Leo Herreras film Fathers asks: What if AIDS never touched San Francisco? – San Francisco Chronicle

What would San Francisco be like if the plague of AIDS had never struck? Two whole generations of gay men might largely be with us. Western SoMa would probably have more than a handful of bars. And erotic photographer Robert Mapplethorpe would not only be alive hed be a mainstream artist with a billion Instagram followers.

Thats how Leo Herrera imagines it, at least, in his 45-minute, five-part film Fathers. A raucous and occasionally heartbreaking what-if, its final episode premiered at Mannys in the Mission on Dec. 1, 2019 (World AIDS Day). The film has subsequently been viewed 100,000 times on platforms like YouTube and Vimeo or more if you count the parts shown in a 2019 Emmy-winning PBS Behind the Lens documentary about the project.

The Fathers universe is one where poppers (a.k.a. amyl nitrate) are advertised on TV and protect sexually active people from STIs. The fashion designer Halstons robes help people evade surveillance. There is no Jerry Falwell although, in a way, Fathers grapples with the Christian rights outsize role in American life by setting up a queer parallel.

We dont know much about the evangelical lifestyle, but it affects our elections, Herrera says in late January outside Four Barrel Coffee, wearing a vintage T-shirt honoring the AIDS quilt. His vision gives queers that outsize influence instead. In the America that Fathers imagines, no matter where you were, there would be these pockets of queer people creating their own sort of culture. I thought that was fascinating.

A project five years in the making, Fathers is a rejoinder to decades of moral panic about sex, drug use and disco. Narrated by a female voice with an affectless British accent, it has the air of a bizarro-America documentary. Stonewall Nation and the Queer Colonies are the films more or less interchangeable terms for Herreras LGBTQ country-within-a-country, a loose constellation of communes rooted in 20th century gay Mardi Gras krewes. They are joyous, uninhibited places, the vital center of American cultural life, marshaling hedonism to bring about social change, reinvigorating decayed cities and becoming home to the highest life expectancies in the nation.

Herrera, 38, was born in Mexico, grew up in Phoenix and lives in Hayes Valley. In addition to filmmaking, hes also a painter, essayist and occasional politico, having managed Tom Tempranos campaign for S.F. school board. Post-Fathers, hes revisiting a novel he began writing in 2005 that describes a dystopian San Francisco whose problems are todays afflictions in reverse, a sort of cyberpunk Tales of the City if that city were also broke and under constant surveillance. Herrera hasnt found his Michael Tolliver yet, but the characters are based on people he knows.

There is one character whos obsessed with free plastic surgery, he says. One of them is Mother, a big bear whos a matriarch of this commune of wayward boys living in a burnt-out version of the Vida complex in the Mission. But instead of a beacon of gentrification, its this community hub, a derelict, dilapidated apartment complex where all these squatters live.

At times, Fathers revels in similar tensions between utopia and dystopia. Colonies, for instance, is a curious term, generally referring to places in need of liberation, not exponents of it. Herrera chalks this up to the type-to-text software that gave the narrator her voice.

She said colonies better, he says. But my idea of liberation would be that we live in these uninterrupted communes. The most utopic moments Ive had were when we were left on our own, like the Radical Faeries, a loosely affiliated movement of left-leaning, artistically inclined queer pagans.

Even the phrase Stonewall Nation isnt pure. It hails from an unrealized, back-to-the-land movement by early-70s San Francisco gays to take over rural Alpine County in the Sierra Nevada and run it as their own. The Oakland Museum of Californias Queer California exhibit in 2019 included a not-so-fast response to that idea from local indigeneous leaders, who took a dim view to being dispossessed. Herrera, who is Latinx, acknowledges this while also observing that queer and Native identities are hardly in conflict; many indigenous cultures have long accepted nonbinary or two-spirit people.

The inclusive, utopian vision of Fathers is not a separatist one, either. In it, the activist and film historian Vito Russo who authored The Celluloid Closet, the definitive account of gay Hollywood is an ambassdador from the Queer Colonies who wins the 2020 presidential election. He therefore becomes the leader of the whole of America, not just Stonewall Nation.

In the films internal chronology, it is legal advocacy by a real-life 1980s GOP attorney and leatherman named Duke Armstrong that helps the Colonies gain recognition as a religious organization, elevating gay bars to the status of churches and protecting them from evictions. In other words, this utopian vision owes itself in part to a white Republican, albeit one who fought to keep the bathhouses open before dying at 39.

Fathers was filmed over several years in New York and Fire Island, New Orleans, Mexico, San Francisco, rural Northern California and Provincetown, Mass. Queer-identified Bay Area residents will surely recognize locales like SF Underground in Lower Haight, the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park, or the Saratoga Springs Retreat Center near Clear Lake in Lake County, along with performers like Sister Roma from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and Jake Shears.

As for the future of Fathers: Herrera has submitted the project to multiple film festivals, although, as he says, not all of them have a category for episodic features, so thats a little bit of a challenge. Hes also at work at finding widespread distribution and recutting it for Dolby Surround Sound, which would eliminate the credits that conclude each episode.

Except that its not finished. Like Tony Kushners two-part Angels in America which the playwright has rewritten several times, even after it won a Pulitzer and a Tony Fathers is something of a palimpsest. A section on the performer Sylvester was taken out to give space to Roxana Hernandez, a trans migrant who died of complications from AIDS in 2018 while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Herrera makes these alterations less out of dissatisfaction than because creating the film largely on his own has been such a costly, time-consuming undertaking.

Its never going to be complete, he says. I want to say that my part will be done and if I did get hit by a bus Its hard to work on a project where all the people died making art at your age and youre constantly thinking about them.

One scene that has proven to be a roadblock in terms of promotion depicts footage of a real-life orgy in New York. Setting a new benchmark for NSFW art meant that censorship on YouTube and Instagram was probably inevitable. But Herrera also believes hes been occasionally shadowbanned for violating vaguely worded community standards, particularly by the third-party processor that handles payments for the crowdfunding site Indiegogo.

Our Indiegogo campaign was shut off a day before it was supposed to be finished, which is the most important day, he says. And Facebook wont let me take out ads for Fathers. They wont let me promote articles about it, even if the clips are G-rated.

What really pisses me off is that if I have two men kissing, or if theres a butt or too many shirtless men, Im not allowed to post that or the sponsored posts get taken down, he adds. But if you do a search for Burning Man girls, theres half a million half-naked women running around the playa.

But Herreras targets arent just hypocrites and puritans. Fathers allots screen time to a NOLA Carnival-goer who dismisses San Francisco AIDS documentaries as overly grim, saying that you have to have something to laugh about. Outrage can be exhausting, the film argues, and for people to get up and fight another day, they need to be touched. They need to be surrounded by beautiful things. They need exposure to radiant joy, even if that looks like cruising at funerals.

This is the camp essence of Leo Herreras queer theology, perhaps with the baroque freak Klaus Nomi as its pope. Liberation, as Herrera defines it, is strength in numbers and freedom from the heterosexual gaze. Hes consequently nonplussed by reactions to Fathers that boil down to AIDS was almost a blessing because it helped LGBTQ people win political rights.

Thats wrong, he says, because it depends on the straight, cis gaze to dictate what made us human. So his touching and gleefully raunchy film is a plausible path away from that. The pre-AIDS moment of liberation in the late 1970s was so achingly brief that its practically a Greek tragedy, and the films attempt to recapture its dynamism demonstrates the ur-hope of progressives everywhere: A better world is possible.

Peter Lawrence Kane is a Bay Area freelance writer. Email: culture@sfchronicle.com

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Leo Herreras film Fathers asks: What if AIDS never touched San Francisco? - San Francisco Chronicle