We Were Here

I was 18 years old when I went to Greenwich Village in 1985 to attend school at NYU. Before that, I had never been acquainted with the gay community and only knew closeted and frustrated gay people. My eyes were opened when I got there, in a wonderful way. But AIDS had beat me there and I remember the profound fear and controversy that was unfolding at the time.

This movie made me think of those days like I hadn't for years. It is an incredible, moving story which shows how much of a Holocaust the epidemic was. It is heartbreaking and poignant, with personal stories and compassion shown by the individuals involved which are heroic and inspiring.

I found this movie to be an important contribution to a period of American History that musn't be forgotten. I found myself shocked all over again by how widespread and devastating the epidemic was, how it was ignored and feared by a homophobic nation. I wonder how different our world might be today if we hadn't lost so many wonderful, creative young people to this plague?

AIDS survival has come a long way, but the disease is not gone. People really should rent this movie, it's like lighting a memorial candle of sorts. You will remember someone who is gone that touched your life in a special way.

I went to see "We Were Here" today at the Cinéma-Village theater in New York. I was afraid it would disappear before I got the chance to see it. This movie was recommended by a friend who is a producer at KQED in San Francisco as being the ultimate resource on San Francisco during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Along with Randy Shilts's seminal book, "And the Band Played on," he was certainly right.

One great element of "We Were Here" is that it gives several quite different perspectives on what the HIV epidemic in San Francisco was like at that time: Ed, the misfit who found his place in the gay community by volunteering with people with AIDS early in the epidemic; Daniel, the Jewish artist who felt he had found his true family among San Francisco's gay men and then lost them all within a few painful years; Paul, the high-profile political activist; Guy, the big-hearted, philosophical black flower vendor; and Eileen, the lesbian nurse who served at ground zero of the epidemic and stuck with it with grit and compassion to the end.

Like Ed, I didn't fit in well in the "gay community" during my years in San Francisco. So disconnected was I that I did not know a lot of what was happening in the early and mid-1980s, although I remember Guy the florist, who always had a smile for every passerby on the street corner where he worked, and I remember James Harning, a beautiful young man who died a hard death in 1992. "We Were Here" helped me understand much of what was going on all around me in those days. It will do the same for others who weren't "there," for reasons of either age or geography, and it will be a moving, bittersweet reminder for those who did survive those difficult years in San Francisco.

Beautiful documentary gamely attempts to tread through the chaotic AIDS crisis of the 1980s using only a handful of survivors as commentators. Co-directors David Weissman and Bill Weber pull it off, however, and "We Were Here" is surprisingly absorbing and moving as a result. The celebration of sexual freedom for homosexual men in the 1970s ground to a halt at the end of the decade by what was initially being referred to on the street as the Gay Cancer. These wonderful men who survived to tell their individual, intimate stories are marvelous to listen to, painting a portrait of an era that was, by turns, frightening and challenging, yet one that brought out a number of true heroes. ***1/2 from ****

I didn't know my eyes could produce this many tears. It's the most effective talking-heads documentary I've ever seen. Forget the cloying trash that they make today about the AIDS epidemic. This is the real deal.

This is a really fine piece of work.

The BBC screened it on BBC4 in Febrary 2012 and made it available via i-Player also.

Anyone who lived in the Bay Area during the eighties will be moved, informed and educated by this documentary. As a young gay geek in San Francisco in those years, I was overwhelmed by the deaths and suffering I saw and often could not make sense of it. This documentary really helps.

The tales of the attacks on civil liberties by the bigots, and the personal tales were emotive and powerful.

Now I salute those survivors and hope their stories will stimulate others in future onslaughts.