The Berkeley Remix, Season Three: First Response—Aids and Community in San Francisco by Paul Burnett (review)

Around 1981, a mysterious illness began claiming lives in the United States. While HIV/AIDS knew no geographic bounds, it especially ravaged San Francisco, California. A new seven-episode podcast explores that period of uncertainty. As the Berkeley Remix enters its third season, the podcast series promises to fulfill the mission of the Oral History Center at the Bancroft Library "to record the history of California, the nation, and our interconnected world." First Response: AIDS and Community in San Francisco aims to highlight that connection by sharing stories and voices from the AIDS epidemic. The series pulls excerpts from thirty-five interviews conducted during the 1990s on the early days of the AIDS crisis. During that time, Sally Smith Hughes was the historian of science at University of California Berkeley's Oral History Office. Hughes conducted interviews focused on memories of the epidemic's beginning from 1981 to 1984 in San Francisco; First Response centers on narrators with public and community health experiences. To listeners with a cursory knowledge of the AIDS crisis, and those who have read Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: Penguin, 1987), many of the nurses, doctors, and scientists interviewed will be familiar. Paul Burnett, the current historian and interviewer at UC Berkeley's Oral History Center, thoughtfully connects Hughes's interviews with interpretive content to create season three. First Response elicits a thought-provoking discourse on the relationship between public and community health in response to the AIDS crisis.

The season begins with a prologue—an introduction to the interviewer, Sally Smith Hughes; Burnett inquires about Hughes's experience conducting the interviews. The introductory episode provides background information on the oral history collection and establishes the tone and organization of the podcast. Both Hughes and Burnett make one thing clear: this not a podcast about community activism. Instead, it is about how the AIDS crisis necessitated a relationship between public and community health officials and practitioners. The six episodes that follow are organized to build and facilitate that understanding for the listener. With episodes that range from fifteen to twenty-three minutes, the podcast offers interpretation on HIV/AIDS in San Francisco. Additionally, it provides broader context on queer life in the early 1980s with enlightening interviews that propel the narrative.

Oral histories are the driving force of First Response. Burnett supplies relevant historical context and information on the narrators throughout each episode, but that material is not the focus. The only exception is "Episode 1: San Francisco," which begins with seven minutes of introductory interpretive material. The following six episodes include necessary but concise contextual additions from Burnett, leaving the majority of the episode for the interviews. Included is the strategic use of archival material, embedded within these episodes. "Episode 5: The Fight for Resources," includes a recording of an exchange between a reporter and President Ronald Reagan's press secretary at a 1983 White House press briefing. When asked about the President's knowledge of the AIDS epidemic, the press secretary makes a glib response riddled with willful ignorance and homophobia. While difficult to listen to, the clip adds a compelling archival component alongside the oral history interviews. This addition sets the tone for the rest of the episode in which Donald Francis, an epidemiologist for the Center for Disease Control, discusses the nearly impossible challenge of finding funding and resources to care for patients and research the disease. That narrative seamlessly fits into the broader story of why and how public and community health merged into the San Francisco model. When public health services, lacking necessary funding, failed dying people and those caring for them, patients and caregivers had no other choice but to search out alternate solutions. The press conference clip placed alongside the...