finding
their voices in a time of growing silence
by Douglas Messerli
David Weissman and Bill Weber (directors) We Were Here / 2011 [documentary]
For several months now, I have been
attempting to figure out why I simply couldn’t finish my essay on David Weissman
and Bill Weber’s excellent documentary film The Cockettes. I had
previously written about several short films of Weissman and I truly loved the 2002
documentary, so what was holding me up?
The other week, after viewing his 2011 documentary, We Were Here
about the HIV/AIDS crisis in San Francisco, again as fine a piece of historical
story-telling as you could imagine about a subject very close to my heart (and
about which I have long imagined I might write a separate book), I suddenly
clearly perceived what had been holding me up.
Weissman’s films were so carefully edited and rhythmed, so fully
informative not just about their particular subjects but about how the city
itself affected the particular subject, in the first case a rag-tag gay
performance group, and in the second film how a hand-full of young AIDS workers
experienced and contributed to the community so devastated by disease and
national malaise, that it seemed almost impossible to express the significance
of the films without almost recreating them, line by line, on the printed
page—quite impossible of course. To do them justice one would have to
intersplice the various narrations that each film provides and simultaneously
be fully cognizant of the history of San Francisco, a city which despite it’s
beauty has never quite attracted me for the very reasons—the tightness of
community relationships and the almost hippie-like sense of communal interconnectedness
with which I feel most uncomfortable. I have a wild-card type of personality
that works better in a large metropolitan landscape that permits intense
cultural experiences while yet permitting me to move apart from a group when
necessary. Yet it is the very constancy of the that communal sensibility that provide
Weissman’s works with such a powerful voice.
His
works in both their subject and structure are based on communal interaction,
and to achieve that perhaps you need be totally at home in such a space. How
could I, always the outsider’s outsider—I even left the university, in part,
for its suffocating communal restraints—be expected to even sufficiently
explain what made these documentaries so very special? San Francisco is really
a fairly sizeable city with a small town sensibility, which, having grown up in
small towns, I still abhor. I need a city full of various cultures into which I
can dive for intellectual stimulation but afterwards be able to disappear, to
make my own personal meaning of those experiences without friends breathing
down my neck. I guess you might describe me as a gregarious loner, while
Weissman’s characters live night and day in each other’s beds. There is a
reason why San Franciscans and Los Angelenos often react to one another like
oil and water.
In short, although I well recognize the value and strengths of such an
intense sense of community, it is personally alien and difficult for me to
fully convey. And now that I have finally recognized my limitations, perhaps I
can step back and demonstrate to the reader just how substantial Weissman’s
contributions truly are.
We Were Here views the experiences of what was first called “the
gay disease” from the perspective of five gay and lesbian individuals who encountered
and personally experienced the sudden onslaught of HIV/AIDS deaths in a
community that in its very homogeneity and interconnectedness suffered the plague
early on in a way that became very personal. Every gay person of my age from
San Francisco with whom I have spoken about the subject describe this era with
similar tales of how they found themselves attending numerous funerals every
week, losing friend after friend within a few short years, as well as being
constantly terrified for their own survival. The Castro and environs was a
world of unto its own in which suddenly, after years of delightful sexual
frolic and liberated lifestyles, every day was now filled with matters of life
and death.
From almost the first breath of this film’s first narrator, Ed Wolf, who
became a counselor to many of the dying AIDS patients, he argues that this will
be a film about family, about a group of mostly men and women who felt disenfranchised
from their own families, and for whom the gay community became their family. “We
are not some network of people who just like to have sex,” a narrative voice
continues, “we are not some ephemeral subculture…. This is a community that was
tested in a way almost no community on earth was ever tested, and succeeded in
what is was trying to do, which is [to] save as many lives of people as it
could, stop civil rights attacks, and then try to use that example to transform
the world.”
These large and seemingly overinflated statements, as we soon discover, represent
the full vision of what such a dedicated community as San Francisco perceives
itself to be; for these individuals and like-minded citizens this is the
truth, which is the very reason why the city was able to accomplish so much
before the rest of the nation and the world at large was struck by this plague.
A
second commentator, Paul Boneberg, a political activist, reiterates this
particular viewpoint: “If you’re ever facing a natural disaster as extraordinary
as AIDS was in the last quarter of the last century, you should be so lucky as
to be in a community like the queer community of San Francisco.”
A gay artist who was diagnosed as HIV positive, Daniel Goldstein,
continues, suggesting that when he has asked by younger people what was it
like, he can only compare it to a war zone. “You never knew where the bomb was
gonna drop.”
Ex-dancer Guy Clark, who ran a flower stand near the Castro that
supplied flowers to many of the AIDS funerals, gives some perspective on the
community we are talking about that was the result of the Hippie movement at
the end of the 1970s when, as he puts it, San Francisco was the place to come
if you felt even the slightest bit misunderstood or, in particular, you were a
gay man unable to any longer live in your community. One day his father
suggested that he sell flowers, that it was a good business, and suddenly Clark
begin to sell flowers in San Francisco to the very people who most represented
the flower children of the world. A friend took him over to Noe and 15th Street
were he remained, at the time of his film, for 28 years.
Eileen Glutzer, a nurse who later became one of the forces of testing
antiretroviral drugs, always knew, she claims, that she would end up in San
Francisco, perceiving that she, like so many others of friends, “didn’t quite
fit where they were.”
Yet even in college Eileen started a woman’s newspaper and helped to
create a women’s center, attesting to her involvement in politically active efforts.
And in San Francisco she quickly helped to open up a women’s clinic in the time
of illegal abortions. As she approached her 20s she felt she might want a job
at some point, and so she attended nursing school and immediately found that
she loved it.
Once she started working in the hospital, she found herself surrounded
by gay men with whom, after work, she’d go clubbing, to the I-Beam, The Stud,
and other gay bars and clubs. “Unfortunately,” she adds, “none of those guys
are alive today.”
Paul, part of the gay hippie community left Buffalo with the guy he was
sleeping with and traveled around for a few years “and deliberately tried to be
free.” He liked the word “Crazy dreamers,” and imagining California, and in
particular, San Francisco to be filled with “crazy dreamers,” he thought that’s
where he wanted to be. He joined a small commune of leftover 1960s folks who
were attempting to establish an alternative life style. He describes coming out
of the closet and suddenly realizing as most queer men of his generation quickly
came to wonder, “How did I not realize that this is where I was supposed to be?” He attributes it to the feeling of suddenly “coming home,” whereas my feeling
was always that thank heaven I had been able to leave “it,” whatever home meant
in the USA. I never wanted to return home, although I often did.
But these young men and women, quite obviously, still unsure of
themselves, were seeking community and found it expressed in the city in nearly
every aspect of its life.
Artist Daniel made a compromise with his father to attend San Francisco
State University. He liked the people there, who always seemed “more open,”
and, “Frankly,” he adds, “I always wanted to meet a nice blond surfer.”
Daniel didn’t come out until after college, when he appeared in a
production of Boys in the Band. But for several years he admits he was a
workaholic, creating in his studio all of the time. And in some ways he was
already successful, already being shown in New York galleries. He takes us back
into San Francisco history as he remembers that he was living in the Haight, where
a man, Harvey Milk, was handing out leaflets on the street. After Milk
introduced himself and talked to him about his concerns, Daniel went to work
for him. He’d been political in college, but many of his friends were SDS
members, and Harvey, as he quips, “was a lot gentler.” This was Milk’s first campaign.
Moreover, his lover Steve was very political, there for every march. “That
was important to us. Those are the things which made us feel connected to the
community.”
Castro Street, so Guy reports, was just beginning to happen. Daniel adds
that you would always run into people you knew. “The Castro began to feel like
the Village you always wanted.”
Paul returns to the major theme of gay life, lest we forget the subject
at hand. “If you took a bunch of young men and said, ‘Have as much sex as you
can have,’ how much sex would they have?” The question seems ridiculous since
all know the answer, which as Paul asserts, is “A lot of sex.”
“The sense was if gay sex was good, gay sex is good, you know? And more
gay sex is even better. People often say of my generation that we came to San
Francisco to be gay.” And who’s to deny that generalization?
Ed
returns to the screen to remember in January 1977 he went right down to Castro
Street, after living for years in Greenwich Village in New York City, feeling “This—this
is going to be amazing.” And in the one block there were a lot of gay men, but
it was already beginning to fall into various little cliques. There was the
military look, the outdoorsmen look, the preppy look, already a kind of western
look, and, of course, the leather look. I don’t know quite why this astounds
him since when I lived in Greenwich Village in 1969 those variances had already
quite established themselves, along with others. I was preppy since, after all,
I’d dropped out of college for a year to discover myself at home in the Village
and other downtown bars. I didn’t choose it; that’s who I was, a nice clean
college kid out to have fun. In any event, Ed is disturbed by the fact that
people were quickly identifying themselves with various male images, and he
sadly admits, that he just “didn’t, like fit in.” He describes himself as representing
a “long haired basketball look”; “it was just kind of me.” He admits he was
terrible at anonymous sex, which is precisely what I loved during my New York
year and even before in Madison, Wisconsin. I liked all those types equally—except
perhaps for the leather, agreeing with Bette Midler that it was just too much
to have bring along all of those accoutrements to every event. Ed admits, he
didn’t click. Which probably explains why later he was such a good counselor to
all the various types of dying gay men to came to him for help and consolation.
He wasn’t a type, but a just an ordinary human being.
Daniel explains that he was always drawn to having sexual partners, but
since they were generally open relationships, his sexual outlet was the famous
bath houses. “And they were there. And they were fun.” He went out with
friends, it was never something secret or sleazy. “It just felt so good. It was
like a club, and we—we called it church.”
Paul picks up the conversation, “Part of it, you’re having sex to have
fun. Part of it, you’re having sex to find love,” and, he concludes, “to rebel
against the people who said you couldn’t have sex.” Truer words were never
spoken. That triple whammy made it such a joyous experience, fun, love,
rebellion all in one—for those of us who had had to be so silent all of our
high school years. I remember almost shaking with joy and anticipation each
night I’d go out to the bars, almost every night, in fact, since who could
resist and would even want to?
As Paul puts it, “All of America was feeling very confident that you
could be much more sexual, and that was okay. Venereal diseases and unwanted pregnancies,
it’s all curable with a shot or a pill.”
By May of 1979, however, everything had begun to change with suggestions
of that the wonderful idyll was crumbling. Harvey Milk had been killed, and the
jury came down with a verdict against Dan White. For those who forget (unfortunately
this film does not explain the matter), White was found guilty of manslaughter instead
of murder. “And we’re all at City Hall protesting. There’s this enormous rage. Thousands
of people arrive. Police attack. We’re tear-gassed, we’re beaten. Police cars
are burned. So this is not a community that is feeling really good about the
political establishment going into the 1980s.” My only question is when in the
history of gay life did any gay community feel safe and protected by the
establishment?
I might just remind these somewhat myopic commentators that almost a
decade earlier to the date, after my lover, who I had accidently acquired on
one of my many nights of exploring sex, had told me that he had made a commitment
to someone else long before he even met me. Feeling somewhat rejected and a
little heartbroken in a sentimental kind of way, I rode the elevator down from
his apartment and walked to the nearest phone booth (an artifice that may seem
to those younger than me as not only an antique but almost inoperative, but
which I assure them thoroughly functioned) from which I called my parents back
in Iowa, begging for money to pay for my flight back to Madison, Wisconsin so
that I might finish my temporarily interrupted education. I also felt the fun
was over, leaving New York City by the second week of June, just about a week
before at the bar I passed each evening in my walk from Julius’—where after
dance practice at the Joffrey Ballet, I generally dined on one of their
delicious hamburgers before walking over to my favorite bar, The Badlands (which
had a large back room in which those who hadn’t found someone to return home
with could enjoy orgiastic sex)—an nationally important event occurred.
That night in late June 1969, after a police raid, drag queens, transgender
individuals, effeminate gay boys, and some other gay boys who might even
described as preppy, fought back against the police, barricading them within
the bar, Stonewall, itself, forever changing gay history. These women and men
were also not exactly happy with the establishment back then either.
Back in San Francisco it is Harvey Milk’s birthday party, the night
after the protests described above. Streets are closed off, and thousands of
people attend to hear what Paul describes as “very angry speeches.” Anne
Kronenberg gave a very “fierce” speech ending with a chant “Welcome to the 80s.”
Paul explains that, of course, the crowd couldn’t haven known at that point
that HIV had already arrived, probably in 1976. “And by 1979, probably 10% of
the gay men in that crowd were infected. And by the time that we discovered
that there is such a thing happening in June of ’81, roughly 20% were infected.”
This is where this excellent movie really begins, establishing how each
of these individuals, some of them also infected, took on important roles in
the crisis or simply found ways to survive it.
If I have spent far too much of this essay on the years before this film
even begins to reveal it’s full painful and tearful story, it is only because
we all now know generally what happened afterwards, but I fear we have almost
totally forgotten all about those amazingly exciting, even thrilling years
before it. In our after-the-story realities we seek now mostly for long-term
relationships and gay marriage much in the manner of our heterosexual
neighbors. But for a long wonderful decade or more we thoroughly enjoyed our
lives as single men finding pleasure and enjoyment through our bodies, the gods’
gift to us. It was what then separated us from the heterosexual community and
made being gay seem like such a glorious opportunity to tell the world and
ourselves that there was nothing really to fear in stripping off one’s
clothes, and rubbing up against another human being and sharing the bodily
parts of your fellow male neighbors. Even now the fingers wag, the tongues
click in scoldingly disbelief. I can hear them! But those of us lucky enough to
have come of age in that moment between the rejection of the closet and the
joys of open sex, now mostly dying old men, can never forget it. Despite the
legions of wonderful young boys and later women and straight men lost to this equal
opportunity killer of a disease, we survivors cannot forget the joy of our
bodies from the 1960s through the 1970s, even into the early 1980s. And I will
argue to my last dying breath that we should never forget it, attempting to
convey that reality to all of those now desperate to escape just such open
pleasures.
From
here on, Weissman’s narrators gradually reveal their valiant and heartbreaking
attempts to help and alter the natural disaster that was represented by the
narrow-minded bigots and terrified religious-minded hypocrites who attempted to
describe AIDS as their God’s punishment.
Paul finishes his train of thought, reminding us that by the time they
could actually develop tests so people could find out if they are infected,
perhaps as many as 50% of the gay men in San Francisco are infected.
For Ed 1981 was a great year. He
had landed a wonderful job where he was working with many gay men, he was
finishing his graduate degree in creative writing, he traveled to Europe. That
was his great year, he claims. But then
he remembers, when his friends and he were about to smoke pot that he didn’t
have any papers, and he ran down the Star Pharmacy. “And I was looking in the
window of the Star Pharmacy, and there were these little Polaroid photographs. …There
were at least three, maybe four of them, the first one [he opens his mouth to
show his teeth and gums] like this. And inside these big purple splotches. And
then there was another picture, and he had taken his shirt and pulled it up
like this [he mocks raising his shirt]. It was of his chest [we see an image of
purple blotches all over his upper chest].” It is what we recognize as the
first real evidence of the horrors everyone would soon know only too well with
the development of Kaposi’s Syndrome and other diseases which struck those who
lost their bodily immune systems. “Watch out guys, there’s something out there,”
a phrase which immediately reminds me of the William Finn’s and James Lapine’s
1992 musical Falsettos in which a nurse sings a song about the very same
discovery, “Something Bad Is Happening.”
And from here on in, sickness and death begin to haunt these men and
woman’s life. Ed’s friend Michael wakes up with a red splotch in his eye. The
news reveals a young man, Bobby Campbell, covered with the red splotches of
Kaposi’s Syndrome. Daniel and his lover had friends who dying already at the
very beginning of the epidemic. Eileen is taking blood from a patient one day
when a doctor from infectious disease enters, suggesting she wear gloves
because they don’t know what “this” is. Guy was selling flowers to a man who
one day went to the hospital and five days later he was dead. Daniel bemoans
the necessary closings of his beloved baths, and wonders if the numerous
changes required to fight this disease might not also end the gay life as he had
known it. His fears were real ones which I reiterate through the pages of My
Queer Cinema.
Eileen describes people coming in with Pneumocystis Pneumonia. One day
they were out there swimming, playing tennis, buffed, and ten days later they
were dead. People would come in with Kaposi’s Syndrome elisions, and within a
few days they would grow, expand, and cut off circulation. Or maybe it would
get into their lung and they couldn’t breathe or maybe they would just waste
away.
Paul assumes very early on that a number of his friends are already
infected, probably myself and all the people in my group were infected.
From the very beginning Eileen cannot tolerate the prejudice and
homophobia going on. Yes, she admits there was incredible fear. “People were coming
in and dying and nobody knew what it was. There were people who were afraid to
go into rooms, so I found myself going into to [those] rooms. If you were not a
family member they wouldn’t talk to you. So if someone was somebody’s partner
they wouldn’t explain to them what was going on. So I found myself talking to
them.”
Ed explains something was terrible was happening since these men were
showing up the United Way or Social Services because they had no family. He saw
an ad in the Bay Area Reporter for the Shanti Project who were looking for
people who would be willing to serve as a buddy to someone with this illness. He
was the second trained volunteer person and was matched with someone immediately.
Ed hadn’t yet actually met someone dying of AIDS. He bemoans the situation that
the patient thought that someone was going to come and help him. One can just
imagine, tearfully, the expectations on both sides. What can you give, what can
you receive, particularly knowing it cannot be enough? Yet here, suddenly, he
realizes that his way of being with gay men worked perfectly.
Even then he begin disseminating the information he was discovering, informing
his other gay friends that it may be sexually transmitted and that they should
wear condoms, warning them (quite wrongly, but I remember the same warning),
don’t use poppers (alkyl nitrites that relax muscles, particularly the anal
sphincter and produce a brief, intense high).
The big question in his small office of mostly gay men with whom he is
working is who is giving it whom and why? Ed explains that he believes they had
all has sex with one another, but in his mismatched way, he hadn’t had sex with
any of them. In the end, he sadly reports, they all got infected.
The
list of the dead goes on as the bodies literally pile up. By film’s end Daniel
loses three lovers and almost his own life as he suffers through early AZT
treatments that often did the patients more harm than good, killing them off
even the attendant diseases didn’t. His refusal to undergo further treatment
perhaps saved his life.
Eileen goes on to become a major figure in the testing of further
experimental treatments. Ed continues to become someone whom the dying can turn
to in their deepest despair. Paul joins friends of ACT UP who work for force
the chemical companies and the government to put their forces behind finding a
cure for the disease. Eileen also points out something that may too easily be
forgotten, that a great many of the first responders and those that stood with
their gay brethren as caretakers and best friends were lesbian and transgender
women.
Guy often offers his flowers free to many of those who desperately want their
beauty without being able to afford the cost for the funerals. He becomes an almost
mute witness to all the Castro’s endless deaths.
Daniel suffers intensely (we see it still in his eyes) as friend after
friend dies until he is nearly left alone in his sorrow. In 2025 Daniel
Goldstein, now a noted artist, himself died at age 74 after surviving nearly
all those he loved.
All of these caring beings have, through the filming of this movie in 2008-2011,
agreed to share their stories in devotion for all the amazing individuals lost
in this endless crisis. One can only imagine how things might have been
different if those these talented and loving men had only survived to speak and
act out their visions. What would the gay community have looked like today had
there been no AIDS?
As Amy Taubin nicely summarized this movie in Film Comment:
“We Were Here weaves the
personal and the political, the intimate and the epic to show the effect of
AIDS on individual lives and also on the San Francisco gay community that
constructed, through its immediate, caring, pragmatic actions, a model of how
people can fight back in a crisis and survive. It’s this last point that
everyone involved in the film tries to make again and again—and which they do
with great hesitation and a bit of wonder, because it’s difficult to admit that
anything positive can be built on the corpses of so many who died so horribly
and, very often, so young.
….The witnesses/ storytellers of We Were Here testify to the
horror and sorrow of those years and also to the way they and others responded.
Since the sick and the dying for the most part had no families, the community
became their family—nursing in AIDS wards, forming service organizations,
lobbying for drug trials, teaching safe sex, and finally in the Nineties
figuring out how to live with AIDS, with survivors’ guilt and the memories of
great loss.”
The relationship between how the city functioned as a communal space with
regard to its citizens is wonderfully revealed in Weissman’s brilliant telling.
But I do need to remind the viewers that the battle so touchingly expressed
here—and I must admit that yet another reason for the delays in being able to
immediately write this essay was that every time I approached the film I ended
up in endless crying jags—did not take place in the vacuum of San Francisco but
breached almost every large urban center and small town throughout the world.
As early as 1985 Nik Sheehan screened a documentary relating how Toronto dealt
with some of these issues in the truly amazingly almost comedic No Sad Songs;
and another great San Francisco-based filmmaker, Arthur
J. Bressan, Jr. directed the first and one of the most moving of AIDS classics,
Buddies, in that same year, 1985, about a program akin to the Ashanti
Project, this in New York City, where not a single AIDS clinic had yet been
established.
I do believe from all my viewing and reading that the city by the bay
was a central force in demanding a civilized response to AIDS, (see also the
significant AIDS classic And the Band Played On of 1993); but many others
throughout the world came forward to make a difference throughout the USA,
Canada, Mexico, in Europe, particularly France, and even Africa, still
suffering from the scourges of the disease today. Moreover, given our current US
president’s abandonment of all world health programs and research in our own
country when we are so very near a real cure, it is apparent that we have not
yet come to an end of this endless story. People are still dying of AIDS across
the planet, their deaths demanding that we still need to step up and do
something about it the way the San Franciscans of this documentary once did.
Los Angeles, March 30, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(March 2026).
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