Introduction - Historical Notes

The AIDS Pandemic - AIDS in San Francisco I

The American city of San Francisco, famous for its beauty, culture, good weather, and tolerant social climate, had attracted the ”beat“ poets in the 1950s and the “hippies“ and “flower children” in the 1960s. In the 1970s, it was the favourite destination of homosexuals and bisexuals from all over the country and indeed from many other countries. Thus, San Francisco soon became the “gay capital of the world”. There, gays and lesbians made considerable social and political gains, and their dreams of a sexual utopia seemed to be coming true.
However, in the early 1980s an unexpected tragedy began to unfold as the first cases of a new, mysterious disease were reported in California and in New York. This disease later came to be known as AIDS, but at first it had no name and puzzled everyone, including the doctors. As the number of cases increased, people began to realize that it was contagious, that it was sexually transmitted, that it could be deadly, and that it especially seemed to affected gay men. Indeed, the general public came to think of it as a “gay disease” which would restrict itself to San Francisco and other cities with large homosexual populations.
In this increasingly frightening situation, the well-organized San Francisco gay community pulled together and developed pioneering programs of prevention and care that became models for other American cities and, eventually, for other countries and the world.