to Tom Hanks in Philadelphia: a “noble, suffering AIDS victim”.
Further, many current LGBTQ media consumers tend to shy away from LGBTQ depictions that have overt internalized homophobia/transphobia, straying away from media depictions that might seem to make light of oppressive circumstances in ways that are ultimately self- cannibalizing. Rupaul was famously castigated for having content on her show that was deemed transphobic. Lisa Lampanelli, though not queer, is known for her gallows humor and recently left show business citing, “people in their 20s and 30s weren’t getting into that [insult comedy] tradition”. I spoke to a friend on Facebook about DPN and they echoed a popularly resonant sentiment, “I really don’t like to view historical media/works of art relating to our [queer] community. Because they always carry the hint of shame, of internalized homophobia and transphobia.”
Clearly, we are currently living through a shift in what we find humorous from particular groups of people based on their identities. And to be honest, it shouldn’t be ok for a white, cisgender, straight, man or woman to make jokes about communities that they historically (or contemporaneously, for that matter) oppress. But should queer people with HIV/AIDS be able to laugh at their own lived experiences? If observational comedy is about illuminating the mundane and often untintentionally humorous aspects of our everyday lives then DPN represents to me a group of queers with HIV/AIDS taking this to its’ logical conclusion: finding humor in the everyday lives of queer folx living with HIV/AIDS. Additionally, I think something is foreclosed when we as a queer community rush to quash inter-group humor that may on its surface appear aberrant. Queer people should be able to laugh at their own lived experiences if they so desire, especially, if by laughing, we find a form of resistance while skewering social and political realities that we ultimately find empowering.
AIDS activist Bobbi Campbell making a peace sign, wearing University of California San Francisco School of Nursing t-shirt.
Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic is an interdisciplinary symposium exploring and reflecting on topics related to archives and the practice of documenting the stories of HIV/AIDS.
The task of documenting the history of HIV/AIDS and thinking about the present and future of the epidemic is daunting. The enormity and complexity of the stories and perspectives on the disease, which has affected so many millions of patients and families around the world, present significant challenges that demand continual reexamination. Questions of “what do we collect and from where” and “whose stories do we know best.” The ways in which we handle documentary evidence and produce knowledge from that evidence has profound effects on a huge range of social, economic and health outcomes. In examining and reflecting on our knowledge of the history of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic and its future, we hope to improve our understanding of the true effects of the disease, and what it can teach us about future epidemics.
The program committee invites submissions for presentations addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the wide-ranging perspectives of historians, archivists and librarians, artists, journalists, activists and community groups, scientific researchers, health care providers, and people living with HIV. We invite proposals from individuals with diverse experience and expertise on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in scholarship, research and advocacy. Proposals will be considered in a variety of forms including paper presentations, panel discussions and posters.
The Symposium will take place in Byers Auditorium in Genentech Hall at the UCSF Mission Bay Campus in San Francisco, October 4th and 5th 2019. The program will be an afternoon session and evening reception the first day, followed by a full day of presentations the second.
The Program Committee has identified the following themes to consider when developing your proposal, though we encourage creativity and experimentation in exploring themes, partnerships, and narrative ideas.
Documenting the epidemic: Gaps, silences and unheard voices
Creating an interdisciplinary narrative of an epidemic
Silent no more: Community, caretaker and patient stories
The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic
Biomedical story: From mystery disease to cure
From local to global: Learning from AIDS to address future epidemics
The Program Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers, panel discussion and posters. Individual papers with a similar focus will be assembled into a single session by the program committee. Usually 3-4 papers are included in a session. To allow adequate time for questions and discussion, panels should be limited to four participants in addition to a chair/facilitator. Please include the following in your complete proposal
Session title if submitting a full panel proposal (of no more than 20 words)
Session abstract if submitting a full panel proposal (up to 500 words)
Short session abstract for the program if submitting a full panel proposal (up to 50 words)
Paper or poster or presentation titles (if any), and names of corresponding presenters
Biographical paragraph for each presenter
E-mail address for each participant
Affiliation, city, state, and country for each participant
Social media handles or web addresses for each participant (optional)
Audiovisual needs
Special accommodation needs
The deadline for submissions is June 3. We will notify presenters if their proposal has been accepted by July 22.
Memory Lives On Program Committee
Victoria Harden, Ph.D., Director (retired) of the Office of NIH History
Monica Green, Ph.D., Professor of History, Arizona State University
Richard McKay, DPhil, Director of Studies for HPS at Magdalene College
Barbara A. Koenig, Professor of Medical Anthropology & Bioethics in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Institute for Health & Aging and Head of UCSF Bioethics Program
Jay Levy, MD, Professor UCSF School of Medicine
Eric Jost, Digital Marketing Manager, SF AIDS Foundation
Jon Cohen, Staff writer for Science Magazine
Mark Harrington, Executive Director, Treatment Action Group
William Schupbach, Wellcome Library
Jason Baumann, Susan and Douglas Dillon Assistant Director for Collection Development and Coordinator of Humanities and LGBT Collections
Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives & Special Collections, UCSF Library
We are excited to announce the addition of a newly acquired collection to the archive. This collection includes materials assembled and organized by William R. Alschuler, California Institute of the Arts science faculty, for a class on the AIDS epidemic he was teaching in 1993-1996 entitled, “AIDS as exhibit.” It contains flyers, handouts, newsletters, and other publications from numerous public health departments and community based organizations in California and around the country with information about AIDS transmission and prevention, treatment, testing protocols, nutrition, service organizations, legal rights and educational resources as well as newspaper and journal clippings and course syllabi about the history of the AIDS epidemic. The final project of this class included exhibits curated by students that were displayed in hallways at California Institute of the Arts.
As part of our current National Archive NHPRC grant project “Evolution of San Francisco’s Response to a Public Health Crisis: Providing Access to New AIDS History Collections,” we’ve been processing the papers of Laurie Garrett. Garrett is a Peabody, Polk, and Pulitzer Prize award winning journalist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for her work chronicling the Ebola virus in Zaire published in Newsday. She is also a bestselling author of the book The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. Garrett has worked for National Public Radio, Newsday, and was a senior fellow for The Council of Foreign Relations. She has won many awards including the Award of Excellence from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Bob Considine Award of the Overseas Press Club of America.
Laurie Garrett, photograph by Erica Berger, MSS 2013-03
The Laurie Garrett papers include drafts of her two books, The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust. The collection also includes material related to her service in The Council on Foreign Relations. Garrett’s papers feature correspondence, records of the various national and international conferences and meetings of which she was a part. Some unique types of material present in the collection include audiovisual recordings, photographs, videotapes, film reels, notebooks, and interviews.
Once the Laurie Garrett papers are processed, a finding aid will be prepared and put on the Online Archive of California, and a small selection of the collection will be digitized and made available online to researchers via Calisphere.
-Edith Martinez, processing archivist for AIDS History Project
Harold Hardin is joining us in Archives & Special Collections this spring to work on finishing the NEH grant-funded project The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic. Harold will be helping QA digital objects among other tasks related to the digitization workflow.
Harold Hardin is a current student in Cuesta Colleges’ Library/Information Technology program and San Francisco City College’s Paralegal Studies program. While pursuing a double major in Sociology/Critical Race Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz Harold developed an academic interest in the often hidden and occluded histories of marginalized communities, particularly histories of oppression and resistance. Through their own experiences of political activism at UC Santa Cruz and beyond (#Blacklivesmatter Oakland/ Stockton, GaySHAME SF) Harold has insisted on moving iteratively between theory and praxis: centering an intersectional feminist analysis of power.
These analytical lenses and political participation increased Harold’s consciousness regarding the fundamental ways in which access to information (particularly personal/community histories) profoundly shapes participation in our democracy (or lack thereof). Harold is interested in the nuances of political participation and uncovering the innumerable sites of quotidian resistance! Therefore, Harold sees their internship within UCSF’s AIDS History Project as not only a unique privilege to work toward increasing community access to Queer history, but also, and importantly, an extension of the deeply personal (political) work of (re)understanding their multiple positions within (and outside) of the Archives.
From January 28th to March 9th, the National Libraries of Medicine’s traveling exhibit, Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics, and Culture will be on display in the lobby of the main hospital (Building 25) at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
The exhibit is only available for six weeks, so be sure to visit as soon as you can!
From NLM:
The exhibition explores the rise of AIDS in the early 1980’s and the evolving response to the epidemic over the last 30 years.
The title Surviving and Thriving comes from a book written in 1987 by and for people with AIDS that insisted people could live with AIDS, not just die from it. Jennifer Brier, the exhibition curator, explains that “centering the experience of people with AIDS in the exhibition allows us to see how critical they were, and continue to be, in the political and medical fight against HIV/AIDS.”
Protestors in front of the James A. Shannon Building, National Institutes of Health, 1990
Courtesy Donna Binder
Surviving and Thriving presents their stories alongside those of others involved in the national AIDS crisis. The six-banner traveling exhibition utilizes a variety of historic photographs as well as images of pamphlets and publications to illustrate how a group of people responded to, or failed to respond, to HIV/AIDS.
Robert C. Gallo, M.D. at the National Institutes of Health, early 1980’s.
Courtesy National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health
This exhibition was produced by the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health and curated by Jennifer Brier, PhD, University of Illinois.
