Don Hall (1949 - September 2, 1993)

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Don Hall was an American songwriter. He organized Ads Against AIDS, which encouraged print and broadcast campaigns about the disease.

Don Hall worked primarily as a studio musician, writing and recording songs for commercials. In the 1980s he also worked as a studio vocalist on many industrials and corporate projects with composer-writer-producer Mary Moreno.

His last project, completed shortly before his death and still unreleased, was a recording of songs for children.

He lived with his companion, Robert Starr, in Manhattan and Bellport, Long Island.

In 1986 Hall and a group of friends in Bellport founded People Taking Action Against AIDS, an all-volunteer organization that by the time of his death had raised $10 million for AIDS research, mainly through an annual event on Long Island. In 1987 the group raised over $120,000 at a single event – an auction of work donated by well-known artists.

Projects funded by People Taking Action Against AIDS included hot meals, hospital equipment not covered by Federal grants, malpractice insurance for rural volunteer nurses, an AIDS support center in rural Georgia, the Children's AIDS Foundation, Friends of Clinical Care Center, the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, the Long Island Association for AIDS Care, and New York's Community Research Initiative.


AIDS Quilt



In 1990, as part of the group’s work, Hall organized Ads Against AIDS, signing up advertising agencies to create print and broadcasting campaigns about the epidemic.

Don Hall died of AIDS in New York at the age of 44 on September 2, 1993.

Source: http://www.artistswithaids.org/artforms/music/catalogue/halld.html

Further Readings:

Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS by Deborah B. Gould
Paperback: 536 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (December 15, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0226305309
ISBN-13: 978-0226305301
Amazon: Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS

In the late 1980s, after a decade spent engaged in more routine interest-group politics, thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to the AIDS crisis by defiantly and dramatically taking to the streets. But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more—even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author’s time as a member of the organization, Moving Politics is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion.

Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. From anger to hope, pride to shame, and solidarity to despair, feelings played a significant part in ACT UP’s provocative style of protest, which included raucous demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of street theater. Detailing the movement’s public triumphs and private setbacks, Moving Politics is the definitive account of ACT UP’s origin, development, and decline as well as a searching look at the role of emotion in contentious politics.