Dear Friends,
William Faulkner’s comment that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” is a line that’s close to the hearts of all of us who recognize the privileged place of history in our present and in our future. It is certainly true of the exhibition we open this month, AIDS in New York: The First Five Years, which chronicles the epidemic in New York from 1981 through 1985. The epidemic disease, which eventually became known as AIDS erupted in the 1980s. But it is neither dead nor past. We see its effects everywhere in our city today. It altered our demographics, our sense of neighborhood, our friendships, our families, and perhaps above all, our cultural and artistic communities.
I returned to New York City from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where I’d just completed my Ph.D. in late 1979. For the next decade at least, I would hear--it seemed to me endlessly--of the deaths of former Stanford classmates, generally those who had chosen Stanford for its proximity to San Francisco’s vibrant gay community. My first academic job in New York at Fordham University would bring, in those same years, many more deaths of colleagues and friends and students as a result of the disease. In my first five years at Fordham—the years that our exhibition chronicles—I would lose a great colleague, a man who was revered as a Fordham dean and Philosophy professor. And I would lose one of my most prized students, whom I won’t ever forget visiting in St. Vincent’s Hospital. What sorrow and pain to meet this brilliant young man's parents, who had flown from Puerto Rico to watch their son, once so full of promise for the future, die.
There are many, many people in our city today who were just being born as the AIDS epidemic became known. They typically have no idea, no sense, of what AIDS meant to our city as they were drawing their very first breaths. Without understanding its impact, they tend to have little or no understanding of its consequences. I have found that with my own three children, born between 1981 and 1989.
Over the course of our development of AIDS in New York: The First Five Years, we discovered just how little many New Yorkers today either know or understand about the early years of the epidemic. And these discoveries confirmed our sense of the importance of our story and our responsibility, as New York’s address for history, to tell it. You may recall other exhibitions that we have mounted over the last several years on the impact of disease and especially epidemic on our city. Remarkably, AIDS turns out to be, at least initially, viewed, understood, and dealt with in much the same way as cholera and smallpox. It is awful to think that we might have learned so little from these dreadful medical events, and from history. I hope you don’t think us arrogant in taking the view that we can, as an institution organized around history, effect a change in such attitudes.
We have focused on only the first five years of the epidemic in our show, the early period of confusion, panic, misinformation, denial, and prejudice. There are of course later chapters in the story of AIDS. And thankfully, there is another institution that will tell it, next fall--the New York Public Library, with whom we have worked closely.
We hope you will visit us and remember this time of uncertainty and fear, or learn about it for the first time, and see that it is a past that is still very much with us.
