How a 1980s AIDS Support Group Changed The Internet Forever
As the AIDS epidemic spread, Ben Gardiner took to the nascent internet — and shaped the way we share health information online
Ben Gardiner was a larger-than-life mainstay of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood in the 1980s. He had wavy white hair, big eyebrows, and a bushy beard that took Santa Claus to task. He rarely left the house without his signature pair of coveralls. His voice boomed; when he entered a room, “he was a presence,” his friend Paul Boneberg told OneZero.
Gardiner joined just about every gay organization in the city, organizing mailing lists, hosting meetings, and leading marches. He seemed to work full-time as an activist, piecing together an income through freelance side projects. In a gay liberation movement populated largely by people in their twenties and thirties, Gardiner — who turned 60 in 1981 — took on the role of elder statesman.
He was also a techie. Gardiner had been fascinated by computers since at least the 1970s, according to Boneberg. He owned a rickety Osborn 1, one of the first commercially available computers, plus a slew of other early tech. When gay activists piled into Gardiner’s apartment for meetings, they’d find half of the room cluttered with computer equipment.
