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IN SAN FRANCISCO, A WEEK WITHOUT AIDS OBITS

The news in the Bay Area Reporter this week was the lack of news. For the first time in more than 17 years, the San Francisco gay weekly contained no obituaries of AIDS victims. As of Friday, no AIDS death notic es had arrived at the newspaper for almost a week and a half. "It's nice to pick up the paper and not read about your friends dying," Tom Hayer said Friday as he sat in a coffee shop in San Francisco's largely gay Castro district. Over the years the cours e of the AIDS epidemic could be traced in the pages of the Bay Area Reporter.

During the explosion of AIDS cases in the mid 1980s, the paper averaged a dozen obits a week, and they covered two or three pages. One week there were 31 obituaries. Loved ones write the profiles and hand deliver or mail them to the Reporter, which at one point was getting so many novella-length obits that by 1992 readers were limited to 200 words per submission. The first noticeable drop in obits began two years ago with the in troduction of protease inhibitors and other powerful AIDS drugs that subdue the virus.

"No obits!" screamed this week's front-page headline, which was accompanied by a story and an editorial titled "Death Takes a Holiday." Editors at the newspaper greeted the news with cautious delight. "It doesn't mean that there is no AIDS," news editor Mike Salinas said. "What it does mean is that people with AIDS are living longer and that we're smarter about the human immune system."

It also doesn't mean that no one died of AIDS-related complications in the San Francisco Bay area this month. The city department of public health's latest figures showed 35 deaths attributable to AIDS in July--compared with an average of more than 150 deaths a month during the peak year of 1992--and some AIDS deaths have almost certainly occurred in August too.