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.

Although arguably the vast majority of the people memorialized here died of AIDS or AIDS-related diseases, this project is not intended to infer 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. The archive now includes 11,264 people and 12,037 scans. 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 — a search for "gay men's chorus" will find many of the Chorus members' obituaries, for example. Kerry has also developed the timeline that shows graphically the statistical figures of the AIDS epidemic. When Tom and his friend Dan launched the original version of the website in 2009, much of the functionality Kerry added wasn't even possible.

Kerry Rodden is an independent consultant in data visualization (kerryrodden.com) who developed the new website and the timeline 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.

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.

Full-text search is powered by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of scanned newspaper pages. OCR 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.

The team of Tom, Dan and Kerry are 100% volunteers. We know there may be mistakes in the 12,037 file names 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.