David Pasquarelli, 36; ACT UP Leader Made Threatening Phone Calls

David Pasquarelli, 36, a leader of the activist group ACT UP San Francisco, who pleaded no contest to making threatening phone calls to public health officials and reporters in a highly publicized case, died March 8 in a Walnut Creek hospital of complications from HIV.

The spate of late-night phone calls began in October 2001 to protest, among other things, San Francisco’s syphilis awareness campaign, which Pasquarelli and fellow AIDS dissident Michael Petrelis felt had inflated statistics on the number of cases among gay and bisexual men in order to collect more federal money.

Last August, Pasquarelli and Petrelis pleaded no contest to misdemeanor counts of making threatening or annoying phone calls and were sentenced to three years of probation, along with mandatory anger-management counseling and writing apologies to their victims.

Pasquarelli was born in Pittsburgh. As a high school student, with a group of gay friends, he was assaulted by a baseball bat-wielding gang that broke the windows and dented the hood of his father’s car. He told the St. Petersburg Times in 1992 that he had lied to his parents and the police about what had happened -- and that his silence had led to his belief in the importance of speaking out.

He was involved with the campus gay and lesbian organization at Pennsylvania State University, where he received a degree in graphic design in 1990. He later co-founded ACT UP Tampa Bay and donated time to the Tampa AIDS Network. He moved to San Francisco in 1993 and joined ACT UP San Francisco, which favors confrontational forms of protest.