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As Ms. Pelosi announced her retirement, she was celebrated for her long tenure in Washington. But back home, she was remembered for showing up at a terrifying moment when others turned away.

Nancy Pelosi announcing her candidacy for Congress in 1987.Credit...Vince Maggiora/The San Francisco Chronicle, via Getty Images

Nov. 7, 2025, 9:37 p.m. ET

Ed Wolf worked as a nurse at the AIDS ward at San Francisco General Hospital in the late 1980s, a time when young men were arriving at a relentless pace, gaunt and struggling to breathe, only to die days later.

Well-known figures would drop by to tour the ward, their visits tracked by news cameras. But when Nancy Pelosi spent time there, it was different.

No cameras. No entourage.

Ms. Pelosi, the new member of Congress representing San Francisco at the time, asked the nurses if they had what they needed and if any patients were up for a bedside visit. Then she would slip into their rooms alone.

“Early on, it was not seen as a wise or popular thing to do, to champion people with AIDS, of all things,” Mr. Wolf, 74, recalled. “You didn’t want to align yourself too closely, but she didn’t care. We were her constituents, and she went to bat for us over and over and over again.”

He added, “She was fierce before fierce became a cliché.”

Ms. Pelosi, who announced on Thursday her plans to retire from Congress, is known nationally as a Washington leader praised by Democrats for standing up to President Trump and derided by Republicans as a symbol of the radical excesses of the left. But back home, her reputation was shaped by how she stepped forward at the earliest and most terrifying moment of a local crisis and how she fought to help her constituents deal with the AIDS epidemic and fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

The public side of this is by now well-known: How over decades spent in Congress she fought for money for AIDS research and treatment or invited prominent AIDS and gay rights activists to be at her side at the State of the Union address and other events. But much of it took place away from the public eye. It’s those moments many of her gay constituents in San Francisco talk about as she approaches the end of her congressional career.

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Ms. Pelosi at the San Francisco Pride Parade in 2022.Credit...Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

“Things were very dark — people were dying every day,” said Mike Smith, who worked with Ms. Pelosi to display the AIDS Memorial Quilt. “Our first straight female ally by far was Nancy.”

Mr. Smith experienced that firsthand, just months after she had been seated in Congress in 1987. He and Cleve Jones, a longtime gay-rights advocate, were struggling to secure federal approval to display a quilt commemorating the people who had died of AIDS on the National Mall.

Mr. Smith had 1,920 quilt panels, each one representing someone who had fallen to the virus. He had scores of volunteers eager to help unfurl them on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., during a planned march on Oct. 11, 1987.

But six weeks before the event, the Reagan administration was “dead set against having symbols of people who had died of AIDS on their front lawn,” Mr. Smith recalled. He went to Ms. Pelosi, who secured a meeting on Capitol Hill with National Park Service officials late that August. One of the federal officials told her it was impossible: The quilt would kill the grass.

“Nancy raised an eyebrow,” Mr. Smith, 65, said. “‘You can fluff the quilt every 30 minutes, can’t you boys?’”

The organizers’ response? “‘Oh yes, oh yes, ma’am!’” he recalled with a laugh.

The Reagan administration gave in. The quilt was displayed. No fluffing took place. And it grew to become a symbol of the AIDS crisis and is now made up of 50,000 panels and part of the archives at the Library of Congress.

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The AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington, D.C., in 1987.Credit...Jean-Louis Atlan/Sygma, via Getty Images

Back in San Francisco, Ms. Pelosi experienced the tragedy as she traveled the city on weekends, riding the grim funeral and memorial circuit for young gay men who died of the disease before effective treatments started in the early 1990s.

“She had a network of friends who died early in the epidemic,” said Steve Morin, who was conducting AIDS research and advising the San Francisco Department of Health at the time. When he met Ms. Pelosi, she asked him to come work for her in Washington as an adviser on AIDS issues.

“It was intense,” said Mr. Morin, now a professor emeritus in medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “It wasn’t unusual for us to go to two memorial services back-to-back on Saturday with young people, people who knew her.”

Ms. Pelosi did not just pressure the Reagan administration to display the AIDS memorial quilt — she personally sewed a panel to honor Susie Piracci Roggio, a flower girl at her wedding, who died of AIDS in 1986.

“Susie died of AIDS, but not before becoming a champion fighting against the disease in schools, and colleges, and the rest,” Ms. Pelosi said at an International AIDS Conference in 2012. “My patch in the AIDS quilt was stitched in her memory.”

Another square, sewn by someone else, honors Scott Douglass, a former aide of Ms. Pelosi’s, who died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 34.

Her decision to identify herself so powerfully with a deadly disease that at the time was likened to a plague baffled her colleagues from her earliest days in Congress. In her very first speech in June 1987, she declared that “we must take the leadership, of course, in the crisis of AIDS.” Here was a Catholic mother of five children, who was referred to in the society pages of The San Francisco Chronicle as Mrs. Paul Pelosi, embracing a fight against a deadly virus linked to sexual behavior among gay men and intravenous drug use.

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The International Lesbian & Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco in 1988.Credit...Getty Images

Her introductory speech to Congress “went directly to my heart,” said Mark Leno, a small-business owner and a future elected official in San Francisco whose partner would die of the disease. “It was a revolutionary statement and act on her part.”

To live in San Francisco in that era was to live on the front lines of a viral epidemic that was killing thousands of young men, gutting the gay and lesbian culture that had helped define an extraordinary American city. The Bay Area Reporter, one of the country’s oldest L.G.B.T.Q. newspapers, was filled with obituaries. Local gay bars posted photos on cork boards chronicling that week’s dead.

Ms. Pelosi came to Congress in 1987 in a special election to fill a vacancy created by the death of Representative Sala Burton, winning the Democratic nomination in a crowded field that included Harry Britt, a gay member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. From a political perspective, she needed to quickly grasp the mantle of gay issues to reassure L.G.B.T.Q. voters who were distressed over Mr. Britt’s defeat.

Tom Ammiano, a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who is gay, went to Ms. Pelosi for support building a suicide barrier at Golden Gate Bridge, which people with AIDS were using to take their own lives before there was any effective treatment. It took years, he said, but with her backing, the barrier was finally installed.

“She saw people die around her — some were her supporters,” he said, adding, “The sensibility of moderate Democrats and the Beltway crowd was always: ‘They deserve it. Let’s not endorse this quote lifestyle.’ But not Nancy Pelosi.”

She was like that through many of her years in Congress. She stepped in when conservative Republican senators, led by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, tried to block the appointment by President Bill Clinton of Roberta Achtenberg, a civil rights lawyer and a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, as an assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Mr. Helms, who died in 2008, called Ms. Achtenberg a “militantly activist lesbian.”

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Ms. Pelosi speaks on the 40th anniversary of the AIDS pandemic in San Francisco in 2021.Credit...Josh Edelson/Associated Press

“She went out of her way to help me,” said Ms. Achtenberg, who became the first openly L.G.B.T.Q. presidential nominee confirmed by the Senate.

But Ms. Pelosi began her political career in San Francisco, and anyone looking for a tribute to what she brought to the city — and to a community under siege — need look no further than Golden Gate Park.

There, on the east side of the park, is the AIDS Memorial Grove, a 10-acre patch of dogwood and redwoods that stands in memory of the tragedy that took so many lives. She helped convince Congress to fund the grove, the country’s only national memorial to commemorate those who died of the disease.

In the days before construction began, the representative from the Fifth Congressional District was there, wearing work gloves and weeding the overgrown patch of the park, helping turn it into what it is today.

Ms. Pelosi still visits regularly, sometimes gardening and planting trees. Alongside the grove runs a street, bustling with joggers, skateboarders, bicyclists and, no doubt, the occasional mourner. It’s called Nancy Pelosi Drive.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

Adam Nagourney is a Times reporter covering cultural, government and political stories in New York and California.

Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.

Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.

Laurel Rosenhall is a Sacramento-based reporter covering California politics and government for The Times.

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