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In the United States, lapel pins have a long history of making a statement. Political pins grew in popularity during the Civil War, when Union soldiers wore pins with political symbols or President Lincoln’s portrait.

It’s not surprising, then, that the LGBTQ+ community has long used pins to express opinions, support political candidates, and more. Each pin tells a story from a specific time; it provides information about events that happened and brings to light issues faced. The Lesbian Herstory Archives has an extensive LGBTQ+ pin/button collection that is completely digitized, and I highly recommend you check it out.

Today, I want to talk about a few of the many AIDS-related pins in the collection, looking at what they can tell us about the political, healthcare, and cultural landscape in which they were created.

SILENCE=DEATH (SILENCIO=MUERTE in Spanish) was an incredibly important campaign by the art collective made up of six gay men—Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás. In 1987, they wanted to spread the word about the AIDS epidemic, and they did so with the SILENCE=DEATH poster. Overnight, the men put up over 3,000 copies of the poster all over the city, wherever it would attract people’s attention.

Finkelstein later explained that the goal was “to prompt the LGBTQ community to organize politically around AIDS and to imply to anyone outside the community that we already were. In order to speak simultaneously to multiple audiences, the poster would need to be densely coded.”

One of the biggest ‘codes’ in the poster was the pink triangle, a nod to the Holocaust when Nazis put colored triangle patches on prisoners’ clothing to identify their alleged offense. Homosexual men were given pink triangles.

The collective of men who created the poster immediately made the design available to ACT UP, which became the most visible organization fighting AIDS. ACT UP emerged in 1987, around the time the poster was created, and the poster was immediately used in various direct actions, including at the protest at the FDA.

While the design started as a poster, as it was used more with ACT UP, it ended up on banners (as seen in the above photo) and pins, both in English and in Spanish.

This next button once again leans into the pink triangle imagery, which is a nod both to the SILENCE=DEATH campaign as well as the Holocaust. Arrests at protests and direct actions related to AIDS were incredibly common, especially with ACT UP.

In fact, the first demonstration ACT UP held was in 1987 at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway in New York City. It was a busy area, and the 250 protestors sought to disrupt as many people as possible during rush hour. Some protestors held signs, some even lay in the street—all had the same goal of bringing government and corporate action to the AIDS crisis. When all was said and done, 17 people were arrested.

Just a year later, on the first anniversary of the 1987 protest, 1,000 people came together to protest government and pharmaceutical company inaction. This time, 111 people were arrested.

These are just two instances of many where individuals were arrested protesting the government and corporate inaction regarding the AIDS crisis. This button tells that story, and the fact that it was created also suggests that people likely wore these buttons as a badge of honor. The arrests weren’t something to hide or be ashamed of, but rather something that happened while fighting injustice.

Once again, this pin is a nod to the pink triangle, and the black background with this text is a nod to the SILENCE=DEATH poster. Ortez Alderson was an incredible activist who first became involved in gay activism in 1969 with Chicago’s Gay Liberation Front. He was involved in so many incredible things, including helping to organize the People of Color AIDS Conference.

When ACT UP was formed, he joined and helped organize various sit-ins and demonstrations. As part of the 1987 March on Washington, he was arrested at the sit-in at the Supreme Court. Tragically, in 1990, he died from complications related to AIDS.

Next, we are straying away from the SILENCE=DEATH imagery but still sticking with ACT UP. This time, this pin is from ACT UP San Francisco. “Money for AIDS, not for war” was written on a banner at Grand Central Station in New York as part of ACT UP’s 1991 ‘Day of Desperation.’ The protests were staged because President George HW Bush was spending an immense amount of money on the Gulf War, but at the same time claimed there were no funds to increase support for the AIDS programs. Since the Day of Desperation, “money for AIDS, not for war” has continued to be used by ACT UP, including in a 2003 update from ACT UP.

This 1990 button was created by GMHC (formerly Gay Men’s Health Crisis) and speaks to the urgent push for comprehensive sex education that highlighted the crisis of HIV/AIDS. GMHC’s 1989/1990 annual report provides more insight into its programs.

It s”As the world’s largest non-governmental distributor of AIDS information, GMHC’s Education Department uses many avenues to reach individuals with life-saving information: publications, videos, safer sex workshops, outreach into communities of color, information tables on city streets, condom and safer sex guideline distribution to bars and clubs, and educational programs for mental health professionals and employers. These are but some of the ways by which GMHC furnishes people with the facts about AIDS.”

The final button I’d like to highlight is this one from the PWA Coalition. The PWA Coalition existed from 1985 to 1993, and according to the New York Public Library Archives, “[It was] founded in New York City in 1985 by nine individuals, all of whom had contracted AIDS. They hoped to combat the atmosphere of ignorance, fear, and hostility that had accompanied the development of the disease from its onset. They adopted the acronyms PWA for People with AIDS and PWARC for People with AIDS Related Complex to replace what they regarded as pejorative stereotypes commonly employed by the mass media: victims, sufferers, and patients.” In this context, the very loving message of the button makes sense, as they sought to change public viewpoints and stereotypes.

There are a lot of ways to explore history, and a lot of ways to talk about the AIDS crisis and its ongoing devastating impacts. One such way is to look at objects and see what they can tell us about the larger history they’re part of, and that’s what we’ve done on a small scale today.

All buttons from the Lesbian Herstory Archives collection