A community remembered
A searchable archive of thousands of obituaries from the Bay Area Reporter, preserving more than 50 years of stories from San Francisco's LGBTQ+ community. A searchable archive of thousands of obituaries from the Bay Area Reporter LGBTQ+ newspaper.
The GLBT Historical Society supports and hosts this site, which was created by volunteers. Every obituary is scanned from the original Bay Area Reporter and has a guestbook where friends and family continue to leave remembrances. More about this project →
The impact of AIDS
Secondly, through numbers. The chart below shows the number of people whose obituaries appeared in the Bay Area Reporter each year — rising sharply through the 1980s and falling after effective antiretroviral treatments became available in the mid-1990s.
See an animated visualization of obituaries over time →
Other places to search for names of people lost to AIDS:
A living archive
This archive is more than a historical record. Friends, family, and loved ones continue to visit and leave messages of remembrance. So far, 2,288 messages have been left in the guestbook sections of obituary pages throughout the archive. You can browse all guestbook entries or read some examples below.
“As your youngest sister now age 59, I often think about where and what you would have become had you not left this world at such a young age. I think about your thoughts of becoming the President of the United States and the things you might have accomplished.”
Yvette Engel, sister of Felix Velarde-Munoz
“I still remember the shock at the noise of metal on metal! All eyes inside the lobby turned toward us at the sound.”
Bill Blackburn, describing how he helped John Lorenzini chain himself to the doors of a federal building in an early act of AIDS civil disobedience
“I think of him often. He ruined me for others because he took me on the most romantic dates.”
Ernie Givans, remembering Jack Essex
One visitor, John Mehring, left notes on about 150 obituary pages, connecting individual lives to books, interviews, news articles, and the broader history of San Francisco's LGBTQ+ community. His entries range from activist Bill Kraus, for whom Mehring helped campaign to name a meadow in Corona Heights, to legal advocate Don Knutson and playwright and activist Dan Turner. Mehring himself died in 2018, and his own obituary is now part of the archive he helped enrich.
If you knew someone whose obituary is in this archive, you can write a guestbook entry on their obituary page so that your memories will help keep their story alive.
Notable names
The archive includes obituaries for:
- Steve Abbott — Poet and single father whose life inspired the memoir and movie “Fairyland”
- Lou Sullivan — Trans activist who fought for recognition that trans men could be gay
- Bobbi Campbell — Nurse who became the first American to publicly disclose his AIDS diagnosis
- Sylvester — Disco and soul legend, known for the anthem “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”
- Leonard Matlovich — Vietnam veteran whose challenge to the military's gay ban made the cover of TIME
- Randy Shilts — Journalist who chronicled the AIDS crisis in “And the Band Played On”
On this day
The archive also includes thousands of less well known people whose stories might otherwise have been lost. Here is a randomly selected obituary published on today's date in a past year.
