Judy Woodruff: Finally, tonight, remembering the early days of the AIDS epidemic and the
toll it took on so many. That's the focus of an award-winning documentary that premieres on
the PBS program Independent Lens Tonight. News Hour correspondent Spencer Michel's
talk with a filmmaker in San Francisco. Spencer Michels: San Francisco's Castro
District has become a little more heterosexual, a slightly upscale shopping street since the days
in the 80s and 90s, when AIDS was devastating the gay male population that gathered here. But
in America today, when the disease is mostly controlled through drugs, the Castro remains
a focal point of gay life. Still, the place gay youngsters come to find the freedom and
acceptance that is sometimes hard to find at home. David Weissman: I think the Castro is really
still probably the gayest neighborhood in the world.
Spencer Michels: It's where David Weissman produced and directed his film "We Were Here" that
recounts personal stories of the AIDS epidemic. David Weissman: It became clear to me that the
people who had lived through the epidemic in those years had stopped talking about it,
and the people who didn't live through the time really knew very little about the origins of
the AIDS epidemic and what our community went through in the early years. So it seemed like
with the passage of time since the medication started working and the death rates started to go
down. It was a good time to look back at that era and try to make sense of what actually happened,
what we actually went through as a community. Spencer Michels: Within a 15 year period.
Nearly 20000 people died in this city alone after AIDS swept through the gay community,
starting in the early 1980s. David Weissman: Even in the middle of
the epidemic, I came back to San Francisco after living in Europe for a year, and I expected Castro
Street to have tumbleweeds blowing down it and to be a ghost town. But one of the things that's most
amazing and looking back at this is that even in the midst of terrible horror and terrible trauma,
life has to go on. You don't really have a choice. Spencer Michels: For his film, Weissman chose
five people who lived through that horror to tell in a simple,
straightforward way what it was like. Ed Wolf: I remember looking in the window
of Star Pharmacy, and there were these little Polaroid photographs that this young man had
made of himself. There were at least three, maybe four of them. The first one was like
this. And inside, these big purple splotches. Daniel Goldstein: I've been around for the
entire epidemic. The only thing I can liken it to is a war zone, but most of us have
never lived in a war zone, but it was, as you never knew where the bomb was going to drop.
Paul Boneberg: Were forced to deal with this unbelievable circumstance of a community that
in addition to being hated and under attack, is now forced alone to try to figure out how to deal
with this extraordinary medical disaster. We are not some network of people who just
like to have sex. We are not some ephemeral subculture that comes in, dissolves and goes.
This is a community that was tested in a way almost no community on Earth was ever tested.
Spencer Michels: Weissman was part of the scene in those days
and recalls how alone the gay community felt. David Weissman: There was a tremendous amount
of homophobia, and all of a sudden this epidemic comes that is sexually transmitted, and no one
came to our defense except our own communities. Spencer Michels: You talk about discrimination
and bigotry. One of the characters in your documentary said that that some of the people
sort of was glad that gays were dying. David Weissman: Yeah, I think for many
people back in that era, they saw that AIDS was God's punishment on us, and they had
no no interest in helping us. And they saw that, well, who cares if the gay people die?
Spencer Michels: The gay community's own newspapers, including the Bay
Area reporter filled pages with obituaries. Ed Wolf worked as a volunteer with AIDS patients.
Ed Wolf: There was one issue they decided to run just all the photos of the people that had
died in the last year. It was just page after page, after page after page. And I was stunned
by how many of them I knew from working on the unit. And I, you know, I realized I couldn't.
I just couldn't, couldn't do it anymore. Guy Clark: Then the flower man, I was thrown
into the middle of it because a lot of people would say, Guy, my friend died. And I don't
have enough money to buy flowers, and I need some help. Can you help us? They wanted to bury their
friends with a lot of dignity and beauty. Spencer Michels: But there was more than
just sadness. Even in the face of death in the hospital, there was community.
Speaker: Every other Sunday there was a party on ward 5B. The hostess is a travel
agent named Rita Berger, but the nurses and the patients know her as Rita Rocket.
Ed Wolf: She came on an Easter to offer to do an Easter brunch. It went so well it
turned into like she would come on Sundays. Spencer Michels: Those kinds of experiences
produced a sense of camaraderie that persists even today, says Weissman.
David Weissman: Nowadays, I'll often walk down the street and I'll recognize the face from that era.
And there's a kind of a moment of acknowledgment, whether I know this person or not, that we're
survivors. That we were here before and we're here now. And there's not that many of us here,
and there's a kind of a very bittersweet feeling when one has that experience on the street.
Spencer Michels: Weissman wants the new generation not to forget what happened. His film premieres
in the PBS program Independent Lens this week. Judy Woodruff: Independent Lens airs on most
PBS stations tonight, you can find a link to their website on ours. Also there Spencer shares his own
recollections from his days reporting on the AIDS crisis and the gay community in San Francisco.