I don’t often have
visceral reactions to book. Sure they can make me laugh, make me cry, but until
I read And the band played on: Politics, people and the AIDS crisis, I’ve
never thrown up in my mouth a little. And it wasn’t the revelation of various
more extreme gay sexual practices (which oddly I seem to have been largely
aware of) or the descriptions of the diseases that suddenly were infecting
young men with horrific results, nor the horrid hatred that was revealed
against gays. No, it was the reaction of a bathhouse owner to the threat of
closure. For those of you not in
the know, the bathhouses were places where gay men would have multiple
anonymous partners, and as such were one of the hubs of the American AIDS
crisis. One of the owners turned to a doctor after a meeting and said, “What do
you care? We make money when they come here, you make money when they get
sick.” Another said, “There is no evidence that AIDS is a sexually transmitted
disease.” Togther, they made the bile, or something, rise to the back of my
throat.
The AIDS epidemic, as
author Randy Shilts, says, didn’t happen to America, it was allowed to happen.
Between “not inflaming the homophobics while not offending the gays”, government
indifference, from all levels and all parties, scientists arguing over funding
and credit rather than doing research, and gay activists more worried over their
civil right to anonymous multiple partners than the lives of others, AIDS got a
grip in America in a way that could easily have been, if not avoided, certainly
minimised. It’s a book that will make you angry and saddened.
At the same time, you
meet men and women, gay and straight, who were not afraid to tell the truth, to
take on the problems of trying to deal with a disease that was either being ignored
or denied, working with little or no support, inadequate or no funds, watching
friends, loved ones, patients dying around them, fighting in the political,
social, economic, and scientific arenas. Some of them ended up with the disease
themselves but kept going. Some of the good guys are unexpected. For example C
Everett Koop, a Reagan-appointed fundamentalist Christian, was the Surgeon
General who treated AIDS as a public health issue, rather than a moral or
social issue. It was late but it was something.
Some of the people are
inspiring, some infuriating, some touching, some more ambivalent. The infamous
Patient Zero, Gaetan Dugas, deliberately was having sex without telling his
partners he had the disease or taking any precautions. And yet, while he angers
with his actions, he comes across sometimes as a tragic figure, tormented by
chance and his personal demons. Although Shilts has been accused of creating a
gay bogeyman in Dugas, I thought his portrayal was compassionate without losing
sight of Dugas’s role.
The book covers the
year 1980 to 1985 in detail, culminating in Rock Hudson’s announcement of his
disease, when AIDS finally became part of the public discussion. Apart from the
social and political story, it is also fascinating to read how a new disease is
recognised, found, defined and isolated. And for a book full of science,
technical terms, and government departments and acronyms, it’s quite the page
turner. Its believed AIDS arrived in the US in 1976 with the Bicentennial
celebrations. Before then it was already in Africa and France. Only in America,
because of how it first presented, did it become known as the gay disease, with
disasterous consequences worldwide. Shilts was the only journalist to follow
the story from the beginning, and was uniquely placed to write this book. We should be grateful he did.
There is still no cure
for AIDS, only treatments. As more young gay men, as I am told, are thinking
AIDS is no longer a threat, this book may still be timely reading.
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