Researching contemporary history: AIDS.

Abstract

My research has always focussed on areas which have contemporary policy significance nineteenth-century labour history and the popular press; policy and culture around illicit drugs; alcohol policy and so on. Some of the research itself has also focussed on the history of recent events. But it is with the AIDS Social History Programme, established for the last five years or more at the London School of Hygiene, that the archival and research issues for contemporary history have become most obvious. The Programme's major focus is on the policy history of AIDS in the UK in the period roughly from 1981-2 to 1993-4. My first draft of this paper, given to an archival conference, stated that the end dates were 1992-3. The historical period is continually expanding. This is contemporary history with a vengeance.' There are both problems and opportunities in such an exercise. Take, for example, the most basic level that of historical source material. AIDS in particular has led to a vast outpouring of publication, all of it potential grist to the contemporary historians' mill. There is no lack of published data; there is what Eric Hobsbawm has called 'unmanageable excess' rather than scarcity.2 But access to manuscript material, and in particular the working papers of official committees and government departments, can be difficult. There are differing national policies on access to this type of information. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act made possible a 'journalist history', a detective story tracing the discovery of the virus, based on the laboratory notebooks of Robert Gallo, which were National Institute of Health property.3 The different health bureaucracies also have their own 'official historians' who have access both to people and to in-house documentation.4 But in the UK, the thirty-year rule restricts access to government information. Material which will eventually be located in the Public Record Office is unavailable. William Waldegrave, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, launched an initiative in 1992 which promised access to papers which had previously been closed. But the initiative largely covered papers which had special closure for one reason or another, rather than those which came well within the thirty-year period. In my own case, access to the papers of the Cabinet committee on AIDS which operated between 1986 and 1989 was refused. AIDS has been a peculiarly sensitive area of government policy, for a whole raft of reasons, and official advisers to committees were also told very firmly that they were covered by the Official Secrets Act. What therefore happens is a phenomenon familiar to many contemporary historians: what I have called 'archives on the run' or 'ad hoc archives'. Archives are picked up, sometimes literally, where they present themselves. Here are some examples from the AIDS research. A member of a gay group had been on a government health-education committee about which there was much controversy. Some civil servants saw it as indicative of the hidden gay agenda for AIDS that the threat to the general population should be stressed to avoid the danger of a public backlash against gays. Another gay member of the committee had, in the course of