White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic

by Benjamin Heim Shepard

Across the world, people have created a movement to fight AIDS. San Francisco's contribution to this fight grew out of the Gay Liberation Movement. The San Francisco AIDS story is a tale of how gay rights became human rights.

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Queer

278 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1997

About the author

Benjamin Shepard, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Human Service at New York School of Technology/City University of New York. He received his Masters at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and training in psychoanalysis from the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in their Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program. As a social worker he worked in AIDS housing settings from San Francisco to Chicago to New York, where he directed the start ups for two congregate housing programs for people with HIV/AIDS, as well as served as Deputy Director at CitiWide Harm Reduction.

He has done organizing work with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), SexPanic!, Reclaim the Streets New York, Times UP, the Clandestine Rebel Clown Army, the Absurd Response Team, CitiWide Harm Reduction, Housing Works, the More Gardens Coalition, and the Times UP Bike Lane Liberation Front and Garden Working Groups. Combing ethnography with social change activism, his work considers the interplay between theory and practice.

Reviews

[Laura]

Wonderful and heartbreaking at the same time. I love oral histories, and I think that that format is perfect for conveying the horror of the AIDS crisis as it swept through an entire community. Actually, one of the interesting parts of this book was that it included people from outside the gay white male community, giving voices and respect to others who generally are invisible when the conversation turns to AIDS.

To me, as a transplant San Franciscan born when AIDS was just starting to spread, it is very important to get a sense of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. To understand is probably stretching it - can I really understand what it's like to lose everyone I love, to get sick, to be disrespected by health workers, to be ignored by the government at my time of greatest need? - but the stories shared in this book certainly got me close.

If you are interested in this book, or have already read and liked it, then I recommend watching the movie "We Were Here: Voices from the AIDS Years in San Francisco."

[Stephen Cranney]

An oral history compilation of interviews with survivors of the AIDS epidemic that decimated San Francisco's 1980's gay population. He could have interviewed more people, but there were some very poignant and touching moments.

[Lindsey Morel]

Oh so surprisingly, a bit of a downer. But I like the idea of being a social worker moonlighting as a social historian. Benjamin Shepard knows what he's doing.