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Check in with our Student Historians! 

April 10, 2026 By Jordyn Babalola, Archives Outreach and Student Assistant

The Archives’ Student Historian Program provides undergraduate students at the UW-Madison the opportunity to conduct independent research with support from Archives staff. Working closely with a staff member, the Student Historian chooses a research topic that centers on a historically underrepresented campus community. Here are their end-of-year reflections!

In Their Own Words: Aids Activism at UW-Madison

Haleigh Smith

Hello! I am so excited to share an update about my project as a Student Historian in Residence with UW-Archives. From my last update you may have learned that I decided to shift my project towards the topic of AIDS activism on campus. In the last couple of months I have continued the process of refining my research focus and deciding the type of project I would like to complete. Since the beginning of the spring semester I decided I would pursue a project centered around oral histories of activists who worked with the Blue Bus Clinic. This project would continue to evolve–unsurprisingly.

A black-and-white photo of the front porch of a brick house. To the right of the screen door, a large white sign features a cartoon illustration of a bus with various symbols (an umbrella, a female symbol, a male symbol, and a flower). The text on the sign reads "BLUE BUS," followed by a list of services including "diagnosis & treatment of venereal diseases," "pregnancy testing," and "birth control counseling." It lists clinic hours as 7–9:00 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

While continuing my archival research surrounding the subject of AIDS/HIV activism I really grew an interest in learning more about the Blue Bus Clinic, a mobile healthcare unit created by medical students in 1969 hoping to address a lack of addiction and reproductive health information on campus.

As I discussed in my last update, this clinic of course expanded due to the demand for care and would be adapted to join University Health Services. Although I really enjoyed learning about this interesting feature of campus activism and culture, I felt there was a fair amount of scholarship existing profiling folks involved in its creation. As a result, I sort of took a few steps back and decided to analyze the contribution to AIDS support services beyond the Blue Bus. Evidently, this quickly led me to Madison AIDS Support Network (MASN), a mutual aid group founded by a growing group of folks who knew there was a major disparity in holistic mental health support for HIV positive people. I spent a lot of time learning more about the organization’s inner workings and I knew I wanted to do an oral history on someone involved in MASN. As I began reaching out to people who were involved in activism particularly in MASN, I realized just in their initial email responses how incredibly interconnected these organizations were. This sparked the idea to analyze what I saw as common threads of the work people were doing during this crisis: mutual aid, political action, and medical services. Although medical services may seem like the outlier, it became apparent in my discussion with activists that medical services in Madison worked closely with the former two dimensions of protest, as some practitioners themselves identified as activists and saw their care as an act of resistance, especially early in the epidemic. This of course is true of all three categories. Someone working primarily with MASN would also be involved in events with The Ten Percent Society or ACT-UP!

A black-and-white photograph of two young people holding a large, hand-painted white banner in a grassy field. The banner reads in bold, capital letters: "PARADES ARE NOT ENOUGH," with the sub-text "Queer Pride - Flaunt It EVERY DAY!"
Gay Pride Rally
A black-and-white photograph of two men standing outdoors at night, dressed in humorous, oversized baby costumes. Both wear white lace-trimmed bonnets, bibs, and large, white cloth diapers. The man on the left wears thick-rimmed glasses and has a playful, slightly open-mouthed expression. The man on the right holds an open light-colored umbrella and has his left hand raised as if mid-speech. The background is dark and out of focus.
Daycare Protest

I was hard pressed to find someone who was involved in politics but not also involved in forms of mutual aid, the same to that of medical care and politics or mutual aid. These fairly different dimensions of protest were all working uniquely to create a broader support network for people who were loved ones and HIV positive folks themselves, truly addressing a pressing matter at hand. This became evident in all three of my oral histories, as each of these three folks had a sort of “primary” focus like being a doctor, being a politician, and being a mutual-aid-minded community member but still were leaning on or participating in other groups who seemingly existed as “another kind” of activist. Overarchingly, this was such an incredibly enjoyable process to get to speak to activists who all had really interesting ways of “doing” activism. 

Trans and Gender Diverse (TGD) Experiences

By: V Hernandez – White

Hello world, it’s been a while! So many things have changed since my last update, and I’m excited to share my progress. My first blog as Student Historian documented my process of sifting through the LGBTQIA+ Archive, hoping to find untold histories of trans and gender diverse (TGD) students at UW. I found lots of great sources, especially in the Wayne Gathright Collection, covering different TGD events hosted on and off campus throughout the years. It was both surprising and healing to discover just how active the Madison TGD community was during the early 2000s; I never heard anything about it while growing up here. However, as one might expect, materials that center on Gay and Lesbian communities and individuals make up the majority of UW-Madison’s LGBTQIA+ archive. As I continued to dig through countless websites, finding aids, and boxes, I felt like I reached a dead end.

TGD stories and voices have not been well-documented or preserved at UW-Madison, and you would think that, as a trans student myself, this would have been immediately apparent to me. However, in the age of the internet, it’s easy to believe that if you only look hard enough, all the information you could possibly need is out there. This process of both digitally and physically tracking down archives of the TGD student experience at UW-Madison has certainly proved me wrong—but it was far from pointless. It got me fired up to start making history.

This past summer, I worked for the UW-La Crosse Oral History Program and fell in love with this underappreciated model of historical preservation. Written documents are generally considered more trustworthy than the spoken word within the field of history, but this bias has consequences. It has been used to discredit indigenous oral traditions, and largely works to exclude marginalized perspectives from the dominant historical narrative. Oral histories put the past in the hands of the people, revealing new perspectives and fascinating stories that can’t be found in a textbook.

I decided this model was perfect for my project, and fortunately I also work as a House Fellow (Resident Assistant) in the Gender Inclusive Community at Lowell Residence Hall, so I have an amazing pool of potential narrators that I already knew by name. I was so happy when 10 people volunteered, but because every hour of an interview takes 6-8 hours to process, I ended up picking 4 narrators, each with distinct identities and perspectives on the TGD experience. After my first interview, I realized that I might need to add more questions, and try to interject less. As they went on I felt increasingly comfortable and confident, which hopefully also put my narrators at ease.

I’m excited to share what I learned from the interviews during my final presentation, as I’m still currently editing transcripts and writing indexes for each. Thanks for reading!