William Way LGBT Community Center and its John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives announce the launch of the Philadelphia HIV/AIDS History Portal. This vital community resource seeks to preserve and deepen the unfolding story of how HIV and AIDS has impacted Philadelphians for over 40 years.
Conceived as both a home for the interviews of the Center's Philadelphia AIDS Oral History Project (PAOHP) and a complement to its HIV/AIDS memorialization project called Remembrance, the site debuts with an initial group of 10 audio recordings and transcripts from both the PAOHP and Remembrance. Additional oral history interviews from both projects will be added over time.
The Philadelphia AIDS Oral History Project may be traced back to the conference Fighting Back: Defending the LGBT Mind and Body in Pennsylvania, organized by the Center and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in October 2015. Following this conference, the AIDS Library of Philadelphia (now Critical Path Learning Center) at Philadelphia FIGHT convened a planning committee to guide the new oral history project. The first interviews were conducted in the summer of 2016; Operations for the project have since moved to the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives at William Way.
Remembrance was the Center's 2020-2022 alternative memorial to Philadelphians and the HIV/AIDS crisis, which was supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Partnering with artists, activists, and community leaders, Remembrance included the collecting of community stories, the premiere of a full-length original play, a "going home" ceremony to memorialize those most at risk of being forgotten, and, now, the creation of this website for the preservation and distribution of these important stories.
"For those who may not remember or did not experience the early years of the epidemic, it was marked with great societal fear and government inaction," says John Anderies, Archives Director, who serves as the project director of both the PAOHP and Remembrance. "People's friends and lovers were dying before their eyes and a diagnosis was a death sentence. The individuals we lost as well as how our communities built the support networks to combat and cope with the disease are stories that must not be forgotten."
The PAOHP includes interviews of community members who served as early responders to the health crisis in the 1980s and 90s. Those from Remembrance engage individuals in recalling someone close to them who died of AIDS. The PAOHP has so far collected almost 50 oral history interviews, while Remembrance held 45 listening sessions, mostly conducted over Zoom during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The site was designed and built by CWP Design Studio together with Strategic Websites. "It's been a pleasure to work with the folks at CWP and Strategic," notes Anderies. "They instantly understood the importance of these projects and were able to design a beautiful and functional site that can grow and change over time." Implementation of an application called the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) connects spoken word audio and typed transcripts, allowing a listener to follow along, search, or jump from one spot to another in both.
The site also features an interactive timeline of the history of HIV/AIDS in Philadelphia beginning in 1979 and continuing to 2022. Each year of the timeline is illustrated with images from the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives. In addition to serving as the collective memory of Philadelphia's LGBTQ community, the Wilcox Archives has substantial holdings on the history of HIV/AIDS, including the records of area service organizations, as well as personal materials of activists, artists, and other individuals who died from the disease, dating from the early 1980s to today.
Also included are video excerpts and photographs from playwright Ain Gordon's These Don't Easily Scatter, a full-length play commissioned by the Center as part of Remembrance, as well as from artist Alex Stadler's "going-home" ceremony called Gone and For Ever, another element of Remembrance, both premiered in Philadelphia in 2022.
The development of the site was funded by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Foundation and the Walter J. Lear Trust. The site is dedicated to Dr. Walter Lear (1923-2010), the life-long public health activist.
