The Associated Press; Friday August 14 4:58 PM EDT
David Kligman, Associated Press Writer

For the first in more than 17 years, the gay weekly contained no obituaries of AIDS victims. As of Friday, no AIDS death notices had arrived at the newspaper for almost a week and a half.

"It's nice to pick up the paper and not read about your friends dying," Tom Hayer said Friday as he sat in a coffee shop in San Francisco's largely gay Castro District.

Over the years, the course of the AIDS epidemic could be traced in the pages of the Bay Area Reporter. During the explosion of AIDS cases in the mid-1980s, the paper averaged a dozen obits a week, and they covered two or three pages. One week, there were 31 obituaries.

Loved ones write the profiles and hand-deliver or mail them to the Reporter, which at one point was getting so many novella-length obits that by 1992 readers were limited to 200 words per submission.

The first noticeable drop in obits began two years ago with the introduction of protease inhibitors and other powerful AIDS drugs that subdue the virus. "No obits," screamed this week's front-page headline, which was accompanied by a story and an editorial titled "Death takes a holiday."

Editors at the newspaper greeted the news with cautious delight.

"It doesn't mean that there is no AIDS," news editor Mike Salinas said. "What it does mean is that people with AIDS are living longer and that we're smarter about the human immune system."

It doesn't mean no one died of AIDS in the San Francisco Bay this month. The city Department of Public Health's latest figures showed 35 AIDS deaths in July - compared with an average of more than 150 deaths a month during the peak year of 1992 - and some AIDS deaths have almost certainly occurred in August, too. Derek Gordon, spokesman for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, said a large number of the new HIV cases involve homeless drug addicts, many of them without friends or loved ones who would submit an obituary to the Reporter.

Over the past months, the number of AIDS obituaries arriving at the newspaper had dropped so low - about four a week - that the reporter whose full-time job was to edit them left in June because there was so little to do.

The few days leading up to Monday's deadline for submitting obits were tense at the newspaper. In the previous two weeks, none had been delivered until the last minute.

"It was like watching a no-hitter in baseball unfolding," Salinas said. "We didn't really want to discuss it until it became obvious that it was going to happen. We held our breath waiting."

It never came and still hadn't come as of Friday, the 10th day without an AIDS obit.

San Francisco still has an estimated 15,000 HIV-postive residents and about 600 new infections every year, down from 8,000 annually in the mid-'80s, and some worry that the drop in AIDS obituaries might prompt younger gay residents to begin practicing unsafe sex.

"Obviously the last thing I want anybody to believe is that the epidemic is over or it's a reason to think that they don't need to protect themselves," Salinas said.

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