Every year, at least one film in the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival garners so much audience support and community spirit that I'm reminded not only of why I love film but also why I'm grateful to be a part of this eccentric and beautiful multi-lettered community. This year, one of those films was We Were Here: Voices from the AIDS Years in San Francisco, which previewed yesterday to a full house at the Castro Theater.
This topic, with its galaxy-sized weight, can get overwhelming in the blink of an eye, so We Were Here tackles it slowly, building on a brief visual history of the burgeoning post-Stonewall gay community in San Francisco, and settling into interviews with just five well-chosen, eloquent individuals who survived the '80s and have come out with a goldmine of wisdom to share.
And to me, that's the greatest gift of this film. Sure we've acquired medical knowledge that can help with prevention—and certainly, that knowledge needs to be deepened and shared until HIV can be sent backstage to join polio and the bubonic plague—but more than medical knowledge, the film seems to ask, what wisdom do we have to share? What did the AIDS crisis teach people that can now be passed on to the next generation of queer men, and, more broadly, to the culture as a whole? If there is any meaning or utility to be had from all these horrific deaths—deaths that glutted the obitiuaries sections of gay newspapers worldwide for well over a decade—that usefulness has to be more than simply teaching young men: "Wear a condom" and "Don't do what we did" (the only messages I received when I first came out and began visiting the war-torn but reemerging Castro scene of the early 1990s).
Wisdom, more than anything, is what we need to heal—and to conquer the virus. And this film has more wisdom than just about any I've ever seen. Wisdom about loving ourselves enough to value our own lives as well as the lives and well-beings of our partners. Wisdom about queer men and women working through their differences and even taking care of each other. Wisdom about valuing our families of choice at least as much as we're taught to value married couples and nuclear families. Wisdom about knowing how and when to fight, and when to let go. Wisdom about how to turn anger into action. Wisdom about living with grief and loss, and the love and hope that seem to survive and return even after and within the worst of circumstances.
I'm grateful that I was there yesterday at the Castro Theater, but I hope We Were Here reaches a much wider, worldwide audience, so that the healing and dialogue can continue.
If you want to learn more about We Were Here, or if you want to help it reach more people, please contact David Weissman through the film's website, wewereherefilm.com.
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