Well color me proud! Our very own Chris Bartlett is featured today in a New York Times story on social marketing for the dead. Chris has jumpstarted the Gay History Wiki, which is a project that attempts to gather the bits and pieces of Philadelphia's gay history 1960-present on one little site. Archiving those who died of AIDS is a key part of that project. From the Times piece:

Beginning in 2005, Mr. Bartlett began assembling the names of every gay male Philadelphian who died after being diagnosed with H.I.V. or AIDS, searching obituaries and the Names Project registry of people commemorated by the AIDS quilt, combing through records of social clubs and the rosters at St. Luke and the Epiphany, the Philadelphia church that took on the task at the epidemic's height of "burying the people no one else would," Mr. Bartlett said.

Inspired by Steven Spielberg's Shoah project, a Holocaust memorial, in 2007 Mr. Bartlett built a database on wikispaces.com, the free portal that invites editorial interventions, and by the end of last summer was ready to broadly promote his site. Unlike the AIDS quilt, an intensely elegiac but largely static artifact, the Gay History Wiki is a sprightly free space open to posts and tags, to biographical data added and amended by survivors for their vanished friends.

[snip]

Beyond the novelty of this approach is something equally important, Ms. Schulman of the Act Up Oral History Project suggested: the opportunity to fill in blanks in a haphazard narrative. "The AIDS story has been limited to depictions of doomed individuals," and not impassioned, ad hoc communities, she said.

A conviction that gay men and women and their friends came to one another's assistance during the crisis -- improvising buddy systems, treatment groups, food banks and other survival networks -- fueled Mr. Bartlett's pursuit, as he recreated a mesh of lives that unexpectedly turned out to have meaning for a cohort of young gay men.

"Everyone knows AIDS is a big issue, but for people 25 and under, it's not really a topic of discussion," said Evan Urbania, a 29-year-old marketer who regularly visits the Gay History Wiki. "I'm a social media guy, and the importance of involving the stories of people who have passed on, particularly as a gay man whose development was influenced by people who are 20 or 30 years older, is very powerful to me."

Oh, Chris! I'm tearing up a bit just reading this! Thanks for all you do, honey! xoxoxoxoxooxoxox