Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

From the 1970s protests against antigay legislation through the White Night riots after Milk was assassinated by a conservative ex-cop to the ferocious activism of ACT UP and Queer Nation into the 1990s, it was a politically charged place. It was both a center of the AIDS crisis and of organizing to respond to it, from the work of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to educate about safe sex to ACT UP and Queer Nation to Cleve’s AIDS memorial quilt project, a project so massive that the last time it was displayed in its entirety, in 1996, it covered the entire Mall in the nation’s capital. I watched the AIDS crisis as a bystander passing through a Castro that suddenly had bulletin-board notices and gay newspaper articles about a strange new disease, then skeletal men teetering along the sidewalks, memorial displays, protests and marches.