It's 30 years since the so-called "gay cancer" swept through San
Francisco's queer community. This new feature-length documentary by
director David Weissman revisits survivors of the 1980s Castro
community and examines the personal testaments of those who lived
through the AIDS epidemic as victims, friends, lovers, activists
and carers.
There seem to be relatively few instances left where it is
socially acceptable for people to cry in each others' company.
Thankfully, the cinema is one of the last bastions of defence for
public tears, which is just as well given the nature of We Were
Here. Funny, heart-aching, tragic and shocking, it is difficult to
sit through this film without shedding a tear for the thousands of
people who died of AIDS in this single community. But if tears are
a measure of success, then We Were Here would fill a bathtub.
Rather being a macabre film about death - of which there was an
unimaginable volume - Weissman's documentary focuses on the
experiences of five individuals living and working in the San
Francisco area during the epidemic who survived the drug trials and
the deaths of friends and spouses.
Guy Clark, an African American who moved to San Francisco during
the late 1970s, provides a humorous and energetic description of
the Castro in the pre-gay years. A flamboyant figure famed for his
dancing abilities, Guy established a flower stall on the Castro
that would eventually end up providing flowers for the funeral of
many of his close friends. Daniel Goldstein is a HIV-positive
sculptor and artist who lived through the deaths of two long term
partners who went on to establish Under One Roof and Visual AID,
two non-profit organisations that helped AIDS sufferers and funded
education programmes about the disease. Ed Wolf, a sensitive,
bearded and romantically shy man remained healthy because of his
inability to have "anonymous" sex and became an eminent counsellor
and support-worker to gay AIDS sufferers. He provided companionship
for the ill and dying, some of whom had lost friends and lovers
already, and who hadn't seen their families in year.
The documentary also features the testaments of Paul Boneberg,
founder of Mobilization Against AIDS, which back in 1984 called on
Ronald Regan's government to block attacks against the civil rights
of the gay community and AIDS sufferers - from public calls to
tattoo the HIV-positive (alarmingly reminiscent Nazi concentration
camps) to proposals of quarantines, forced migrations and the
mandatory closing of gay saunas and hang-outs.
Public hysteria was tangible, but so was the panic felt within
the community itself. A snap shot from 1981 shows a group of men
clustered around a note posted in the window of the Star Pharmacy
warning gay men about the "gay cancer" going around - curiosity,
fear and uncertainty prick at your skin as you watch, pathetic
fallacy weighing down. Yet Boneberg's account and mobilisation of
the gay-community provides some of the most uplifting footage of
the documentary, as lesbians, gays and queer-supporters picketed,
lobbied, marched and protested for their rights of their gay
brothers, despite this pervasive atmosphere of fear.
Beautifully filmed, Weissman's documentary recounts experiences
of these five individuals, but his narrative is not confined to
these five alone. Through the use of archive footage, photographs
and newspaper clippings he extends that dialogue to the thousands
of people who did not survive to recount their own story. This
footage, which punctuates the eye-witness testimonies of Eileen
Glutz (a feminist and nurse working on early AIDS drug-trials),
Goldstein, Boneberg, Wolf and Clark serves to mediate the distance
between the fun-loving queer community that San Francisco was in
1979, and the terror and overwhelming sense of uncertainty felt by
those in the Castro district during the 80s and early 90s.
This footage draws on the personal, the private, the candid and the
tragic. Yet film-clips of the 1983 Candlelit March organised by
Boneberg shows a community united despite its internal
problems.
Stark images of Kaposi's sarcoma lesions and 20-year-old men
suffering from muscle wastage add weight to the harrowing
collection of obituaries that appear, meaning that the film is
sobering in its content. But it is also remarkably candid, and the
testaments of those five people who survived the ordeal and have
made it their life work to educate against AIDS means that you
leave the cinema with a renewed faith in humanity, but also with
the knowledge that we still have a long way to go in our battle
against AIDS.
We Were Here is out in selected cinemas from 25
November. It will be released on DVD from 5 December through
Piccadillo films.
