A Litany of Saints: Remembering the Early Years of HIV/AIDS Activism in the First Year of a New Pandemic

Mary Foltz,Kristen Leipert,Liz Bradbury,Adrian Shanker

doi:10.51897/interalia/ubqq8712

Abstract

With the emergence of COVID-19 in the U.S., many LGBTQ people found ourselves reflecting upon the early years of HIV/AIDS and how our communities responded to the lack of robust federal and state response to this preceding public health crisis. As the leaders of the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center (BSC) in eastern Pennsylvania became a central resource for our community sharing up-to-date information about COVID-19 and organizing vaccine clinics, they also recognized the historic nature of this moment as many elders in our community consistently tried to make sense of the current crisis by contemplating their past AIDS activism and organizing. In March of 2020, BSC staff and archivists received grant funding to conduct an oral history project called "40 Years of Public Health in the LGBTQ Community: Collecting and Curating Local LGBTQ Health Experiences From HIV/AIDS to COVID-19," which recorded both timely commentary on the impact of COVID-19 on LGBTQ people and memories of HIV/AIDS organizing that seemed urgent and relevant to our contemporary moment. Offering excerpts from oral histories collected in 2020, this piece explores how COVID-19 spurred LGBTQ people in the Lehigh Valley to share stories about communal grief, health inequity, political responses to pandemics, and organizing to support the health of minoritized communities.

Highlights

In March of 2020 during the emergence of COVID-19, LGBTQ elders in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, like LGBTQ people in other communities, were haunted by memories of the 1980s when HIV/AIDS decimated friends, chosen family, and lovers
Expanding from a previous oral history grant, center staff quickly applied for and received grant funding to conduct interviews with diverse community members to collect their thoughts about the recent pandemic and recollections of the early years of AIDS activism in the Lehigh Valley
While we are inspired by a number of oral history projects created in metropolises like the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project coordinated by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman5, we agree with a number of LGBTQ historians that more work needs to be done in small urban centers and rural communities to collect 72 the unique histories of LGBTQ people outside of New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles6

Summary

Kristen Leipert

With the emergence of COVID-19 in the U.S, many LGBTQ people found ourselves reflecting upon the early years of HIV/AIDS and how our communities responded to the lack of robust federal and state response to this preceding public health crisis. Like those produced in other small urban centers and rural communities, are important contributions to expanding our understanding of LGBTQ history In this short piece, we share a few excerpts from oral histories included in the collection titled 40 Years of Public Health in the LGBTQ Community: Collecting and Curating Local LGBTQ Health Experiences From HIV/AIDS to COVID-197. We believe that oral history collection and curation through public programs are powerful ways both to honor the value of our elders’ contributions to social change in our region and to create intergenerational conversation that can fuel on-going political struggle for equity for LGBTQ people With this particular project, we hoped to instigate conversations in our own community about knowledge produced during healthcare crises and strategies utilized in the early years of AIDS that might be useful today.

On Mourning

On Politics and Pandemics

On Inequity and Organizing Communities of Care

Works Cited