By 1986, AIDS had cut deep into San Francisco’s arts community. On December 7, the Sunday Examiner & Chronicle’s Datebook published a special report on what had been lost.
“How the Bay Area has been hit”
Edward Guthmann’s report counted 1,517 San Franciscans dead of AIDS. The Gay Freedom Day Marching Band had lost its director Lesesne Van Antwerp, its drum major and a trumpeter within three weeks. Its founder, Jon Sims, had died two and a half years earlier. The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, then 114 members, had lost at least two dozen members and former members in five years, according to founding member Perry George. He recalled that the chorus once held a memorial for a member killed in a plane crash. Now deaths were announced in the middle of rehearsal.
“It becomes so numbing after a while.”
— Perry George, as quoted in the Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
Remembered by name
The report’s memorial pages included chorus members:
- Dean Halsey, a baritone who formed The Lollipop Guild, the chorus’s barbershop quartet. He died August 31, 1986, at 32.
- Roger Hostetler, a Kansas Mennonite who sang with the chorus from 1980 to 1982.
- Tony Kramedas, who also ran the Inn San Francisco.
- Frank LoBraico, the chorus’s stage manager and technical director. He built sets for the 1981 tour and coordinated the 1983 Opera House concert “Too Much Fun,” during a run of three straight Cable Car Awards.
- Jerry Lo Presti, who designed lighting and sound, computerized the chorus’s records and sang with Men About Town. Perry George said he had a blood transfusion so he could make the July 1986 tour to Portland and Minneapolis. He died that September at 33.
A year earlier, the Examiner had reported the death of bass Robert Beale, 32, a Safeway employee who had been treasurer of the national tour committee and sang in The Lollipop Guild.
From the archives: this post retells reporting by the San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle. The original articles survive only in newspaper archives, so we have told the story here in our own words. Details attributed to those outlets are their reporting; see the sources below.
Sources
- San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, “AIDS and the Arts: How the Bay Area Has Been Hit” by Edward Guthmann, December 7, 1986. sfchronicle.com
- San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, “Robert W. Beale (obituary)”, July 7, 1985. sfchronicle.com
