About this project

The online obituary project began as an attempt by Tom Burtch to locate the published obituaries of the members of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus in time for the Chorus' 30th anniversary in 2008. As of 2026, the number of Chorus members who have died stands at 353. The Bay Area Reporter is the weekly LGBTQ newspaper of San Francisco; Tom went to its archives and scanned the Chorus members' obituaries by hand.

In looking for the Chorus-specific listings, Tom realized that there was a much larger audience that would benefit from a complete listing of all the obituaries that have appeared in the Bay Area Reporter. Tom and his friend Dan launched the original version of this website in 2009.

Although arguably the vast majority of the people memorialized here died of AIDS or AIDS-related diseases, this project is not intended to imply any cause of death that is not specifically mentioned in the individual listing. Included are victims of crimes reported in the paper, as well as memorial listings that often appear on the anniversary of a person's death.

In 2026 the website underwent a renewal adding increased search ability with full Optical Character Recognition (OCR) allowing searches on any words which might appear in one of the obituaries — a search for "gay men's chorus" will find many of the Chorus members' obituaries, for example. We hope this will enable visitors to the site who might not have a specific last name or an unusual spelling to still search for other known facts about the person.

The new website and the timeline, which shows graphically the statistical figures of the AIDS epidemic, were developed by Kerry Rodden, an independent consultant in data visualization. Kerry became interested in the project after watching We Were Here, the documentary about the impact of the AIDS crisis on San Francisco's gay community.

The team of Tom, Dan and Kerry are 100% volunteers. The archive includes 11,264 people and 12,037 scans. We know there may be mistakes in the archive and welcome your feedback to enable us to make corrections. When you leave a guestbook entry we see your comments when they are posted — reading your memories is our reward.

Tom is happy to consult with others interested in starting a similar project in their communities. He can be contacted at obituaries@glbthistory.org.

About the data

Names in the archive sometimes appear as long strings of forenames — for example, Stevens, Jim Muffin or Araujo, Frank Patrick III Fudge Violet Plague Tug Piewacket. This is because nicknames, drag names, faerie names, and other alternative names were all concatenated into a single name field in the original database format. The obituary text itself is the best guide to what a person actually called themselves.

OCR of scanned newspaper pages is not perfect: misread characters, words split across lines, and other artifacts are common, particularly in older or lower-quality scans. A search may not find every mention of a name or term if it was misread by the OCR process.