This photo is actually from 1993, by Eric Luse of the San Francisco Chronicle, reprinted in 2006 with this caption:
The Gay Men’s Chorus posed to illustrate the impact of AIDS. Those dressed in black, with their backs turned, represent those who had died. Today, all their backs would be turned because the obituary list is now 47 names longer than the chorus roster. For each man singing these days, more than one chorus member has died of AIDS.
More from the 2006 article:
There is a common saying backstage before the curtain rises on the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus:
For each man standing, one chorus member has died of AIDS.
A quarter-century into the epidemic, the list of the dead is longer than the living: there are 210 singers and 257 obituaries.
As AIDS devastated San Francisco, the Gay Men’s Chorus suffered some of the city’s largest group casualties.
“If AIDS never happened, we’d be two or three choruses by now,” said Bob Emery, 77, who is among the four active members left from the original 1978 roster and has been living with HIV for 26 years.
At every rehearsal during the 1980s and early 1990s, there were announcements about who was in which hospital room and when the next memorial was scheduled.
“I could see all these people dropping all around me, and there was no official response from any health department at any level,” said Tony McIntosh, who joined the chorus in 1985 and lost 25 friends to AIDS. “It was maddening. The chorus gave us an outlet for all that anger and relief from the feeling that nobody in the world seemed to care.”
As AIDS took its toll, the chorus members used their concerts as a forum to bring a sense of urgency about the epidemic to the public. Their music became more somber, and they began adding AIDS requiems to their programs. The chorus also became the only place for the members to talk openly about HIV and AIDS. The men shared tips on how to get into clinical drug trials and serenaded friends through their last breaths.
For men who were fighting for their lives alone, estranged from parents who had turned their backs on their gay children, the chorus became family.
“We’re starting to go to less-gay places like Modesto and perform now,” said 21-year member Tom Burtch, keeper of the “Fifth Section,” a list of every chorus member who has died. The chorus publishes the list in every concert program.
In February, Burtch added the latest AIDS victim to the list, 48-year-old Robert Frey of San Francisco.
Not long after, Burtch overheard one of the new chorus members in his twenties whisper to another during rehearsal that he’s never known anybody with AIDS or HIV.
“It’s mind-blowing that we’re in the same room with youngsters who have no idea of what we’ve been through,” Burtch said, “I went over to the guy and introduced myself.”
The current Fifth Section list on the chorus’s website now contains 282 names.
Today, the chorus is planning a 2017 outreach tour in response to Trump’s election and the “increase in dangerous and divisive rhetoric against vulnerable minority populations” in the United States.
The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is the oldest explicitly gay chorus of the over 190 LGBT choruses worldwide that make up the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses (GALA Choruses).
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