San Francisco-based filmmaker Leo Herrera has been at work over the last year on a film that explores a vision of a contemporary world in which AIDS never happened, a 59-year-old Keith Haring was still graffiti-ing penises over subway station posters, and a 68-year-old Robert Mapplethorpe had an active Instagram account. It's called Fathers, and Herrera refers to it as a "sci-fi documentary" that combines fiction with real footage of contemporary LGBTQ culture, including the first LGBTQ krewe Mardi Gras in New Orleans and San Francisco Pride, which he'll be shooting this weekend.

"I describe it as Cruising meets Black Mirror, meets Beyonce's Lemonade," says Herrera, a Mexican visual artist, activist, and filmmaker who has called both San Francisco and New York home over the last decade. He's known for queer viral films like 2015's "3 Eras of Gay Sex in 3 Minutes," tackling issues of queer politics, sex, HIV stigma, and history.

In Fathers, Herrera creates cultural artifacts from this imagined present in which the fears around sex that grew out of the AIDS crisis never existed — for instance, he's created faux TV commercials for famous bathhouses, and he's spent time documenting the leather community, which arguably could have become a much larger element of queer culture were it not for AIDS deaths.

"The tools we have to combat HIV [today] will give us the privilege of keeping our queer artists," Herrera says. "But the injustices of AIDS should always live in our collective memory and, more importantly, in our imagination. It’s the only way that we can find creative cures to the damage it caused to our culture and harness the power it gave our community to join against political forces that threatened our lives, now more than ever."

The entire film is being funded by individual donations and art patrons, and you can donate to the project here. Donations come with various rewards that include artwork like the imagined portraits of an aged Haring or Sylvester like those below.

SFist talked to Herrera further about the origins of the project

SFist: How did the initial inspiration form for what you’re calling a “sci-fi documentary”?

Leo Herrera: The inspiration came from wanting to have an answer to what could have been had AIDS not destroyed so much of our culture, but also incorporate all of the incredible things that are happening today in queer culture. A mix a real life events and fantasy to create a vision of queer utopia.

How do you see this as differing from a typical documentary — will you still include talking-head type interviews or archival footage?

We are interviewing queer elders, doing research at the GLBT Historical Society in SF, the Leather Archives in Chicago, recording real-life events such a Mardi Gras in New Orleans and SF Pride (whom we are working closely with), as well as incorporating historical footage, so it is very much created in the format of a documentary, but we are also creating fictional characters, fake commercials, and staged political events. The end-product will be somewhat of a fever dream.

Beyond the what-ifs like what would Robert Mapplethorpe's social media presence have been like, where else are you taking this fantasy visually and narratively?

We are imagining the election of a gay president and what he could have achieved, we are also focusing on the sex-positive communities that were at the forefront of gay culture, such as the leather and Radical Faerie community, and imagine what American sexuality would have looked like now.

For example, we have commercials for bathhouses that closed during the AIDS crisis, and for senior citizen resorts for what would have been a huge GLBT Senior community.

Among those what-if’s, and all the notable names you touch on in the teaser, what’s your most compelling example of someone you wish was still alive in our world, providing an example for a younger generation?

I touch upon many famous people in the project, but it's also folks forgotten by history that intrigue me the most. In my research at the GLBT Historical Museum, I've come across men like Duke Armstrong, who was a queer politician in the 1980's or Marty Blecman, who was 1978's Billboard DJ of the year for SF and helped define the disco era. Of course, there are all of the countless QPOC (queer people of color) and trans family that could have grown to be powerful activists. These are the stories that were buried the deepest, but just by telling them, I think they will already will inspire a younger generation.

Below, an earlier trailer for the project. Learn more about the Fathers project here.