Op-ed: Telling Our Stories Makes a Difference

In the
summer of 2008, I began the process of creating a documentary about San
Francisco at the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. As one who’d
immigrated to The City in the gay glory years of the 1970s, I’d experienced our
community’s exuberanc, and the subsequent AIDS-induced suffering and response
firsthand.

This was
not something I would ever have imagined myself doing. After completing The
Cockettes with Bill
Weber in 2002, I wasn’t sure I was interested in making another documentary at
all — certainly not one dealing with such traumatizing subject matter. But sometimes ideas can be germinating invisibly within, awaiting the right
catalyst to bring them into blossom. 

In the
late 1980s it had occured to me
that if any of us survived that terrible plague, there would come a time when
we would need to share our stories — for our own healing and to help
subsequent generations understand
and honor what we went through, in all its complexity. Having Holocaust
history in my family, I was well aware of the long silence of many
concentration-camp survivors, who were often unable to find words to do justice
to the horrors they’d suffered, hoping futilely for refuge in forgetfulness.

The
catalyst for We Were Here
came from a boyfriend who was much younger than I, also a filmmaker. Many
times, he’d heard me speak about my years in San Francisco, my stories of loss
and community resilience, and urged me to make a film. My initial
reluctance was quickly supplanted by clarity that this was a film that needed to be made, that it needed to be made by
someone who’d lived through it, that now was the time. And I realized
that I felt personally ready to revisit that painful and complicated history.  

 We
Were Here has taken me
on an incredible journey of rediscovery — of forgotten details of the terrible
suffering, of moments of extraordinary generosity and courage, of residual
guilt and shame for when those qualities were not easily accessible, but,
mostly, of a kind of bewilderment that this whole nightmare actually happened.    

The AIDS
epidemic is the
dominant piece of LGBT history since Stonewall. It’s a mind-boggling, but
inescapable, truth. The political mobilization the epidemic necessitated;
the healing of rifts between lesbians and gay men; the visibility that
AIDS forced upon many who’d been reluctant to come out; and, ultimately, the
increased support and compassion from the nongay world have hugely shaped the
reality in which gays and lesbians now live.