When Craig Louis fell ill with AIDS, his friends took him out for Chinese food, raised $173.91 for him at a yard sale and hosted a barbecue for his parents. They also sat by his bed and kept track of his medication.
They chronicled their activities in a lively newsletter, printed on purple paper and distributed among friends, called the Craig Report.
”Craig`s health has taken a turn,” reads an entry in one issue. Then the inevitable news: ”This is the Craig Report no one wanted to read, or write.” Louis died May 25, 1988. That wasn`t the end of the Craig Report though.
As part of Louis` estate and as a piece of history in the age of AIDS, the Craig Report lives on in the archives of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society in San Francisco.
Roughly 12 years after the AIDS epidemic began, survivors here and across the country are beginning to recognize the enormous material legacy people with AIDS have left behind. This legacy is a potentially substantial source of income for AIDS organizations, which are the beneficiaries of homes and other valuables and life-insurance policies, and it is an important record of the thousands of gay men who have died, most of them in their 20s, 30s or early 40s.
”It is a record of a generation that will vanish within 10 years,” said Sherry Thomas, director of development at the forthcoming Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library. ”It is also a testament to the astonishing achievements the (gay) men`s community has made.”
Archives in major cities, including Chicago, are beginning to collect and make available to the public the journals, papers and other memorabilia of people who have died of AIDS. In a tour of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society in San Francisco, where the Craig Report is stored, archivist Bill Walker felt compelled to model the purple and pink sequined jacket once worn by disco singer Sylvester, who died of AIDS.
”You can`t put this on and be somber,” he said.
What is left behind includes the records of people who never achieved public fame, like Louis, and the papers of those who did, including Jim Foster, a San Francisco politician who addressed the Democratic National Convention as an openly gay man in 1972. His papers have been sent to a collection at Cornell University.
In Chicago, the Gerber Hart Library and Archive in West Lakeview, a gay and lesbian facility that has been open since 1981, holds one of the largest public-access gay and lesbian collections of books and documents in the country. Among the collections is that of Joseph Gregg, a former co-director of the library who died of AIDS in 1987. He left his assortment of handbills, advertisements and newspaper clippings that chronicle gay and lesbian life in Chicago from the late `50s through the late `80s.
The library is making an appeal to people with AIDS in the Chicago area for contributions of their life or their work.
”We`re making an appeal to the community,” said David, one archivist.
”It`s urgent because many of the people we`re trying to reach won`t be here too long.”
”There`s a definite sense of wanting to preserve who we are and what our culture is,” said Jim Mitulski, pastor of Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco, a gay and lesbian congregation. ”The passing of this generation is sad because we see an end to a chapter. We want to make sure it`s not the last chapter.”
The collection at the Gay and Lesbian Center at the library in San Francisco, scheduled to open in 1995, will include the papers of Paul Monette, the Los Angeles author now living with AIDS, and a collection of photographs of closeted gay men working in Hollywood in the 1950s.
The outpouring of donations of papers and money has a special sense of urgency in this city, where 4 percent of the population is infected with the AIDS virus, the highest per capita rate in the nation, according to health officials. More than 9,000 people have died of AIDS in San Francisco, most of them young gay men, and 1,000 more are expected to die in the next 12 months. ”We`ve raised $700,000 in the last six months” in gifts, said Thomas of the Gay and Lesbian Center. ”We would not have been able to do it without the awareness on the part of gay men that they must (take action to preserve the past) now.”
The quality of what is left behind varies enormously, as does the ultimate destination of the goods. While many items such as TVs and clothing are sold at yard sales, much of it is donated to various AIDS organizations. One man left his 25 teddy bears to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
When photographer Robert Pruzan died in May, his succulent and exotic plants were made available to the Strybing Arboreteum at Golden Gate Park, which carried away three truckloads of greenery. His friends are planning to publish a book of his photographs with the proceeds to benefit the AIDS Emergency Fund.
And in the largest bequest ever made to an AIDS organization, Peter Pender, a San Franciscan who died of AIDS, recently left $2.26 million to the American Foundation for AIDS Research in New York, with $1 million more to come pending the sale of the gay resort he owned.
The planning necessary to ensure that papers are kept and property donated is haphazard at best.
”The vast numbers of people with AIDS have no wills or a will written before AIDS,” said Eric Rofes, executive director of the Shanti Project, an AIDS service organization here.
”The most common experience I`ve had, and this is in a city as savvy as San Francisco, is that an AIDS organization spends years caring for a person with AIDS whose family refused to visit or care for him back in Omaha,” said Rofes. ”The person dies and the estate goes to Mom and Dad in Omaha.”
Often lost in these transactions are the letters, journals, posters and buttons that would interest historians of the gay community and the AIDS era. On the financial side, many AIDS groups, fearful of offending those they serve, remain reluctant to talk about estate planning. ”We`re a baby in the planned-giving field,” said Debra Kent, director of development at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
Even without an official estate-planning program, the foundation received $385,000 in bequests, about 11 percent of its $3.6 million budget, in fiscal year 1991-92.
As the epidemic grows faster than government funding, bequests are increasingly important to AIDS groups.
San Franciscans John Motdoch and his companion, Burt Barnett, were faithful contributors to AIDS charities until they both fell ill with AIDS. Now they are hoping there will be money left after they die; they have designated four AIDS organizations as partial recipients of their estate.
The cost of co-payments on health insurance has tempered their hopes for leaving a financial legacy. ”I don`t know how many people end up with anything,” said Motdoch. ”It is so expensive.”
Many die drained of financial resources. Yet even those people who have little to leave behind, and their numbers are increasing, leave an imprint.
”Some people who come in, the homeless with AIDS, have practically nothing,” said Ron Walent, an AIDS nurse at San Francisco General Hospital.
”The only thing they leave behind is their name in a book.”
For more information about the Gerber Hart Library and Archive, call 312-883-3003.
