Step Two – Randy Shilts, the Man With a Mission

But the myth of Patient Zero might have been restricted to the scientific community had it not been for work of queer author Randy Shilts. Shilts was researching his new book on the AIDS crisis, And the Band Played On, and had seen the information relating to Patient Zero. He too read it as meaning the man who had played a key role in introducing and spreading AIDS and determined to find out who this man was. Exactly how he was able to get around the processes that (hopefully) were in place to protect the patient’s identity is not known, but he did. And so it was that the name of French-Canadian air steward Gaetan Dugas began its journey into the public domain – along with the myth that he brought AIDS to America.

Shilts never specifically said that Dugas brought the disease to the States, but he did portray him as a man who knew that he had AIDS and yet continued to have unsafe sex with large numbers of men. Amongst other things, Shilts put words into Dugas’ mouth that he cannot possibly have known he said. For example:

“Back in the bathhouse, when the moaning stopped, the young man rolled over on his back for a cigarette. Gaëtan Dugas reached up for the lights, turning up the rheostat slowly so his partner’s eyes would have time to adjust. He then made a point of eyeing the purple lesions on his chest. ‘Gay cancer,’ he said, almost as if he were talking to himself. ‘Maybe you’ll get it, too.’ “

And the Band Played On is, on the whole, an important record of the early years of the AIDS pandemic, particularly its documentation of the Reagan administration’s criminal neglect. But the anger that drove Shilts’ writing was entirely misinformed and dangerously misguided when it comes to Dugas. Sadly, that misinformation was to lead to an even greater level of misinformation and demonisation of Dugas.

Step Three – Recruiting The Homophobic Press

Concerned that the large (and in every other way extremely important) book was getting little attention in the mainstream media, Shilts editor, Michael Denneny, contacted a publicist friend. That friend advised him to deliberately play into the hands of the homophobic Press and give them the sections on Gaetan Dugas. “Sex, death, glamour and, best of all, he is a foreigner. That would be the icing on the cake.”(1)

And so the misinformation about Dugas was given to the New York Post, a paper with a long-standing reputation for homophobia. It wasn’t a decision that Shilts was happy with but he went along with it anyway on the grounds that it would help build a platform for the real message of the book – that of the Reagan administration’s intransigence to the AIDS crisis.

And so it was that the demonisation of Gaetan Dugas really took off, as the Post announced, in front page, banner headlines, that he was “The Man Who Gave US AIDS”. The story was quickly taken up elsewhere (for example, “Canadian said to have had key role in the spread of AIDS,” New York Times, 7th October, 1987) and the book was a best seller by the following week.

So Shilts finally got a platform for his message about the Reagan administration’s appalling response to the AIDS crisis – even if it was delivered along with a misinformed message about Patient Zero. Unsurprisingly, there was a media clamour to get comments from his family – something that they very wisely ignored.