What interested you about the role of women in the AIDS response?
Women were integral to the response in almost every aspect of the battle against AIDS. And in many ways, the epidemic brought women and gay men together in ways that hadn’t always been the case. In the 1970s many lesbians were more focused on the women’s movement, and there was a lot of understandable separatism. And many gay men were less than sensitive to feminist issues. So the epidemic allowed for a kind of healing and shared growth that has in very positive ways impacted our community’s political clout.


The unification of the gay community in the face of crisis was remarkable. Do you see the same spirit in the younger generations of gay men and women who didn’t live through the epidemic?
I think that crises create community in a way that doesn’t so easily happen otherwise. One of the common reactions I’ve heard from young people after seeing We Were Here, and also Milk, is that they wish that they felt that degree of passion or community engagement. These things ebb and flow. And I think that San Francisco is still a place that places more emphasis on creating community than almost any other place in the country.