Pandemics often come as a crisis in our society, calling into question our relationship with the state. How would the history of a pandemic look like when viewed through private papers as opposed to public archives? Public or government archives come to us organized and ordered with an intellectual coherence that often points to a chain of thought processes or actions of individuals. On the contrary, private papers often have no order to them and can relate to multiple subjects and activities that interested an individual. Private papers foster a creative, subjective, and humanistic interpretation of the past than government archives which often exist for their own sake as precedents for governance. Private papers of ordinary individuals who led mundane lives are closer to the reality of a subjective, disorderly, and chaotic world, and a better register of the struggles, frustrations, and travails of the people. In this essay, I examine the papers of Harry Adamson (1949-2021), a long-term survivor of AIDS in Philadelphia, as offering a unique window into the history of the AIDS pandemic, gay rights, disability, and urban spaces.
Adamson, called by his friends as “a man who won’t die,” was believed to have been infected by his second partner, Dr. David Yontz, a physician, in February 1982, when Americans knew little about HIV or AIDS. Both Adamson and Yontz were close friends of John Fryer, the legendary American AIDS activist and Professor of Psychiatry at Temple University. Fryer, popularly known as “Dr. Henry Anonymous,” made a disguised speech (in a Nixon-like mask and alternate voice) at the American Psychiatry Association (APA) annual meeting in 1972, denouncing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM, 1968) definition of homosexuality as a mental illness. Following his speech, in 1973, APA removed reference to homosexuality as a mental illness from the DSM.
In 1985, Fryer helped recruit Adamson as a counselor and phlebotomist at the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force, which was the fourth oldest AIDS service organization in the US and the first in Pennsylvania. Adamson was also instrumental in starting an AIDS Hotline dedicated to teens, which saw remarkable success. The on-site testing at the Task Force was the only free testing site in Philadelphia then. As a staff member of the Task Force, Adamson had access to testing, and his results returned positive, confirming his nagging suspicion that he was already HIV-infected for a few years.
In 1993, when he was barely 44 years old, Adamson had to retire from full-time employment and seek disability and social security benefits. For the rest of his life, he had to navigate social security and Medicare systems to be able to not only pay the bills but also to bring his changing prescriptions and care needs under coverage. Thus, his papers have boxes and boxes of confidential health information that he had to supply periodically to claim disability benefits.
The hallucinatory spells caused by his medicines led him to lose sleep and develop anxiety. Adamson kept a dream journal at the instance of his friend John Fryer. His dream journal is a collection of various dreams involving his romantic partners he had between the 1970s and 2000s, and they are each marked by a title and a year, which makes them more like a collection of short stories. It is not clear when he dreamt a particular dream; the years signified the happenings in the dream. Rather than writing an autobiography, Adamson wrote down each of his dreams in a picaresque fashion as a tale of adventure, lust, and loss; it is likely that many of these dreams would have changed their nature or acquired more details and force in the act of writing them down. The only part of the collections that Adamson was eager to be closed during his lifetime was his dream journals.
Adamson was passionate about local history and collected many documents and artifacts relating to the AIDS pandemic and Philadelphia, which form an archive within the archive. These are not materials he himself created but collected and preserved in neatly marked folders. His papers have copious amounts of newspaper clippings about friends and men of standing who died of AIDS. For instance, they include his collection of artworks and news clippings relating to the promising and rebellious young gay artist Keith Haring, who died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 31. As a long-time Philadelphia resident and a well-wisher of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, he encouraged his friends to donate historical records to the society. Adamson was instrumental in getting John Fryer’s voluminous private papers donated to HSP in 2003. Fryer’s will left Adamson in charge of settling his belongings, and Adamson donated much of Fryer’s private papers to HSP.
Adamson’s private papers are a veritable collection of what may be called “Philadelphiana”—brochures, postcards, restaurant menus, magazines, and chapbooks relating to Philadelphia and its many historical sites. These ephemeral memorabilia show a man who loved the city he lived in and tried to document his relationship with the city. The most important of these was the set of documents he acquired from Mary Kilroy-Pagoch, the director of the “one percent for art” program in Philadelphia and is now a part of the Adamson papers. These documents show the history around the construction of the Irish Famine Memorial monument at Penn’s Landing. They include a call for artists and the application files of the five short-listed artists, and more information about artist Glenna Goodacre, who went on to design the monument.
Adamson papers are an archive of one of the major pandemics to have ravaged the US and the world. AIDS pandemic (though, in the US it is often called an epidemic) brought to the fore the American establishment’s hidebound beliefs about homosexuality. So much so that for years, politicians and federally funded scientific institutions like the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) took little note of the disease and, like most of the ill-formed public, dismissed it as gay plague that afflicted only gay men.
Today, living through a global pandemic like the COVID-19, we know that pandemics follow racial and class lines in how they afflict people. In the AIDS pandemic, the gay community was
disproportionately affected even as many women, children, and straight men were also infected by HIV. Given the governmental and societal apathy, Adamson’s tale of survival through the most difficult days of the AIDS pandemic is a standing testimony to the spirt of a man who sought to fight a disease about which the society and medical profession knew little about. As more scientific knowledge, vaccines, and treatment regimens came into place, he tried hard to adapt to those, and had to painfully navigate the social security, Medicare, and hospital administrations on a routine basis. The highly medicalized life that the AIDS patients lived through, where they had to constantly classify and enumerate their illnesses and disabilities, tells us about a medical state that sought to control diseased subjectivities.
For me, as a South Asian historian, reading the papers of Harry Adamson opened a new world of pandemic and the legal and medical subjectivities that it created in its wake. There was no AIDS pandemic worth its name in South Asia in the 1980s, and hence, it was not something that I had learned in schools or colleges or knew about through fiction or movies. Even today, there is little awareness or precaution against the disease in South Asia. Today, in the US, there is greater awareness and sensitivity toward AIDS, and medical research has advanced to the stage where HIV-positive people can, through sustained treatment, live a long and healthy life once HIV is undetectable.
For historians and archivists, private papers connote the collections of an individual whose life and actions give us a unique window into their times. Unlike public or government records, private papers of ordinary individuals are often idiosyncratic, messy, and haphazard. There is no presumption of objectivity or wholeness to them; rather, they are defined by partiality and subjectivity. The turn toward oral and subjective histories (histories that center the self or the individual subject) is, in large part, a turn away from elite, statist, and hegemonic histories and is motivated by a desire to write the histories of individuals and events that did not leave behind sources. Adamson’s papers provide a counter-narrative to mainstream histories of the AIDS pandemic based on public and government archives on the one hand and those based on the struggles of socially and professionally accomplished individuals on the other. As an AIDS patient, Adamson negotiated with the state and insurance companies daily, yet it is likely that he will be absent from a state archive. Or when present, just as an abstract individual who was the subject of some vaccine trials or as an individual with specific medical conditions. His frustrations with the medical system, political and scientific apathy toward the pandemic, and the ordeal of those disabled reliant on state payments come alive in his papers.
Adamson’s papers are a crucial resource for anyone studying the history of the AIDS pandemic in Philadelphia and those interested in disability studies, urban studies, gay rights, and the social history of medicine and the AIDS pandemic in general. These papers bring alive many individuals who lived and died of AIDS in the city; they tell us about hospitals, doctors, and sanatoriums that treated AIDS patients and rehabilitated them; they tell us about restaurants, parks, housing complexes, pubs, and parks that were frequented by the AIDS afflicted. More importantly, they give us a very personalized, first-person account of the AIDS pandemic (as opposed to the third-person accounts of professional historians) from an ordinary individual who worked as a restaurant waiter.