We Were Here

This post has been in draft format in my mind since watching We Were Here at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival at the beginning of April. I'm publishing it tonight because of a text message that I received yesterday from my friend telling me that he has been re-admitted to hospital with HIV related illnesses - something you don't hear of happening that much these days.

We Were Here is a documentary film about the start of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. It is a series of moving interviews with five people (four gay men and a lesbian) who lived in the San Francisco gay community in the early 80s and who lived to tell the tale. The point of this film is to remember those (the majority of that community?) who didn't. The footage of young handsome men, who had only just won the battle of gay liberation, having their confidence and happiness smashed by an unknown disease is heartbreaking to watch, and that era seems like distant history now. (Click here to watch the trailer that gives you a powerful introduction to the film.)

Untitled by Askalon

I first joined the "gay community" as university student in Southampton in 1996. AIDS was still a very important part of this community. I remember the World AIDS Day events we held and the safer sex health workers who were always very prominent in the Magnum nightclub.

This period in time - the mid 1990s - was a real turning point in the history of HIV and AIDS, but I don't know if we knew it back then. I remember at the time wondering what would happen to my friends and to the community in the coming years. Safer sex messages had made a real impact, but we didn't know how long it would take for medicine to produce that long hoped for cure. Films like Philadelphia had recently been released, portraying Andrew Beckett (played by Tom Hanks) becoming very ill (with visible KS marks on his face) and ultimately dying from AIDS related conditions. But in 1999, Queer as Folk was screened on Channel 4, and I don't recall HIV featuring strongly in that story about the gay men living it up in Manchester. It was like HIV had suddenly became invisible again.

If you are familiar with the history of this horrible virus will know what happened to cause this change. Effective drug therapies - antiretrovirals (or HAARTs) - were introduced in 1995. Whilst these drugs are no cure for HIV - the virus cannot be permanently eliminated from the body yet - antiretrovirals mean that for many people the disease can become manageable, some now compare it to a condition like diabetes. But what did this change mean for the gay community? In the 80s and early 90s the signs of AIDS were very visible and so many were lost to this disease. These days seeing gaunt young men on the gay scene has became a rarer occurrence, but HIV has not gone away.

These statistics from the Health Protection Agency and similar ones from Avert show two things. The number of annual HIV diagnoses in the UK has increased dramatically since the year 2000. And people are still dying from HIV. Since 1998 the number of HIV related deaths has remained at around 400-500 per year, compared to 1,700 in 1995. The drop has not been as big as I had imagined.

In the controversial French novel, Hate: A Romance by Tristan Garcia, published this year in the UK, the changing significance of AIDS as a cause to the gay community over time is explored through the relationship of love and then hate between Dominique Rossi and the younger William Miller. Dominique has lived through the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and has seen it ruin the party that the gay community had been having in Paris throughout the 1970s. As Garcia wrote: "There it was. Five years later it was part of the culture. AIDS was there. [...] People died, people protested, people protected themselves, people gave money, people did research. It was part of life, part of the era, part of the whole."

We only have this generation of campaigners to thank for the medical advances that actually took place and saved so many lives. Books like And the Band Played On document the resistance that campaigners faced from the US government under Reagan.  However, Garcia is right that AIDS, as devastating as it was, became a uniting force for the gay community and his character William Miller takes an extreme approach to filling the vacuum that the cause of AIDS had left behind after the changes in the 1990s.  After William's relationship with Dominique ends, William starts advocating "bare-backing" or sex without a condom, complaining that gay safer sex campaigners are oppressing him in the same way that the state is by trying to remove the "special gift" of AIDS from the community and by dictating how gay men should have sex. Perhaps this is a very twisted way of expressing the need to retain a purpose gained from difference and from a cause.

Garcia describes the journey that Dominique is so proud of and that William (the man who came of age in the 1990s) is trying to destroy: "Dominique, who sketched the meaning of his struggle and the long march accomplished by the gay community, paradoxically saw its victory as it dilution, its integration into society: 'The community has sometimes been ungrateful to its key supporters, because their success has brought about a progressive assimilation into the social body. Personally, I consider that an achievement. There are so many things that we don't have to fight for nowadays.'"

I see this tension today in the gay marriage debate. Many people like the title "civil partnerships" because of its difference, because they are resisting that total assimilation into heterosexual society. Others feel that we will not be totally equal until our legal unions are given the same name as heterosexuals', because this implies that civil partnerships are second rate and not as real as marriages.

Is our goal to break free from being a separate community with its own bars, clubs and meetings (do these meetings take place any more?), for the "default assumption of heterosexuality" in social situations to disappear? Or do we like that difference, the special network that is created by the being a member of the LGBT community (the name and membership keeps expanding...). Whilst I would miss the family, and perhaps exclusive, element of the community if it ever disappeared, losing it would be a price that I would be prepared to pay for the end of homophobia, shame and self hatred that ruin so many lives and relationships still, today, in 2011. If we are honest, more of us want to be accepted than excluded. But I don't believe it is ultimately an "either/ or" outcome.

So have we forgotten about the AIDS crisis? Have we forgotten the generation that won the battle for gay liberation and then faced a very unexpected war against a deadly disease that some of their most vile homophobic opponents could have only dreamt of? Do we realise that many people who are diagnosed with HIV today are still too uncomfortable to speak openly about their condition to everyone? And that many people, like my friend, are still in a lot of pain and discomfort because of the infection or the side effects of their medicines?

Here's a link to a very moving post about We Were Here by a man who watched it in the Castro in San Francisco and has captured some of the emotions that many of us felt when watching the film.