ABSTRACT
One particular source of frustration for Paul was Bavarian AIDS Relief—the umbrella federation of AIDS Relief organizations in Bavaria—which he found bureaucratized and of little help for what he wrestled with in D-Town. Set up in 1995, ironically, it, too, disbanded (in 2002), after a phase of stagnation running parallel to the decline of its small-town and non-professionalized chapters (such as in D-Town). This is particularly interesting as one of its key activities revolved around providing support to those smaller chapters. In this way, it related indirectly to the local conditions for AIDS organizing in rural Bavaria in which, for instance, AIDS Relief D-Town was embedded. It is interesting, therefore, to analyze how these conditions mattered to actors at Bavarian AIDS Relief and which actions they took to address them. Also of particular interest is that they made connections with Bavarian AIDS policies, a topic that was absent from the narratives about AIDS Relief D-Town. The Bavarian state government was the only regional state government in Germany to oppose new public health policies and it tried to implement more coercive measures, albeit with limited success (see Chapter 3). As one interviewee described, this approach later gave way to the tacit implementation of new public health approaches, especially the inclusion of civic organizations, yet with a crucial difference: with one exception (AIDS Relief Munich) civic partners were not recruited from the ranks of AIDS Relief organizations, historically rooted as they are in the gay movement. Instead the state commissioned other, pre-existing general welfare organizations.
