Stories have power. We tell stories so we’re seen and heard. We tell stories to pass down knowledge and history. We tell stories to heal. Projects that document those stories capture them for future generations.
In 2015, the National AIDS Memorial and the HIV Story Project launched a multi-year and multi-part AIDS oral history project titled “Surviving Voices,” focusing on different demographics and communities every year since then, to capture personal stories about the horrific AIDS epidemic and the ongoing struggle with HIV.
Numerous “Surviving Voices” documentary films have been released since its inception, and on June 5, to coincide with Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day, the National AIDS Memorial will premiere the tenth and biggest chapter of the series. This event will be at the Roxie Theatre, with a pre-screening reception and red-carpet arrival.
This “Lifetime and Long-Term Survivors” chapter will include stories of people who acquired HIV at birth or as young children, and those who acquired the virus before the availability of effective treatment in the mid-1990s. This most recent chapter adds to the already captured hundreds of stories from a widely diverse set of communities, each sharing their unique experience with, and response to, the AIDS crisis.
“Over the last decade, these profoundly compelling stories have been shared across the world receiving awards at numerous film festivals for both their content and design,” said National AIDS Memorial Chief Executive John Cunningham.
Challenges and resilience
HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day was established in 2014 by Let’s Kick ASS - AIDS Survivor Syndrome, a nonprofit that honors and supports long-term HIV+ people and to raise awareness about their unique challenges and resilience. This year’s theme is Leading with Legacy. The June 5 premiere date was intentionally chosen to coincide with the same date in 1981 when the first official report was published about what would later be identified as the AIDS epidemic after five young gay men in Los Angeles got sick with a mysterious illness.
Surviving HIV can prompt a type of trauma. While parallels and analogies vary, some survivors and those who have supported them describe the worst of the AIDS epidemic similar to living through a horrific war. Seeing your friends and loved ones die day after day took its toll and guilt plagues many who endured those times and lived. That does not diminish the fact that all people living with HIV today also have their own unique challenges and struggles.
“AIDS Survivor Syndrome is this thing of having hypervigilance, where you’re waiting for someone to hit you or you jump a lot,” said Tez Anderson, the Founder of Let’s Kick ASS - AIDS Survivor Syndrome. “It’s depression, anxiety, sleep disorder. It’s hopelessness, really, and a deep fear of ‘What am I gonna do? I’m going to live, but what does that mean? How does that look?’ And I didn’t want to call it PTSD because I really didn’t like the disorder part of PTS.”
Thriving
Before the advent of protease inhibitors, a breakthrough in the treatment of HIV, many people who acquired the virus considered it essentially a death sentence. Today, those on treatment can live full and healthy lives. Many who thought they were going to die are now thriving.
The National AIDS Memorial’s “Surviving Voices” documentaries are produced and directed by Jörg Fockele with major support from Presenting Sponsor, Chevron, a long-standing partner of the National AIDS Memorial. Community partners include San Francisco AIDS Foundation, The Elizabeth Taylor 50-Plus Network, Let’s Kick ASS, SF Queer Film Festival, Honoring Our Experience, and Dandelions, Inc., among others.
With the help of committed financial and community partners and the skilled producing and directorial filmmaking abilities of Fockele, the “Surviving Voices” series has been repeatedly recognized for its powerful work in helping tell the true story of AIDS through the voices of survivors of the pandemic.
Through intimate personal stories of struggle, survival, resilience and perseverance, this series powerfully captures the journeys of individuals living with HIV/AIDS in raw, honest, and forthright conversations. It depicts their individual strength, power, hope, and resilience, the importance of community, spirit, self-respect, and the will to live with dignity and pride. It also depicts the vulnerabilities, shame, denial, stigma, and hopelessness they have experienced.
The National AIDS Memorial stewards our nation’s two most notable AIDS memorials - the federally designated National AIDS Memorial Grove and the globally recognized AIDS Memorial Quilt. The “Surviving Voices” series further drives their organization’s mission to continue to tell and memorialize people’s stories through storytelling to reveal the humanity behind the statistics, invoke compassion, and dispel discrimination and stigma.
Artist DK Haas describes experiencing the worst years of the AIDS epidemic.
“We went through this horrible experience that was full of fear and uncertainty and loss and grief year after year,” he said. “And so, I think that does something to a person. I think it does something to your sense of safety in the world, your ability to bond with people. I think it creates a lot of memory and depression and isolation in people.”
The latest chapter of Surviving Voices reveals those memories to the film viewing world in the hopes it will add to the healing of everyone impacted by HIV and AIDS.
The June 5 premiere will also include a screening of three of the documentary’s 22 filmed interviews. Following these screenings, a panel discussion will include five of the subjects in the film.
Prior to the Roxie Theatre premiere, there will be a reception at 4:30pm at 518 Valencia Street for community members and lifetime and long-term survivors to gather, share stories, and again recommit to the continuing work before us.
‘Surviving Voices,’ June 5, 5:30pm, $12.50, 3117 16th St.
http://www.aidsmemorial.org
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