AIDS and the City

ARC/AIDS Vigil, 1985-1995 & The NAMES Project/AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1985-present 

Civic Center, San Francisco, CA 

In the second half of the twentieth century, gay and lesbian spaces and organizations in San Francisco created formidable infrastructures of peer support. They accumulated resources, expanded knowledge regimes, and the horizon of possibilities for gender and sexually non-conforming people that extended far beyond the city itself. As a result, San Francisco was equipped with organizationally mature gay and lesbian groups in 1982 to fight the pandemic after the first AIDS diagnosis. However, the public perception of AIDS as a gay disease and the medicalization of the gay male body and its physical and discursive spaces dominated early debates, especially around gay bathhouse closures in 1983-1984. Overtly sexual environments, such as these, were polarizing, unlike public protests that “humanized” the toll of the disease on youthful bodies.

As debates about how the city and the country would respond to the pandemic went on, doctors, nurses, and volunteers at San Francisco General Hospital spearheaded the “San Francisco model of care” based on empathetic care provision with the participation of multiple non-governmental organizations. Moving from hospital wards to the public spaces in the city, in the aftermath of public debates about bathhouse closures and the development of new empathetic types of treatment, another type of affective activism entered everyday public life in San Francisco with ripple effects that traveled far beyond the city.   

The ARC/AIDS Vigil depicted in photographs and documents in this section was an activist occupation of part of the United Nations plaza off Market Street in downtown San Francisco that began on October 27, 1985, when a small number of AIDS activists went to the site to support Steve Russell and Frank Bert, two HIV-positive gay men arrested for chaining themselves on one of the entrances of a building housing federal government offices. Russell and Bert were protesting the lack of funding for AIDS research and the inaction of the Reagan administration. Activists brought beds, which they lay in front of the building’s side entrance as a form of protest, drawing attention to AIDS patients who died neglected in hospital beds.  

The Vigil site was established when more activists arrived and set up tents on the site to support the protesters in the beds by keeping vigil by their sides overnight. Since then, activists continuously occupied the site until 1995 (though after 1990, its name changed to HIV Vigil and shifted organizational priorities). Over the first five years, its symbolic and material contributions to fighting AIDS changed along with the priorities of the rotating cast of volunteer organizers and the organization’s entanglements with municipal and state agencies. 

One of the most symbolic artifacts that emerged from the devastation that AIDS caused in and beyond homosexual social networks was the NAMES Project/AIDS Memorial Quilt. The Quilt is an ongoing activist art project initiated by Cleve Jones in 1985. It currently comprises nearly 50,000 panels dedicated to more than 110,000 individuals lost to AIDS created by their loved ones. The quilt has been exhibited nationally, most notably at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and has helped raise awareness of the AIDS toll and the effect that has had on the lives of millions of people affected by this unimaginable loss.  

The photographs exhibited here depict the intimate affair of making a quilt panel in Fresno, California, and an early display of panels at the Mayor’s balcony in San Francisco City Hall, likely in 1988. Note the similarity between the display of placards with people lost to AIDS in the photograph from the ARC/AIDS Vigil (top row on the left) and the quilt’s composition. In fact, Jones has remarked that this very installation at the Vigil site, contemporaneous with the Vigil’s establishment, inspired the conceptualization of the AIDS Quilt.  

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