We Are Animals is a fiction set in the mid 1980s at the height of the AIDS panic· Modern viewers may find the plot unbelievable - that gaymen could be quarantined and placed in internment camps out of fears they would spread the disease just by their physical presence· While it never got quite there, there were voices advocating steps very close to it - AIDS sufferers were often shunned and isolated· Even the forcible castration of gaymen in the belief that would prevent the disease's spread was advocated· While this film is fiction, it easily could have become a widespread reality were it not for activists such as "Act Up," and the medical profession's relatively quick discovery of the methods of HIV spread (via bodily fluids) and its more-or-less successful controls.