The Things You Find in the Bottom Drawer

I had to pack up a lot of my papers because my office was being renovated, but I left a lot of things in boxes because they’re going to the University of Rochester library.  

The bottom drawer of Dr. Bill Valenti’s desk held papers from decades ago.

When you start gathering papers and things, the bottom drawer of the desk is a good place to start. I found this folder from AIDS Rochester that goes back to around 1986. It’s the folder for the ombudsman committee – that’s the advocacy committee internally for AIDS Rochester that looked at issues of patients/clients’ complaints and concerns about a variety of things related to their HIV diagnosis.

The file represents a couple of cases regarding clients’ interactions with AIDS Rochester. The correspondence gets pretty aggressive and contentious in terms of the back-and-forth with at least two patients that I knew, talking about issues of stigma, discrimination, aspects of their care and the aspects of their interaction with AIDS Rochester.

I think what it represents is a time very early in the AIDS epidemic, just after the start of treatment, where we were still getting our feet on the ground in terms of how to interact with people around the issues.

There were a lot of struggles that are reflected in this material. One of them is a back-and-forth between the AIDS Rochester people and one of their clients who was a patient of ours and a psychiatrist who was seeing the patient. The concern on the AIDS Rochester part was the patient was being aggressive and demanding. The psychiatrist said essentially yeah, this guy is being demanding, but you have to understand the background here and he’s just frightened to death.  He’s alone, and he’s frightened and he has no one and you’re his anchor. I think the issue there is a reflection of the anxiety and tension and disruption of that whole era. It’s a remarkable read. Really sobering after all these years.

I have another piece in this file, one that I consider the lighter side.

It’s an October 1986 interoffice memo from Jackie Nudd, who was the first executive director AIDS Rochester, sent to five of her staff. It’s about staff behavior.

One of the files in the bottom drawer had a letter from Jackie Nudd to the AIDS Rochester staff, reminding them of proper staff behavior.

Here it is: “It is considered inappropriate behavior for chaste staff members to comment on unchaste behavior of other staff members who go around horny all the time and for those staff members who are knocked up all the time.”

It’s kind of early bureaucratese of the AIDS movement, I suspect talking about boundaries, probably related to gossip and stigmatizing people. It’s heavily veiled. The language is curious – chaste and unchaste. Horny all the time and knocked up are the words that stand out here.

Wow.

That’s what was in the bottom drawer. I’ll talk more about other memorabilia that I’ll be donating to the UR, and what the items mean to me and how they are part of the story of AIDS in Rochester.