This podcast is about the politics of the first encounters with the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. The six episodes draw from the thirty-five interviews that Sally Smith Hughes conducted in the 1990s. A historian of science at UC Berkeley’s Oral History Office, Sally interviewed doctors, nurses, researchers, public health officials and community-health practitioners to learn about the unique ways that people responded to the epidemic. Although these interviews cover a wide range of topics, including the isolation of the virus HIV and the search for treatments, the interviews we selected for this podcast are more focused on public health, community engagement, and nursing care. Most of the following podcast episodes are about the period from early 1981, when the first reports emerged of an unknown disease that was  killing gay men in San Francisco, to 1984 and the development of a new way of caring for people in a hospital setting.

First Response: AIDS and Community in San Francisco

Join us here in January 2018 for season 3 of our podcast series! "First Response: AIDS and Community in San Francisco" draws from the thirty-five interviews conducted by Sally Smith Hughes with the health researchers and practitioners who faced the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco during the early years of the crisis.

Season 3 Preview -- First Response: AIDS and Community in San Francisco

This is the first of six episodes of First Response: AIDS and Community in San Francisco, the third season of the UC Berkeley Oral History Center's podcast series The Berkeley Remix (previously known as Tales from the Campanile). In this episode, we provide some social and political context for the city before the arrival of HIV/AIDS in San Francisco, and hear stories from the researchers, community physicians, nurses, and public health officials about the history of the gay community in San Francisco.

Read the full episode transcript here: https://ucblib.link/OHCPodcastS03E01

Ep 1: San Francisco

This episode takes a look at the medical community’s first encounter with AIDS in San Francisco. As reports began to circulate of a mysterious disease affecting gay men, fear spread even faster than the virus itself. Here medical researchers and healthcare professionals discuss how the health community grappled with this fear of the unknown: from medical institutions and staff refusing to treat patients, to the internal conflict of the health practitioners themselves as they faced the reality that their pursuit to save lives could very well risk their own. Ultimately, the management of fear—among patients, the public, and the health community itself—proved to be one of the first steps in the city’s medical response to AIDS.

Read the full episode transcript here: https://ucblib.link/OHCPodcastS03E02

Ep 2: The Virus of Fear

Episode 3 –The Gay-Positive Health Community Before AIDS

This episode takes a step back and examines the efforts of public health officials in San Francisco to establish a relationship of trust with the gay community. For years, homophobia had pushed this ostracized community, gay men in particular, to seek underground health services at establishments where they could receive treatment from sympathetic or at least non-judgmental professionals. By the 1970s, however, bridges began to develop between health officials and the gay community, just as physicians within the community itself started to form their own public health networks. In this episode, we hear from practitioners from inside and outside the gay community on the work undertaken to create a gay-positive health response to rising epidemics before the arrival of AIDS in the city.

Read the full episode transcript here: https://ucblib.link/OHCPodcastS03E03

Ep 3: The Gay - Positive Health Community Before AIDS

This episode explores a crisis that threatened to derail the developing collaboration between public health officials and the gay community. By the late 1970s, researchers had identified the city’s bathhouses as sites for the spread of disease, especially among gay men. Facing ineffective educational initiatives and a new, fast-growing epidemic, San Francisco’s Pubic Health Department ordered the closure of bathhouses in October 1984. The bonds of trust that had slowly developed between the public health service and the gay community began to fall apart, as emergency action to address the spread of disease collided with the legacy of homophobia and persecution. Here public health officials and physicians within the gay community discuss the Bathhouse Crisis and the strained relations that resulted.

Read the full episode transcript here: https://ucblib.link/OHCPodcastS03E04

Ep 4: The Bathhouse Crisis

This episode charts the uphill battle medical researchers faced in securing the needed resources and funding to combat the AIDS epidemic. The discovery of the epidemic coincided with the rise of fiscal and social conservatism in national politics with the election of Ronald Reagan. Public health budgets were slashed and there was little sympathy or support to fight a disease affecting gay men. In this episode, medical researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and University of California San Francisco’s KS Clinic reveal how they had to improvise in this context to piece together the crucial resources needed to make headway against the epidemic.

Read the full episode transcript here: https://ucblib.link/OHCPodcastS03E05

Ep 5: The Fight For Resources

Our final episode looks at how the collaboration between community members and health officials ultimately came to redefine care for AIDS. We hear medical staff and community members describe the multi-pronged approach developed at San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 5b, which  combined care, research, social work, and community involvement. Together, health officials and community members pioneered a new way of treating epidemic disease and human suffering—a new way that became known as the San Francisco Model.

Read the full episode transcript here: https://ucblib.link/OHCPodcastS03E06

EP 6: Ward 5b, or The San Francisco Model

This interview with UC Berkeley Oral History Center historian Sally Smith Hughes introduces her interviews with the physicians, public health officials, researchers, and nurses who faced the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco in the early 1980s. Paul and Sally also discuss the podcast "First Response: AIDS and Community in San Francisco," which is based on Sally's interviews from the 1990s.

Read the full episode transcript here: https://ucblib.link/OHCPodcastS03E00

Ep 0:  Prologue - Interview with an Interviewer - Sally Smith Hughes

The Oral History Center preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. Our podcast, The Berkeley Remix, delves into pressing issues, making our vast archive accessible to scholars and the public. The UC Berkeley Oral History Center, a division of The Bancroft Library, was founded in 1953 and produces carefully researched, audio/video-recorded, and transcribed oral histories and interpretative historical materials for the widest possible use.