Chronicling History

Hundreds of thousands of items documenting the AIDS pandemic that were painstakingly cataloged by archivists in Los Angeles and San Francisco during the past three years are now available for public viewing. Coordinated by the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, the collection includes government paperwork, condoms, safer-sex pamphlets, photos, magazines, the diaries and letters of HIV-positive people, and much more. 'It is important for us to see not only how AIDS was treated medically,' says Michael Palmer, an archives project director at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, 'but to document historically people's responses to it.'