Film: We Were Here

Stephanie Taylor

Last night, while browsing iPlayer, a thumbnail caught my eye. It was a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. In a nanosecond I read the words “San Francisco”, a place as close to my heart as close can be. An incredibly vibrant city that oozes positivity and can-do attitudes; the month I stayed there I had the hugest grin permanently strapped across my face.

So it was with this hook that I found myself watching ‘San Francisco’s Year Zero: We Were Here’. A poignant retrospective film, looking at the very beginning of the AIDS pandemic, when no one knew or could even envisage the devastation that would very quickly tear through the heart of a thriving gay community.

It’s the Seventies. People looking for life come to live it in San Francisco. The Castro is the nucleus of gay and civil rights and its motto is: Gay is good! Sex is good! Having lots of gay sex is good! (Still true today!) And they were having a whale of a liberated time. One interviewee, Ed Wolf, was a little straighter in his approach, explaining that going from “nought to sixty wasn’t really his thing” – and quite possibly his saviour – as he liked to ask a guy his name first, and ask him how he was doing, have a bit of chat and that.

It was Ed who told an anecdote which made a big impact on him back in the day, and made a big impact on me yesterday. He noticed by chance, in the pharmacy window, a piece of paper where a man had taken three pictures of himself, one of the inside of his mouth, showing three red blotches, one of his torso covered with the same red blotches and another picture. He’d written a warning saying “there’s something out there”, or something to that effect. Ed was on his way to the cinema to meet a friend who’d been complaining of a red blotch on his eyeball which was leaving eye doctors baffled. Ed’s friend soon died.

The stories these men tell are affecting because you’re there with them during that time. Something was happening, something was amongst them, breeding, and they didn’t know it was there. And then they didn’t know what was happening or why. And then they couldn’t contain it, slow it down or even identify it. They speak of how people they would see every day would simply be no more. They would see regular cyclists walking with a cane, and then be in a wheelchair and then not there at all.

Automatically trying to identify it with something else in order to make sense and comprehend the hugeness of it all, I went with a Hollywood thriller: the oft-used plotline of something evil lurking within, unnoticed, and striking from the inside, hidden, nameless. Healthy, sporty young men being brought down with startling ferocity is too staggering to grasp. Mankind, nature’s strongest invention, was being pulled down from inside its core and there was nothing anyone could do about it. So it went on, and now, 30 years later, we’re ever closer to that happy ending: a vaccination. A cure.

David Weissman’s film is an honourable tribute to those who died, to those who gave their bodies to research, and to those who had the courage to remain unfazed in the face of stigma and fear and who worked tirelessly to develop and make available treatments. It is very difficult to put oneself in the position of these individuals who fought against AIDS and lived to tell the tale. I questioned and congratulated the spirit of one gentleman, Daniel Goldstein, who not only had lost his long-term partners, the love of his life and countless friends; he too was infected and suffering. And I had to wonder, to be surrounded with all of that pain, and sadness and grief, surely that alone is enough to send anyone over the edge? Let alone battle the disease, too, and survive? This man’s strength of spirit is extraordinary, symbolising the core resonance of this film and the ongoing battle against AIDS.

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