Bill Bahlman

Background: Bill is a 37 year old white gay man who grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Starting at age 15,  Bill wrote a music column called “The World of Rock” for some neighborhood newspapers in Brooklyn and Staten Island. He started having sexual encounters with men as a teenager, and came into his own as a gay man after high school when he moved to the Upper West Side. He got very involved in Gay Activists Alliance in the early 1970s, with which he did speaking engagements, zaps, and other activism. GAA also had dances, which Bill helped organize. In the early 1980s, Bill started DJing at punk/new wave clubs, like Club Hurrah and the Anvil. Through Vito Russo, who he knew from GAA, Bill got involved with GLAAD, and met Marty Robinson, who was the chair of GLAAD’s Swift and Terrible Retribution Committee. That committee split off from GLAAD and formed the Lavender Hill Mob in 1986, which was a small group doing direct action activism on AIDS. When ACT UP formed, most of the members of the Lavender Hill Mob joined. 

Groups/friends at the meeting: Lavender Hill Mob

Specific tasks at the March 13, 1989 meeting: Bill is on the agenda to discuss that his friend and fellow ACT UPer Steve Zabel was found murdered in his own apartment on March 1. Bill was one of the people who discovered Steve’s body. Steve was 40 and was an amateur photographer who had documented many gay events and ACT UP actions. As far as anyone knows, the police have made no progress in finding the murderer. Bill will ask for suggestions from the Floor about how to put pressure on the police. 

Additional information: https://actuporalhistory.org/numerical-interviews/112-bill-bahlman

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