Inside the National AIDS Memorial Grove, green and quiet in the heart of Golden Gate Park, granite boulders carry names and messages that paper cannot hold and headlines never printed. One of those boulders already speaks for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence — the irreverent, fearless order of street nuns who turned drag into direct action and grief into ministry.

It’s time to honor another community that rallied early to fundraise and caregive during the AIDS crisis – the global leather community.

Thousands of people have died in San Francisco, millions in the world. The point of the National AIDS Memorial Grove is to remember them, one at a time. — Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi

Our Vision

We are raising the funds to design, carve, and install a new memorial boulder in the National AIDS Memorial Grove — a permanent, public, granite tribute to the global Leather Community.

Together with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence boulder already in place, the Leather Community boulder will continue to further honor the communities whose courage, care, and defiance carried the AIDS response forward when so much of the world looked away.

The leather community memorial boulder will be cut from Sierra granite, the same enduring material used throughout the Grove, designed to stand for generations in a living memorial that already holds the names of tens of thousands lost to AIDS. When the AIDS Memorial Quilt is folded and the headlines have faded, these boulders will still stand — in sunlight, in fog, in the quiet of any day — telling the truth about who showed up.

The Leather Community Boulder

For those who turned intimacy into survival, and survival into a movement.

AIDS Memorial Quilt block #5710 dedicated to leather community.

Long before public health agencies found their footing, the leather community was already doing the work — helping to write and promote some of the first safer-sex guidelines, building peer-education networks bar by bar and club by club, and refusing to let fear extinguish connection.

Alongside the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and other early responders, leather communities across the country and around the world turned hard-won knowledge of risk and pleasure into life-saving practice.

The National AIDS Memorial first recognized the San Francisco Leather Community with its Thom Weyand Unsung Hero Award on World AIDS Day 2015, and featured this community in it inaugural Surviving Voices AIDS oral history short-documentary series.

This boulder reaches further: a permanent tribute to leather communities everywhere — honoring those who were lost to AIDS, and standing as well for the survivors, educators, and successors who carried that early work forward and carry it still.

They wrote the rules for staying alive while the rest of the world was still arguing about whether the epidemic was real.

Fundraising Goal

To source, inscribe, and install a memorial boulder costs $15,000, and that is our initial request of the community.

We hope that leather people and allies worldwide see this memorial boulder as a way to honor every leather person they know who died of AIDS, had a partner or loved one die of AIDS, and every leather person who rose to the challenge of taking care of the sick or protecting their community.

If this initial phase of the project raises monies beyond the $15,000 goal, those funds will go toward the creation of two other phases of memorial boulders we envision following the installation of the leather community boulder. More details regarding a Caregivers and Activists boulders below.

This photo is part of the Powers (David) Photograph Collection, which contains photographs created by freelance photographer David Powers while on assignment for UCSF between 1975 and 2002. Here, Mark Feinberg examines and AIDS patient at San Francisco General Hospital's Ward 86.

The Caregivers Boulder

For the hands that held on when almost no one else would.

Every epidemic produces a quiet army, and AIDS produced one of the largest the modern world has seen: women who buried their sons and stayed to bury their sons’ friends; family members who drove across the country to sit at bedsides; friends who became hospice nurses overnight because no one else would; doctors, nurses, social workers, and researchers who showed up to wards that ambulance drivers refused to enter.

They had no single name and wore no single uniform. History has come to call them, simply, the caregivers. This boulder honors all of them — the ones who cared through the darkest years of the crisis and did not survive it themselves, and the ones who are still answering that call today, at the bedsides of people living with HIV right now.

Caregiving was the epidemic’s second front line — fought in living rooms, hospital wards, and kitchen tables, by people the history books too often left unnamed.

The Activists Boulder

For the ones who turned grief into demand, and demand into change.

When governments stayed silent and institutions looked away, activists made silence impossible. They marched, organized, occupied federal buildings, and disrupted business as usual until research funding moved, drug approval timelines shortened, and the word AIDS was finally spoken from the (then) president’s mouth for the first time, after several years of avoidance. Their fury was strategic. Their grief was organized. Their persistence rewrote how an entire country responds to a public health emergency.

That fight didn’t end when treatments improved — it changed shape. Today’s activists are still pushing for the funding, access, and equity that prevention and treatment depend on, especially in the communities the world is most tempted to forget. The Activists boulder honors both generations: those who fought and did not live to see the changes they won, and those who are still fighting now.

Without their voices in the streets and at the podiums, the medicine that exists today might have arrived a decade and a generation too late.

A Story Completed

Once all three boulders are installed — the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence already standing, and the Leather Community, Caregivers, and Activists boulders yet to come — it will represent a truly global constellation of communities. Encompassing the four corners of the National AIDS Memorial Grove.

Yet more visitors from San Francisco and across the world will be able to walk the Grove and find themselves, or some one they loved, named in stone: not as a footnote to the epidemic, but as one of the reasons it did not win.

Every boulder we place here is a sentence in a story that refuses to end in silence.

We invite you to help us create the first of these boulders for the leather community. Your gift will move the Leather Community boulder project forward.

Please note any donations in excess of what’s needed for the Leather Community boulder will jumpstart the fundraising for the Caregivers and Activists boulders.

By donating, you are making sure the people who saved lives and cared for others during the darkest chapter of this epidemic — along with the people still doing that work today — are remembered exactly as they deserve: permanently, publicly, and together - in community.

Race Bannon & Aaron Furtado Baldwin

Co-Chairs

Leather, Caregivers & Activists Community Grove Boulder Campaign

Stone That Remembers

A Campaign to Acknowledge the Leather Community