Although all eyes and ears were on the blockbuster Contagion this weekend, another film featuring an epidemic opened in New York City on Friday. We Were Here chronicles San Francisco’s gay community in the 1980s and 1990s as it was engulfed by the very real epidemic of AIDS. Director David Weissman’s time-traveling documentary traces the disease from its surprising emergence and examines the effect it had on a community that ultimately mobilized to hasten medical treatment.
“None of my friends are around from the beginning,” says Daniel Goldstein, an HIV-positive sculptor and one of the documentary’s storytellers, in the film. “So I want to tell their story as much as I want to tell my story.”
Goldstein is one of five voices that narrate the film, all of whom lived through the epidemic in San Francisco. Goldstein’s story is perhaps the most striking for its emotional poignancy — he describes losing two partners to AIDS within a decade — but each narrator dictates a distinct angle. The storytellers embrace neither self-pity nor self-promotion, and their crisp recollections immerse the audience into their community.
Only one of the five voices is a woman. Eileen Glutzer was a nurse at San Francisco General Hospital, where she was one of the first to volunteer in the famed ‘5a’ HIV ward when “there was no name for [the infection],” she says. Men began appearing in the clinic with rare diseases such as Kaposi’s sarcoma or pneumocystic pneumonia, and “they were dead ten days later,” Glutzer says.
Glutzer was not only a nurse, but organized clinical trials with Quest Clinical Research, which still runs HIV trials today. “The reason that you wanted to do research back then is because there was nothing,” she says in the documentary, “and all you were doing was helping people die.”
But not all the trials were successful. Goldstein’s first partner, Steve, was an immunologist at University of California, San Francisco under Jay Levy, who discovered the virus in 1983. When researchers launched a clinical trial testing suramin, a drug used to treat the tropical disease sleeping sickness and one of the first compounds tried against HIV, Goldstein and his partner signed up. Goldstein dropped out early because he couldn’t handle the side effects — but the drug did nothing to save the participants who remained in the trial. “Everybody in that study died except for me because I was a wuss,” he says. “Steve was 35.”
This is not the only story that will bring you to tears during the film. Nonetheless, We Were Here manages to deliver a perspective of hope: Despite the fact that the individuals in the film could see their community collapsing around them, these gay men worked hard, not to save themselves, but to save one another. They registered for clinical trials with unknown outcomes and they petitioned policymakers and drug companies, even while they themselves were dying.
“It’s not heroic,” insists Goldstein in the film. “You just do it.”
We Were Here is showing in US cities throughout the fall, and internationally at film centers. You can watch the trailer here.