But it wasn’t just the Dugas family who were unhappy about Shilts’ portrayal of Patient Zero. Many in the gay community feared that it reinforced the stereotype that gay men were sexually – and recklessly – promiscuous; an idea that a homophobic media needed no encouragement in promulgating.

Challenging the Notion of Patient Zero

Challenges to Degas’ designation as Patient Zero began as early as 1988 (AIDS Without End, Andrew R. Moss, Letters, New York Review of Books, December 8th, 1988). But there have been two particularly detailed challenges quite recently in the form of Richard McKay’s book Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic and the film Killing Patient Zero (available on various online networks, such as Bohemia Euphoria in the UK).

Of course, the most obvious ‘challenge’ is that there was never a ‘zero’ in the first place. Dugas was patient ‘O’, because he came from Outside of California. Had he been resident in that state the whole mythology would never even have got off the ground.

After that, the tragedy was that he was too helpful to researchers. There were demonstrable links between him and so many other people with AIDS simply because he kept records of his sexual partners. Had other participants kept similarly detailed records it’s likely that many of them would have exhibited the same level of multiple linkages as Dugas. As it happens, it was largely due to Dugas’ records that  researchers were able to establish that AIDS was caused by a transmissible agent.

And genetic analysis of the blood samples that Dugas gave have also demonstrated that HIV was already infecting gay men in the US long before he came on the scene. For example, an article in Nature magazine on October 26th 2016 said, “The new analysis shows that Mr Dugas’s blood, sampled in 1983, contained a viral strain already infecting men in New York City before he started visiting gay bars there…in 1974.”

It is good to see the amount of effort that has gone into clearing the name of Gaetan Dugas. On the other hand, is it sad to see the amount of resources that have been required to do so, when the original Patient Zero myth comes down to a typographical error and one man’s zeal to discover and ‘expose’ a completely innocent man.

1) Quoted in Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants, by Phil Tiemeyer. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2013.