"This was my time to be alive, even if it were only for a moment." - Dennis Neal Vaughn, from his short story, "The City Was Electric." If you're a small-town McLean County native like Dennis Neal Vaughn, you can't be farther from the heartland average than Market and Castro streets in San Francisco - ground zero for the Bay City's pioneering gay scene.

And Vaughn is far, far way, indeed.

His home is just a stone's throw from that historic crossroads. And he shares it alongside his wedded partner of nearly four months, Mark David Petty, a fifth-generation San Franciscan.

With good reason, the Minier-born, ISU-educated filmmaker has aptly christened his latest project, "Electric City - Far From Normal."

And he's doing what he's done time and again throughout his filmmaking career: He's world-premiering it back where it all began for him.

The free showing of the film is at 7 p.m. Monday at the Normal Theater, site of Vaughn's past first unveilings, none of which could be remotely described as normal cinematic fare.

They include his two stylized, modern-dress riffs on classic Greek tragedies, "Mama Medea" (1996) and "An Enigma" (2001) - the former inspired by Euripides' "Medea," the latter by Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex."

"Electric City - Far From Normal" has no Greek roots, but there's an element of tragedy to its meditation on the past five years of Vaughn's life, never mind that it comes down soundly on the side of affirmation.

Monday's showing coincides with the 26th observance of World AIDS Day, which is something Vaughn can relate to in ways that many of us may have forgotten as the once-deadly disease has become, as they say, "medically manageable."

And thus ignored or forgotten.

Bad move, notes Vaughn, who was diagnosed HIV-positive in July 2003, lost his partner of 19 years to a heart attack the following year, then became co-infected with Hepatitis C two years later.

This triple dose of negative karma sent the enterprising Neal, an established force in Chicago's indie film community, into a psychic tailspin.

"So I sorted through and packed up my meager belongings into five bags," he recalls, having sold off or given away all of his other possessions that didn't fit.

On a May morning in 2005 he caught a bus from Normal, boarded a plane in Chicago and set down in San Francisco.

With only $20 in his pocket.

And knowing not a soul from one Bay Bridge to the other.

"I had decided to leave behind all that I knew and move to the edge of the earth, where East meets West, where land meets water and the sun kisses the sky," he would later write in his short story account of the transition, "The City Was Electric."

"San Francisco was a mythical and mystical Siren," he would add, in a nod to his old Greek ways.

Without going into the daunting complexities of Vaughn's co-infected HIV/Hepatitis C condition, suffice it to say it was fraught with all manner of bodily rebellion against medication - one episode of which placed him within two weeks of needing an emergency liver transplant.

"I eventually became a human guinea pig," says Vaughn of his submission to five medical studies exploring why people of his Scottish descent tend to be more susceptible to allergic reactions to medication than others.

By November 2006, one of the medical studies, involving a new five-pills-a-day HIV regimen (which he immediately connected to those five pieces of luggage sent him packing west, young man) resulted in his HIV becoming undetectable.

However, "the side effects were immense, producing chemical depression, uncontrollable emotional outbursts of anger and rage and aggression. So I had to take additional meds to handle all of that."

Back home in Minier, it was up and down, too, he says: his father had died several years earlier, as had his only other brother (of a heart attack) … his octogenarian mother, Gladys, was becoming increasingly physically frail ("though mentally sharp as a tack") … he became estranged from his remaining siblings who, "once they found out I had HIV, basically forbid me from seeing (other) family members."

Through it all, Vaughn says, his parents, who hail from a Southern Baptist background, were always accepting of his life's directions, particularly his mother.

"I've been upfront with her all the way through, and she hasn't batted an eye," he says, adding that when the siblings wanted to forbid him even seeing her, "she put her foot down about that!"

Meanwhile, despite the success in suppressing the HIV presence, there was still that other serious infection at large in Vaughn's system, which took another year of experimental treatment to. By May 2007, his Hepatitis C became undetectable.

Adding to the euphoria over this medical turnaround was his meeting Petty, with whom he had fallen instantly in love several months earlier.

He's also found steady employment with a major San Francisco firm … he's writing movie scripts again … he's even optimistic that the recent voter-sanctioned California Proposition 8 (ending California's sanction of gay marriage) will ultimately go the way of his dual infections.

His response as an artist to this four-year rollercoaster ride was the aforementioned short story, which, in turn, inspired him to turn it into the film, "Electric City - Far From Normal."

Per its lean half-hour running time, Vaughn says he was committed to distilling his experiences to their very essences, impressionistically, rather than literally or graphically.

Like the spare prose in his short story, he says the economic images in the film are meant to convey the maximum meaning with a minimum of fuss or excess.

"Pennies make dollars" was the philosophy of Vaughn's late partner, Anthony.

"It was the little things that mattered most," Vaughn wrote in his short story. "The most meager of sums that made the greatest differences in ways that I had only begun to embrace and believe in."

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Back to Normal

Monday night's world premiere of "Electric City - Far From Normal" won't be filmmaker Dennis Neal Vaughn's first time out on the screen of the Normal Theater. The Olympia High School and Illinois State University alum has a past history with the bijou that includes:

June 1996: "Mama Medea" (90 min.), Vaughn's modern-dress spin on Euripides' classic Greek revenge drama, transposed to a moody, black-and-white film noir universe circa Chicago in the '90s, and made with both local and Chicago acting/technical talent, including ISU theater guru Sandra Zielinski in the title role.

March 2001: "An Enigma" (14 min.), another modern-dress spin on a Greek myth, this time "Oedipus Rex," filmed in Vaughn's hometown of Minier, and dealing with an 18-year-old high school grad named Ed Rex who has a fateful encounter with a palm reader named The Sphinx (the formidable Zielinski again).

March 2003: "Autumn Blues" (54 seconds), which, because of its abbreviated length, wound up world-premiering at the H.A. Paine Memorial Library in Minier instead of the Normal Theater. Vaughn's bittersweet look at the fate of a yellow maple leaf on its last fall legs wound up being screened in an even shorter (10 seconds!) version on MTV.

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At a glance

What: World premiere showing of "Electric City - Far From Normal"

When: 7 p.m. Monday

Where: Normal Theater, 209 W. North St., Normal

Cost: Free

Information: http://ElectricCityMovie.blogspot.com