Monsters In the Bathhouse: Randy Shilts and Gaetan Dugas Student: Jacob Lively, History
Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On helped popularize the concept of a ‘patient
zero’. In Shilts’ popular history of the onset of the AIDS epidemic, Gaetan Dugas is ‘named
and shamed’ as ‘patient zero’ of AIDS, the individual who brought AIDS to America.
Throughout the book, Dugas is portrayed in an overwhelmingly negative fashion. Dugas is
portrayed first as hyper-promiscuous, vain, and careless, and later becomes a predatory
caricature, intentionally spreading AIDS to unsuspecting men. Scholarship focused on the
books has largely been critical, critiquing And the Band Played On for a lack of context given
for Dugas’ actions; the use of marginalizing tropes towards the diseased; homophobic
tropes; not giving sufficient credit to LGBT activists, who helped educate their communities
about sexual safety and health, which helped curb the spread of HIV-AIDS; and leaving a
damaging legacy in media and law. Shilts’ hyper -focus on Dugas seems to be the result of an
internalized homophobia, due to hostility towards gay male promiscuity, Queer politics, and
a desire for the gay community to adopt a more monogamous lifestyle.
Shilts originally started his work on And the Band Played On with the goal of
demonstrating how homophobia caused government inaction towards the AIDS crisis, which
in turn led to tens of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided. By the time the
book was published however much of the book was devoted to the naming and shaming of
Dugas or ‘patient zero’. Shilts first encountered the concept of a ‘patient zero’ from a
Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cluster study consisting of interviews with
AIDS patients, and their partners, about previous s exual contacts. The ‘Cluster of Cases of
the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’ study was published in 1984 and was comprised
56
Made with FlippingBook HTML5