description, argument, collective history, techno-biography
Aids Info Special and SF Chronicle
Since there would be so much 'action' in San Francisco, both in the streets with ACT NOW and in the formal Conference, and the time available for people to report was very limited, I decided to send some people from Amsterdam to San Francisco and be our 'social interface'. They would create "Radio Paradiso" as we called it: Jo van der Spek, who was well-known in Amsterdam and worked for several local Amsterdam radio stations could make some free time and Paul Verstraeten, the organizer of the gay and lesbian film festival in Amsterdam was already going to attend a film festival in SF and agreed to help us out as well. Radio Paradiso broadcast 4 times per day/night : two Aids Info Specials and two ACT NOW reports, which were named the SF Chronicle.(see appendix 5)
The Aids Info Specials were made at the Marriott Hotel where the VI International Conference on AIDS was taking place. It was attended by several Dutch delegates and contributors to the conference from other regions in the world, including the USA, participated. The SF Chronicles were made at the ACT NOW offices and involved many guests from ACT UP. The San Francisco 69 hours was also covered in the SF Chronicle. The edit group in Paradiso provided written reports of all this and posted them on the 0+Network. Several Radio Paradiso programmes were published in the proceedings. They were informative and engaging, with interesting guests discussing the extremes of what was happening.
With hindsight I am surprised that we did not broadcast this programme in Amsterdam as there was easy access to radio via several radio stations. In the Personal Folders I have found nothing that points to any effort to have the Radio Paradiso programmes broadcast. This is even more of a pity because the radio broadcasts in Paradiso did not enjoy the success I had anticipated, even though they were good programmes. The atmosphere in Paradiso was very diffuse, many things were taking place at the same time, even when there was an atmosphere of silence. "Sometimes debates were disrupted by annoying public phone conversations with San Francisco, which did not add anything new", stated the two chairs of the closing debate in their article on the 0+Ball for a Dutch gay intellectual magazine (Duyvendak & Schutte 1990).