Produced and directed by David Weissman, We Were Here (2011) is a documentary that focuses on San Francisco and five individuals who survived the AIDS scourge, the pandemic bursting forth following a brief dormancy in the late 1970s.
HIV-positive artist, Daniel Goldstein; activists Paul Boneberg and Ed Wolf; nurse Eileen Glutzer and florist Guy Clark, by way of anecdotal history, dozens of sweet-faced photographs, and stirring news footage, guide us through the harrowing epic that was the AIDS crisis.
I cannot do justice to the many online websites and articles that describe or review the film...
http://wewereherefilm.com/
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117944432/
http://www.screendaily.com/reviews/latest-reviews/we-were-here/5023666.article
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/sundance-review-deeply-affecting-doc-81845
...but I can tell you how ashamed I am that I knew so little about a plague that, at its American peak, killed 15,000 San Franciscan residents alone, most of them young men.
In the early 1980s (albeit for one year only), my family and I were living in Cranbrook, British Columbia, a town located not all that far from the west coast of California. My chief memories of that time, apart from the personal, were the eruption of Mount St. Helens; Iraq’s invasion of Iran; John Lennon’s death from a gunshot wound; Anwar Sadat’s assassination; Natalie Wood’s death by drowning, and Prince Charles’ engagement and subsequent marriage to Diana Spencer.
How is it possible that apart from two phone calls – one from a friend to tell me that his ex-partner had died in Cape Breton from what was being hailed as ‘gay cancer’; another from my ex-husband, who asked me, nervously, whether or not I had heard of this new virus – I remained oblivious to a contagion that would ultimately rival the Bubonic Plague.
Initially, I wanted to cite Prince Edward Island, where I spent the second half of the seventies and the remainder of the eighties, as the reason I knew so little. After all, two television stations, one poorly written newspaper, and radio that was more religion than rock and roll (The Life of Brian was banned from local theatre screens) didn’t lend itself to a life of erudition.
But I also attended a highly-rated university (UPEI) during the 1980s, and I knew many well-read, intelligent individuals, among them my husband, Don.
So where was my head? What was I thinking about when all of those people were sick and dying? How is it that I did not have a more thorough understanding of a disease that was so ravaging, so cruel, and so final? How is it possible that I, who had so many gay friends, knew next to nothing about this disease that in its early days killed people in as little as one week? How could it be that the ongoing AIDS quilt seems more like a memory from the Guinness Book of World Records than a testament to so many lives lost?
I wonder what was in my head, and why I cannot keep what matters circulating in my brain. I wonder how much my (my my) self-focus is to blame.
I hope that today at least, by writing this down, I will never again find myself as remiss as I have been about the particulars and the broader scope of a disease that desolated individuals, families, communities and entire countries, having killed over a half-million Americans since its onset and persisting in a world where, currently, an estimated 30 million people live with HIV/AIDS, half of them women, and almost three million of them children.
http://www.avert.org/aids-statistics.htm
Our greatest pretences are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there. Eric Hoffer, Passionate State of Mind, 1955
