Review: "We Were Here" Tells Affecting, Personal Story of HIV/AIDS in San Francisco

Are we now far enough into the HIV/AIDS epidemic that we can finally try to make sense of what the event meant for the GLBT community, at least in its early years? Given the degree of the tragedy involved and its far-reaching implications, maybe not.

A new documentary, We Were Here, opening February 25th at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, wisely avoids making sweeping generalizations, instead choosing to tell the intimate, personal stories of five San Franciscans who lived at the epicenter of the epidemic.

The movie's director, David Weissman, chose shrewdly in his interview subjects: all are articulate, thoughtful, and appealing with interesting stories to tell.

Each came to San Francisco in the 1970s to share in its sense of openness and possibility. Guy is a former dancer who became a florist, seeing the many funerals that beset the city up close. Paul is a self-described "crazy dreamer" who, after a period of aimlessness, became a politician because of the need that HIV/AIDS inspired. Eileen is a feminist who worked in AIDS hospices. And Ed, perhaps the most appealing of the bunch, is a quirky misfit who, ironically, never felt he fit in even in a city of eccentrics like San Francisco ("I was terrible at anonymous sex") until the city provided him with a purpose — namely, AIDS charity work.

Meanwhile, Daniel, an affable artist, may have some of the most chilling stories: infected with HIV himself, he lost two partners to AIDS, including one in an early drug trial that he quickly bowed out of because he couldn't handle effects; all 80 other people in the trial quickly died, including his partner.

There's no denying that HIV/AIDS hit San Francisco, once a city of freedom and liberation, extremely hard. Paul, who clearly knows his facts, tell us that by 1985, when the first HIV test was widely available, fifty percent of the city's gay male population were already infected. (10% were infected by 1979, he says, before anyone even knew the disease existed, and 20% were infected by 1981, when doctors first became aware of it.)

The documentary tells the well-known history of AIDS in San Francisco — the sexually hedonistic 70s, the battles over the closure of the bathhouses and the political infighting in the 80s, and the essential rise of an army of lesbian volunteers to help their gay "brothers."

But the story is told on the personal level: how individuals were affected, what they felt and experienced. Diatribes against the Reagan administration are one thing, but they can't compare to Ed's chilling anecdote about hearing the fathers of young men with AIDS tell him, a volunteer they didn't know was gay himself, that they were more upset to learn their son was a "fag" than to hear he'd be dead in a matter of months.

In other words, while most HIV/AIDS documentaries are angry (with very good reason), this one, perhaps reflecting some chronological distance, is more wistful and, ultimately, even hopeful. Guy, who runs a flower stand on a street-corner, tells how he knew the new anti-viral medications were finally working: after watching countless friends wither and die, he noted one man who seemed to be growing stronger each time he saw him, from a wheelchair, to a cane, to not having an eye-patch anymore, to, finally, riding a bike as he'd done twenty years earlier.

Much like the Holocaust, HIV/AIDS is such an emotional subject that it's genuinely difficult to judge or compare the "artistic" merit of documentaries on the subject. Does We Were Here have the timeless brilliance of Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt or the raw intimacy of Silverlake Life: The View From Here?

Maybe not, but in the film, five San Franciscans tell us what HIV/AIDS meant, and still means, to them. It's absolutely worth listening to what they have to say.