Original subtitles

Um, I don't think I f... really feel any anger.

You know, what I feel is regret at how, um...

One personal story that I'll tell you is,

a very good friend... probably one of my best friends...

he was... uh, had moved to Toronto,

and we were always in touch.

We got together from time to time.

And then, as time goes on, your kind of...

you know, your context kind of broadens,

and you don't see them as much.

And one night, um, my phone rang,

and it was m-my friend.

And there... there was a lot of people in my apartment,

and he just called to say hi.

And, basically, I said, "Hi, great to hear from you."

And I said, uh, "Wow, like, are you still alive?"

Meaning, "I haven't heard from you in a while,

and I can't talk to you right now

because there's a bunch of people here.

So, can I call you back?" And he said, "Sure."

So I hung up.

I didn't call him back.

And about a week later, I heard that he had died,

and I realized that he was calling to say goodbye.

And I had... I said,

"Are you still alive?"

Not even knowing that he was sick.

Like, I didn't know that he had AIDS.

Uh, so...

that's just, like, a personal instance,

but it... it still really haunts me, actually.

"Patient Zero" is the name

doctors and the medical detectives used

to describe this man... the airline steward...

to protect his identity.

I have spoken of Patient Zero

to people who weren't around at that time,

and when they realized that... who I'm talking about

and that I actually knew that person

and that that was a... a real person

rather than, you know, somebody eight foot tall

dripping blood from the mouth,

I-It was... Yeah.

It's as if I'm talking about

having known Joan of Arc personally.

The man was Gaétan Dugas,

a 32-year-old Air Canada steward from Quebec

who died in 1984.

None of the straight people that I've talked to kn...

even know what Patient Zero was.

They didn't know who Patient Zero was

or what it was,

which is not the case with gay people.

I mean, if you're gay, you know Patient Zero.

Patient Zero was a man,

the central victim, and victimizer.

The most widespread part

is the idea that this is the man

who introduced AIDS to North America.

I don't know whether he actually brought

the epidemic to the country,

but he certainly was the person

who spread it from one end of the country to the other.

There is just so much wrong

about the concept of a "patient zero."

The second part is that

not only did he cause the epidemic

by being the first case,

but he was somehow doing it deliberately...

that he was trying to spread his infection far and wide

across the United States and beyond.

He reportedly crisscrossed North America,

feeding an enormous homosexual appetite

with hundreds of liaisons.

This, um, sort of golden man-child...

if you will.

A very handsome airline steward.

And, suddenly, to die on the front page like that...

Dugas's family would only say

that parts of the story are false,

and that only God knows the truth.

It's funny to say... Gaétan always used to say to me,

"One day, I'll be a star."

Well, he might be a star now, you know?

Like, he go... I mean, he was known.

Like, people knew him,

but I don't think that's what he meant

when he said, "One day, I'll be a star, darling."

Okay.

♪ F-F-Fever ♪

The chair is yours.

The chair is yours.

The chair is yours.

♪ Feel the burn ♪

♪ Feel the burn ♪

♪ Feel the burn ♪

♪ Fever, fever, fever, fever, feeeeever ♪

♪ Feel the burn ♪

♪ Feel the burn ♪ ♪ Feel the burn ♪

♪ Fever, fever, fever, fever, feeeeever ♪

I'm Ray Redford.

I was a friend of Gaétan's.

"Gaétan was something different.

A man on the glittering edge.

Flamboyantly and defiantly and happily gay,

seemingly unconcerned about what others thought."

♪ Moon lights up the night ♪

♪ Burning, burning, burning ♪

♪ I light up when you call my name ♪

♪ Know I'm gonna treat you right ♪

♪ You give me fever ♪

My name is Gaétane, with a "E" at the end.

Makes me a little bit different w... than Gaétan.

Well, I grew up in Montreal, and he grew up in Quebec City.

So we, um...

we had the same French humor, if you want.

Eh, you know, I s... We always blamed the other one

because we're both blonde.

And which? Gaétan or Gaétane?

No, no, no, no. I say, "Gaétane."

He was adopted,

and I s... believe he had five sisters,

and they just hovered over him.

They just love him.

But that's about the extent

of the family I know.

Whatever, uh, prejudice I had

going into the house... you know, expecting,

"Who are these people to have raised this monster?"...

w-was, uh, sort of, uh, immediately shredded

when I caught sight of the fridge door

and this prayer card for Gaétan.

In French, there was, uh, you know,

"In memory of... of Gaétan Dugas, uh,

our beloved son."

The love... There was so much love

in that one little gesture on the fridge door.

I don't know when he came out to his family,

but I believe his family knew for a long time,

and they were very supportive.

Unfortunately, not all the men I worked with

had that experience.

Um, at least one supervisor I worked with

who started as a flight attendant,

his family disowned him when he came out,

and he never spoke to them again.

It's to the best of my knowledge.

Growing up gay in the late '60s, early '70s was unspeakable.

It was something you couldn't talk about,

confide even in your closest friends.

When you live in a culture that tells you

your very innate self is wrong,

you're a perfect bullying victim.

Growing up, I had no idea whatsoever...

a-anything about gayness,

gay people, homosexuals.

If you were a young kid, even a child...

some people were children... in, say, the '50s or the '60s...

perhaps before, but I'm not that old...

and you noticed in yourself,

you know, that you were gay or were af...

you fearfully suspected it,

there was no place to find out about it.

It didn't exist in the popular culture at all.

I never was remotely aware of being gay.

I had very intense friendships with other girls,

but I never really put, you know,

five and five together, let alone two and two.

You know, growing up in a... a, you know...

a Chinese... old fashioned Chinese family,

you... you just didn't talk about it.

You didn't learn about it or anything like that.

And you like to play, you know, um, skipping

and jump rope and things like that

rather than baseball.

When I was probably eight or nine,

two gay guys moved into our... onto our street.

They bought a house and moved onto our street.

And everybody was sort of giggling about...

One liked to garden and one liked to paint.

And so, it was one of those things that was sort of,

you know, really embedded on my mind

that that was not something that was a good thing.

I remember looking up the word "homosexuality,"

and it said something about "extreme"...

you know, "e-e-extreme perversion"

and "depraved" and all that.

But I remember how thrilled I was

to discover that I existed.

It was really, uh... It was sort of strange,

where you would gather up your sense of self-worth

or who and what you were.

And when there were images,

they were really incredibly negative.

I do remember "Diamonds Are Forever."

I remember seeing that as a teenager

with my parents at the musical theater

on Tremont Street in Boston

and being absolutely mortified

by the very creepy queer villains

and sitting there with my parents

and listening to people sort of laugh at the...

at these, uh...

It... It was pretty awful.

1967, CBS had a documentary I remember watching

that was just so homophobic and hateful and, uh, really...

"The Homosexuals"...

with CBS News correspondent Mike Wallace.

Americans consider homosexuality more harmful to society

than adultery, abortion, or prostitution.

So, they actually got a real-life homosexual

to speak on camera,

but they backlit him and, uh, changed the voice

so that no one would see who they were.

And so, that was my first introduction

to know that there were these strange creatures

called "homosexuals," but they were obviously so disgusting

that they could not possibly appear on television.

This man is 27.

He was unable to hold a job because of his inability

to contain his homosexual inclinations.

He's been in jail three times for committing homosexual acts.

If he is arrested once more,

he faces the possibility of life in prison.

Uh, I know that inside now, I am sick.

I'm not sick just sexually.

I'm sick in a lot of ways.

It was on a little bit later at night.

It was close to my bedtime.

I remember my parents watching it,

and I remember wanting to hear everything that was being said

but afraid that if I looked too attentive,

it would be something suspicious.

And it was scar...

From what I heard and what I could listen to

and from what little I saw, I remember thinking,

"This is bad. This is terrible.

This is"...

You know, this is really...

not a way to live one's life.

The average homosexual is promiscuous.

He is not interested in

nor capable of a lasting relationship

like that of a heterosexual marriage.

His sex life... his love life...

consists of a series of chance encounters

at the clubs and bars he inhabits.

I mean, I remember myself thinking in the late '50s,

when I wasn't sure, you know, what was going on with me...

um, I decided it was a phase I was going through

and I would just enjoy it.

And if I was still gay when I graduated from college,

I would just commit suicide.

I was living in an all-male dorm,

and it was like gym class around the clock.

You know, "Did you catch the game last night?"

I mean, I didn't even know what sport they were referring to.

The guys on my floor realized I was gay,

and I just...

I just, like, had a breakdown.

I went up on the roof of the high-rise dorm.

I actually thought about jumping off.

We didn't want to be...

Well, I sure did not want to be flamboyant.

I was holding back all the time

because you didn't want to come across as being "that way."

So...

I preferred to not be perceived as being gay.

Somehow, I got the impression that I... I... I...

I would be treated better that way,

where Gaétan was already so obvious

that he must have dealt with that

by just being even more glowing.

Bec... He would have been obvious as a gay person.

Uh, I thought it was very brave of him.

He's never a... He was not holding back anything.

He was ahead of his time, in a way... he was.

He was who he was,

and he didn't pretend to be straight.

Uh, some of the men I worked with past,

he didn't... he didn't really pretend anything.

Um, internalized homophobia was a given.

It would be like if you talked about...

if you talk about any minority...

Blacks or women... if you just scratch...

or Jews... if you scratch the surface,

you will discover a lot of internalized prejudice.

I remember having a boyfriend who had, again,

such internalized homophobia

that he said to me, at one point,

"I think that there's"...

"I think the worst thing that can happen to somebody

is being gay."

It was one of those relationships

where I realized there was no possibility

of that working out,

because if he didn't love

what was an integral part of him,

how could he love somebody who represented that?

Well, I-I'm reminded of Paul Monette

and his... his... his thesis

that we all make fine concierges.

That there's just something about a gay man or a gay woman

that wants to please others,

um, that is still se... searching for a level of acceptance

and, um, understanding

that is always sometime seems to be

just... just outside of their grasp.

Coming of age in the '60s and '70s,

there was a constant message out there... a negative message

that two gay men couldn't love each other.

I mean, it was considered a joke.

It was considered unworkable.

It was considered a-a fantasy.

And that pernicious lie

that gets woven into your psyche and into your being...

um, kind of contributed to the kind of lifestyle

that led to these rising epidemics of STDs.

But underneath it all, there is that message...

you know, that two men together is just...

As one expert said,

"One penis plus one penis equals nothing."

As if we're always reduced to our sexuality

instead of our humanity.

People who are young

do not understand in any real way...

even if they know the fact...

homosexuality was against the law.

It was against the law.

Not just "your parents didn't like you,"

you know, or your... you know, people

you went to school with didn't like you.

It was actually a crime.

There was a special squad of police

who used to hang out in public washrooms

looking for gay behavior

and then arresting people who exhibited it.

And those names and numbers would go in the paper.

We were warned about who... who to speak to.

Uh, if the guys were too good-looking,

they were possibly cops

who were in there, um, to pick you up

and then beat you up.

Take them down to, uh, one of the beaches,

and basically leave them there beat up.

Which was kind of, um, you know,

a... a regular weekend happening.

If you were found out...

I mean, a lot of people kind of...

people kind of knew, if you played the game right,

you'd be okay.

But if you affirmed or asserted yourself

or pushed in any way, shape, or form,

lose your job like that.

You lose your job anyway without doing that.

There were no civil liberties protections of any kind.

Stonewall was like a thunderclap.

The fact that gays had fought back

was astonishing to me.

There was a generation of young gay people

who were more militarized.

They weren't content with,

"Oh, well, you really shouldn't be raiding gay bars.

You shouldn't be arresting drag queens."

When it yet again got raided by the police,

the patrons decided, "Enough is enough.

We're not going to put up with this anymore."

And there was what's referred to as the Stonewall riots.

And that... for most certainly gay men...

um, marks th-the beginning of the gay liberation movement.

Gay rights now!

Gay rights now! Gay rights now!

Gaétan Dugas epitomized a politic of a deep pleasure

in the community we built up out of Stonewall

against the odds... against the Anita Bryants,

against the rise of the Reagan right.

I love homosexuals, if you can believe that.

I love them enough to tell them the truth,

because I know that there is hope for the homosexuals...

that if they're willing to, uh, turn from, uh, sir.

The same as any individual,

that, uh... that they can be ex-homosexuals,

the same as there can be an ex-murderer

an ex-thief, or ex-anybody.

♪ Air Canada ♪

♪ Gives you the sky ♪

♪ Come share our pride ♪

We had a crew lounge

where we had to check in all the time,

and they were... everybody was talking about Gaétan...

how beautiful he was, and so on.

So I was obviously curious to see.

And one day, I was in the comms center,

and I saw him.

Big smile.

And we clicked right away.

We... we were friends instantly.

I appreciated working with Gaétan

because I didn't have to follow him around.

I didn't have to say, "Well, you know,

this is how we're supposed to do it.

Why are you taking shortcuts?"

Working for an airline

was really a good home for... for gay... gay guys,

gay people, lesbian, ehm, because they were

extremely, extremely good workers.

Of course, the airline, they were not blind to all this.

They hired a lot of gay people.

In fact, I would say at the time,

it must have been at least 75%,

80% of the guys were gay.

Word was out, at least among the gay people...

and probably even more around the street people...

that here was this, you know, uh, outrageous gay guy...

um, you know, who, um...

Well, outrageous gay guy.

Oh, yes. That was Gaétan's attitude.

Yeah. Like, you know?

He doesn't have a problem about being gay.

You do, so deal with it.

He even add this shirt that just... that...

tight, tight, tight,

which was not the... the airline rule.

But he... You know, he...

And his pants were so tight

you could see everything, basically.

I would say he was more than fairly flamboyant.

He was incredibly flamboyant.

He loved eyeshadows...

a little bit of blue or purple...

and he, um, also had, um, uh, mascara.

How do you describe charisma?

You know, but, yes, he walked down the hall,

and you could see him stand out, you know?

But he was very kind of, uh...

You know, he flowed.

But a great personality.

You could tell right away.

Very smiling and joking right away.

Both of us, we used to

color our hair the same color,

and we'd do it on his couch

watching "The Young and the Restless."

I did get a white Corvette.

Well... he said,

"Oh, we must go for a ride.

We must go for a ride."

So we did...

and you'd... you would think that Gaétan would sit down

in the passenger seat, and that's it.

No, he was sitting in the back

the moment we got to Young Street

waving at the people.

And I said, "I don't care."

You know, everybody was laughing in a way or waving.

Actually, I've got copies

of those pictures right here. Oh, you did? Okay.

Yeah, I'm wondering if you would... So, can you see one?

Can you... Here.Ah.

Gaétan i-in my...

the white Corvette.

My best friend that died from AIDS, McDonald.

Yeah. He's right there.

He was with Gaétan at the time.

Hairdresser in Yorkville.

The sweetest man.

French Canadian again.

That was a good time

because there was...

Was AIDS around at the time?

I don't know, but there was no worry.

We were having fun.

♪ Ooh ♪

♪ Ooh-ooh ♪

♪ Ooh ♪

♪ Ooh-ooh ♪

The '70s were just fabulous.

Um, you know, not only was there was all...

there was all this sex,

and there was all this... all these drugs going around,

and we didn't yet know

that drugs were really not a good idea.

You know, it is true that you could not believe

what New York was like back then.

You know, people would le... be... I w...

I would be, like, walking down the street

with a friend of mine... a... a man who's gay...

and I... I would be talking to him,

and then he would be gone.

You know, and he would be like... He saw someone

in the street, they looked at each other, and they left.

All through the '70s,

sex was kind of the gay man's obligation.

You had to prove that you were a gay man

by having as much sex as possible

because this was gay liberation.

And so, I remember being introduced to Gaétan.

We didn't really click,

and I... I can tell you why is because Gaétan

was a much more sexually adventurous person

than I ever was.

He was really, I think, the first gay man

that went out and said, "This is my lifestyle."

And I remember saying to the straight guy, who I didn't know,

"Are you telling me that if there was a street in New York

filled with beautiful 20-year-old girls

who you could just look at

and take into a doorway or something,

that you wouldn't do it? You would do it.

You just can't do it because women won't do it."

I mean, a small price to pay

for owning the world, I would say.

Being in a queer club

or just a disco club early on,

once you make it, you know, in the door past the doormen,

there's liberation on the dance floor.

What it was, was anonymous.

You did not know the name of the person,

which meant you did not know

whether this person was a truck driver,

you know, or Vice President of Chase Bank.

Because we thought that sex was good for you.

Like kale.

Like, New York was a... a-an orgy.

I don't even describe it.

And... And, to me, it seemed like

you couldn't possibly have sex with so many different people.

What could be healthier? What could be more delightful?

Feminists were celebrating and reclaiming clitoral orgasm

as... as essential to women's sexuality.

It was as if gay men were busy discovering

that the other half of their dick

was inside their rectum.

It was a golden age while.

Oh, it was.

Yeah, a golden age.

Houses in, like... Well, in the '70s?

Kind of fun.

Kind of great.

I mean, you know.

The bathhouses were meeting places.

That's where you met people.

You went dancing, and then you went

to the bathhouse, you know?

You're probably aware that the Continental Baths

had Bette Midler.

No one had to say, "Oh, this is Rock Hudson calling."

We would walk him around to the booths

and shove him in a booth, and you could hear someone go,

"Oh, my God, it's Rock Hudson!"

Elton John is right there, and he's dancing right beside.

Calvin Klein recently in "The New York Times"

made a comment saying that the three great decades

of the 20th century were Berlin in the '20s,

Paris and the '30s, and New York City in the '70s.

And I... I agree with him.

They had discotheques

and yes-gay discotheques everywhere...

London, New York, San Francisco...

all these places that we flew to.

And I got very clearly, I think,

that, uh, Gaétan liked having encounters

that were no responsibility.

Sliding his business card.

Or, th... Or, they were coming from passengers.

Gaétan had said, "Di-Did you notice

the... the guy in such-and-such's seat?

Cute.

I bet you I can make more time with him

than you can."

Uh, which often was true.

"This guy is definitely straight.

There's no way, Gaétan."

Well, you know, he's gonna do anything with him,

but the passenger go.

It was more important

to have a party for him, obviously.

But it was such a revelation...

uh, to discover that...

that anal sex could be pleasurable and clea...

I mean, it was kind of an acquired taste.

You didn't just... Usually, you didn't jump into it.

There was a whole subculture

that went with learning how to bottom...

learning how to relax, learning how to douche,

learning how to open up.

You know, it wasn't just about sex.

It was about men loving man.

It was about seeing other gay men as your brother

and caring about them and making love to them

and being tender with them and affectionate with them

and having relationships with them.

Gaétan actually told me that he had a project

of having sex with a different man every night.

It was just kind of an entertainment.

Like, it... it was a project he worked on

with great, uh, intensity and effort and success.

Well, you know, if you scored, say, two nights a week,

and you did that for a year, that's 100 people.

So, from '71 to '81, that's 1,000 people.

Your average gay man probably had sex

with 1,000 people in that decade.

And I'm sure Gaétan Dugas had sex

with many more than 1,000 people.

Ooh, yes.

He was an extremely sexual man.

He was always ready.

Always ready, okay? You never knew.

I was going to work, and he had his backpack,

and, er, there was something in the backpack, and it fell.

So, I said, "Oh, what's that..."

I can't go anywhere without that."

I'm sorry.

So he picked it up right away and put it in his pocket

Like, "Was he sexual?" I would say so.

♪ Ooooooh-ooh ♪

Sex, drugs, disco.

♪ Ooh-ooh ♪

Uh, sex.

♪ Ooooooh-ooh ♪

But as the '70s wore on

and the commercialization of gay male sex exploded,

you no longer had to care about the movement.

You could just come in, get your rocks off, and go.

And it didn't really force you to, um, think politically

about, um, this being an opportunity for America

to move forward in terms of its empathy

and understanding and bridging all these divides

that the culture creates to keep us apart

instead of united.

You know, it's very easy to fall into the hedonistic side

because it's intoxicating,

but there was a price to pay, I think, for that.

You could see from the lifestyle of New York

that candles were being burned at both ends.

Yeah, it's great fun.

But if it was a lifestyle, uh, it was gonna burn out.

Young men full of testosterone and opportunity.

Something was likely to happen.

Friend of mine called from the other side of San Francisco,

but he was straight, and he said,

"Hey, have you heard about the new gay cancer?

Ha-ha, there's a gay cancer out there."

I w... Tha... No.

That's crazy.

Being gay has nothing to do with cancer.

Um...

And then, it just got awful.

It got worse and worse and worse from that moment on.

I wish I had never heard the term "gay cancer."

This is very early '81.

There's something going on,

Uh, there's some people

in the New York City emergency rooms

with gay men, you know, who are seriously ill.

And, uh, within a week or so,

there were a couple of deaths reported.

I had referred a man with a rash...

gay man with a peculiar sort of rash

to my consultant dermatologist.

And he phoned me back to postulate to me,

"Isn't it a little strange?

The... All these very strange rashes

that we've started seeing in gay men?"

I remember the first person I knew who had AIDS,

but no one knew what he had, and he died.

I was so shocked. You know, "What did he die of?"

Because we were too young to be dying.

Reading the newspaper that morning,

there was the famous little paragraph.

"Eight New Yorkers died of mysterious gay cancer."

And word was filtering from Fire Island.

The whispers had begun.

There were a lot of gay men coming to my practice

who had unexplained lymphadenopathy,

and lymphadenopathy is swelling of lymph glands.

It could be in the neck, under the arms.

And there was no easy explanation for it,

as well as this peculiar occurrence

of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia

in gay men in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

We began to realize that this wasn't

just a crazy, homophobic media story.

There was something serious going on here.

I was totally paranoid and scared shitless

I was in a state of perpetual paranoia, and so was everybody.

Everybody thought, "Oh, my God, I've got it."

So, this young nurse had been admitted to the hospital

the night before, uh, in September of that year.

Came to my office with a purple spot

on the bottom of each foot...

and biopsy showed that it was Kaposi's sarcoma.

Kaposi's sarcoma had been recognized

as a very rare form of skin cancer...

um, little reddish or purplish lumps

appearing on the skin, often on the feet,

and, uh, mostly seeming to affect older men.

Normally, there are fewer than 20 cases

of Kaposi a year in the United States,

but in the last 18 months,

more than 300 cases have been reported.

The Kaposi's sarcoma that was affecting the younger gay men

as part of this emergent new condition, um,

became known as AIDS was far more aggressive,

far more disseminated.

The... the thing about it

the sort of vaguely got my attention

was the idea that it was an infectious cancer,

'cause there aren't any

infectious cancers, by and large.

Well, there are some cases

of something we don't really know ex... yet what it is.

They all seem to have immune deficiency.

We have no idea what's causing it.

"Is this something?

Okay, is this something we should all know about?"

And beginning to... to kind of come to terms with... with that.

I remember in San Francisco,

people called it "gay waiter's disease."

But of course, I mean, "gay waiter"

was like a redundant phrase in San Francisco.

A lot of people got it.

Bang-bang-bang. With the airline, mostly.

We were all over the place.

It's...

I-It's hard to explain how you feel at the time,

where you can die if you do what?

I don't know.

It was, um...

a time when we didn't stop partying and having sex...

because that connection hadn't been made...

but there was there a unease in the gay community about,

did we actually dare go out i-into a club

and, uh, you know, breathe the air

from all these gay people?

It's a bit difficult in the sense of,

sometimes, you need to know what you're looking for

in order to find it.

And when you really don't know what it is,

it becomes that much harder to find.

You didn't have to be a rocket scientist

to figure out that this was going to be a problem

when you saw two cases and then four cases

and then eight cases.

I mean, that's an exponential growth.

My hunch at the time

was that this was gonna be an epidemic...

and, unfortunately, my hunch was right.

I think when w-we realized

what a big epidemic it was,

it became very frightening.

You know, how is this gonna end?

I remember talking to a very prominent virologist

in Boston who said, "What if it becomes airborne?"

And I s... all I could say is, "Everybody will die."

It was a terrible period because of the uncertainty.

You don't know exactly... how is it transmitted?

"Am I infected with the... a death sentence here?"

The-There were all sorts of weird theories.

Uh, the... the most common was poppers.

Poppers are wonderful.

They make you feel a sense of euphoria.

They're basically vasodilators.

They give you... They give you a quick high,

and, uh, they were being used a lot amongst gay men.

And everybody was praying

that it was gonna be poppers, you know?

'Cause we could give up poppers.

Or it was gonna be S&M, or it was gonna be fisting,

or it was gonna be something we could give up.

Gay men were getting a lot of infections at that time...

hepatitis and amoebas and whatnot.

And it was thought that

they were overloading their immune systems,

and this... what you were seeing with AIDS,

which was clearly an immune system disease,

was the result of this overload.

Was this the CIA?

Was this a urban myth?

Let's... Let's ignore it at all costs,

because it's... it's got to be a...

it's got to be a right-wing plot.

And, certainly, the right-wing exploited it and demonized us

in... in exactly that way.

So it's very understandable

that people like myself or Gaétan

would plug our ears somewhat, especially in the early years,

even as we started to see friends getting sick

and friends dying.

Throughout the summer of 1981,

we recorded interviews from AIDS cases.

We were struck by how sick they were...

also about their lifestyles.

That they had tended to be very sexually active gay men,

travel a lot, use a lot of drugs,

but we didn't know what the risk factors were.

So we developed a case definition,

distribute it to doctors, health departments,

teaching hospitals.

And as for cases, we reported

two health departments, and then to CDC.

Bill Darrow was a... a... a research sociologist, uh,

in the STD division

and an expert on sexual behavior, uh,

both in gay men and in heterosexual populations.

We get this report that three men in Los Angeles

are... all are in the same hospital.

They apparently have the same condition.

And the lover of one of these men says...

and the three have had sex with one another.

This suggests that it's not poppers.

You know, he didn't say

that they were sniffing the same substance.

That they had sex with one another.

That's when the question came.

"Well, are there any other sexual connections

in Los Angeles?

Let's have Bill Darrow fly out to Los Angeles

and pursue the possibility of a cluster of cases

connected by sexual contact within the last five years."

So the first person that came in was actually a flight attendant,

and, um, he... he said that, you know, um,

"One of my sex partners

has been a very attractive steward

who flies for Air Canada.

Handsome guy, really nice guy, and I've had sex with him."

"Can you tell me any more about him?"

"Well, he kind of has an accent.

Um, can't remember his name."

In the afternoon, we talked to a second person

and gave a very similar story.

We had to drive all the way out to Orange County

to interview this third person.

And we got around to this business of naming sex partners,

and here comes this same

French Canadian flight attendant.

"Can you remember his name?"

He said, "You know, I think I've got a card

or some information in my address book.

Let me... Let me go see if I can find it."

So, he excused himself, he went into his bedroom,

and he came back with a big smile on his face.

"I've got it! I've got it! I got it!

Here's his name!

I had sex with him on Thanksgiving,

8709 Club,

and afterwards, I came down with hepatitis.

And then, he came back in December,

I had sex with him again, and I bet that's when

I got this disease that I've got now."

"What's his name?" He says, "Here it is."

Dugas had experienced fever and noticed swollen lymph nodes

since January, 1980.

When I met him,

he had two visible spots of KS,

visible when he's wearing clothing.

One was on his forearm,

and one was on the tip of his nose.

The CDC numbered the cases

in the order in which they came to the attention of CDC...

the order in which they were reported.

So there had to have been 56 other people reported to us

before he would... would report it to us.

And so, that's how I found out more about him.

And then, I followed up

by calling him and introducing myself.

And lo and behold, you know, before anything else happens,

I'm meeting him in New York.

I'm flying up to New York the next week.

There was certainly a lot of fear

because there was still a lot that was unknown about it.

And so, I had no idea

what the impact was going to be on me, um,

as a result of having had sex with Gaétan.

So, um, we were just...

a-a group of us all had just gone out to a...

to a tea dance in the afternoon,

and he was a friend of a friend of mine.

And one thing led to another,

and we ended up going home together.

He was very full of life.

He was charming.

Um, he just had a lot of fun and a lot of energy.

Yeah, it was definitely risky.

I was... I bottomed for him, so...

Week after we had, um, gone home together,

I was talking with this mutual friend of ours,

and I was saying, you know, "He seemed like a really nice guy."

And he said, "Oh, yeah. He's got that weird gay cancer."

And I was like, "What gay cancer?"

I'd never heard of it.

It was the first sort of time

that anybody had even referenced something like that,

and I sort of let it drop.

And then, um, I started to hear a little bit more about it,

and then I started to see, uh, news about it.

And so, that became much more, again, embedded in my mind,

and it was something that started to really impact

my thought process.

This was something, um...

with the potential to impact our community

and... and... and other communities

in... in much bigger ways.

And so, suddenly, all of these boys

who had had to hide who they were for years

and pretend they weren't

and deny to their parents that they were gay

and they weren't married because they were bachelors.

We don't have bachelors anymore.

Suddenly, they could be who they were.

And now, we had a disease come along and say,

"You can't do that"?

We had finally found our moment in time

where we could have sex.

We could have af fa... affairs.

We could do what we wanted, finally,

and no one could say, "No, you can't do that" anymore.

And to have AIDS crash into that party...

Oh, my goodness.

So, you had, on the one hand,

this gay sexual liberation

and... and people really experiencing

what it was like to be gay in a way they'd never

been able to do before.

And a move to the right, from a government standpoint...

it was a perfect storm

because it allowed that group to come in and say,

"This is the price you pay.

What you are and what you do is wrong."

No more faggots!

No more faggots! No more faggots!

No more faggots! Denneny: A disease that only hits gay men,

hits them in their sexuality.

I mean, i-it was like the perfect metaphor

for the homophobia of the whole society.

And it did seem to me

that reality is not supposed to come

already packed with the metaphors.

You know, it's like everything we gained was...

looked like it was being taken away from us again.

I still remember a relative in Europe...

When they found out that I was gay,

and they just turned to me and said,

"Well, AIDS will get you."

The timing of it all was really eerie,

so there is something uncanny about it.

It's very Shakespearean, the way that this happened.

To have this breakthrough...

to get this incredible outpouring, um, of support,

of acceptance, of a community coming into its own,

of demanding a... a place at the table,

of having great success in almost every sector...

and then to just be wiped out, um,

as if in some diabolical plan.

Willie Brown actually said this to me early on.

He said something to the effect of,

"This occurring right now...

with gay rights just having happened...

would be like telling black people

they have to go back to the back of the bus."

When I went to interview the "Out of California" case,

I was very impressed with him.

He... He seemed like an intelligent person.

He was very well dressed.

At the time, he didn't have any hair

because he had just completed a round of chemotherapy.

But he was very concerned about his condition

and about the concern of other people, as well.

Uh, because many of his friends in New York City

and even some in Canada had very similar symptoms

to the symptoms that he was experiencing,

and some of his friends were so ill that they had died.

So he was very cooperative

when I started asking him questions about his sex life.

And I said, "How about your sex partners?"

And he says, "Well, I can remember a few of them,

but, gee, I've had so many, and I hope you understand why.

I'm in a different town every night.

I'm a young guy, so I go out every night and I have fun."

So he averaged about 250 different sex partners a year.

I said, "Do you have an address book?

Little black book?"

He says, "I do."

I said, "Would you mind sharing the names with me?"

He said, "No, I'll be glad to."

And he started reading me notes.

He read me 72 names before he said,

It's 6:30. I've got to go."

If other people had the same amount

of information that he had, we probably would have been able

to make many more connections

and been able to have solved this jigsaw puzzle

much faster than we did.

Here is the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

In this report, there were no figures.

There's no graphs, but there is reference

to an "out of California" case.

Everybody gets the idea that this guy, at that point,

was the person who brought AIDS to California.

That was sort of... It wasn't called AIDS yet,

by the way, at this point.

It was still called GRID.

GRID... Gay Related Immunodeficiency,

which made the whole disease seem as though

it was the result of somebody's sexual orientation

rather than action...

You know, some action they had taken,

something they had encountered.

A microbe.

We had this hotline on Castro Street...

and this patient would turn up.

The minute he did, the hotline would light up.

He's here.

He's having sex with people.

He tells them he's... he, uh, has the gay cancer.

By the end of the summer of 1982,

Kaposi's sarcoma was summoning a huge amount of attention

and upset in San Francisco.

Anybody with KS lesions who continued to go out

would draw attention.

And given that we know that Gaétan did not like

to be told what he could or could not do,

it seems quite likely that he would draw attention.

Gaétan Dugas, uh,

was very comfortable

going to various public health people

to talk about his disease.

He met with Selma Dritz, and according to Selma, uh,

she counseled him that he should not have sex...

that he was, perhaps, dangerous.

And he said, "You're not going to tell me

how I should behave."

I told him that he was getting other people sick with it,

and he said, "It's my right to do whatever I want.

My civil rights."

Gaétan had, uh... uh, different beliefs

a-about, uh... a-a-about his condition.

Uh, his approach was, "Show me, prove to me

how this disease is transmitted,

and if I'm doing anything that i-is transmitting it,

I may acknowledge it...

if you can prove to me that this is the case."

I don't remember what, uh, triggered me

to call Air Canada, but I did call Air Canada.

I wanted to talk to the, um, Medical Director

a-and, um, find out if there was some way

to limit his ability to travel.

A doctor telling us we've got to start w...

you know, uh, watching what we do sexually

and that there's, you know... it's... it's troubled,

and we gotta, you know, curtail our activities.

I totally understood the f... terror

that gay men had about AIDS pushing us back into the arms

of the medical establishment.

It was only in the very early '70s that, um...

that, uh, homosexuality was no longer seen as a disease,

It was taken out of the, uh...

the Diagnostic Statistical Manual

of the American Psychiatric Association.

And so, doctors had always been trying to cure us.

A flight attendant in 1982

looked terrible on chemotherapy...

like death warmed over.

He had lost hair and weight.

Nonetheless, Dugas' attitude carried him through.

He was always hopeful

and kept saying he would beat it.

I can remember sending Gaétan encouraging letters.

I have a card that he sent me in January, 1982,

when he was feeling depressed about the loss of hair.

Saying he feels like an alien.

96% of all the people I saw then died.

Smallpox, Ebola, only kills 60%...

and we were talking about...

virtually everyone was going to die.

Had that been happening to any other group in the society,

there would have been massive hysteria

all over the country, you know?

And, in fact, what we got was total silence.

It's more like what happens in a war, you know?

Where, you know, all of a sudden,

a whole generation of people, you know, are put

in this incredible danger, and many of them die.

It was such an extreme difference

from people who are like 25 and look 25,

And then, in five minutes, they looked 95.

It... It's terrible because it's a slow death, in a way,

and you see the body basically decompose

in front of your face.

A... A beautiful man is turning into...

nothing.

There's a fellow actor...

uh, named, uh, Joe Cappetta,

that became ill and died fairly early on

who was hospitalized.

The food service worker

wouldn't bring his... his tray into the room.

Just set it on the floor outside.

A lot of hospitals...

especially outside of San Francisco...

they wouldn't let the partner come visit their lover

in... in bed as he was dying

because he wasn't a "family member."

They didn't want you around at all.

You... They were ashamed of you.

And you did this to him, probably.

We were being vilified by the media,

by right wing politicians.

I mean, truly vilified.

But then, we have to remember

that there were mainstream figures

who suggested putting gay people...

people with HIV... in... in camps.

Um, tattooing "HIV" on... on our bodies.

The only way to stop them... stop it is quarantine people.

I-I-I don't think there's any way around it.

I think they're gonna have to do it.

Lovers were thrown out of their boyfriends' apartments.

Um, they were not allowed

to go to the funeral of their partner who had died.

Uh, it's... it's...

it's really grotesque, the way that people behave.

You know, very much in the same way

that, in 2016, you said,

"Who are these people who voted for that man?"

You knew who those people were back then in the 1980s.

They haven't gone away.

I mean, the Reagan Administration

simply didn't want to acknowledge the problem.

It was said at the time... and I think it's true...

if the outbreak had occurred in a heterosexual population,

they would be all over it.

But it was easy to marginalize gay men

at the time and say, "Well, who cares?"

There was an interview done with Larry Speakes,

who was the Press Secretary to President Reagan,

where he was asked about the AIDS epidemic.

And he said, "What's that?"

Patient Zero was clearly a very helpful person to us.

He didn't have to be. He didn't have to give us

the names of his sex partners, but he did,

and that turned out to be extremely useful

because it allowed Bill Darrow to contact those people,

follow up on them,

find out who else they had sex with,

and construct the cluster.

But then, we wanted to see how far the cluster went.

We only had information about Los Angeles

and this one Out of California Case.

So I went up to New York, and I followed up

on the 72 different partners that he named.

The important thing was to try to show

that there were connections between Los Angeles cases

and cases in other parts of the United States.

Here's the original drawing

on a piece of, um, yellow paper...

about Case 57,

which was the person later referred to

as the Out of California Case

and a drawing showing connections.

Two exposures with a case in 1979.

Um, a case... Case Number 40.

Um, here he is going to Toronto.

Here he is at NYU.

So, here, "Case 57 is described

as a 30-year-old flight attendant from Toronto."

I lost contact

with Gaétan for a while

the moment he... he left for Vancouver.

And I saw him once.

He was running through the terminal.

And we embrace, and we chat,

but he had very, very short hair at the time.

He had a few spots on his face.

And I noticed that there was a fairly common theme

that, e-essentially, Gaétan in Vancouver

was the personage... the face of AIDS,

a-and it just seemed so ludicrous.

There were stories that Gaétan was having unprotected sex

with, uh, other... other people.

And i-it was, uh... h-he was reported

that he was in the bars

and he was going home with people,

and this sort of thing.

And AIDS Vancouver felt like they needed

to have some kind of response to address what...

what these rumors represented.

I do remember specifically having a conversation with him

about promiscuity and bathhouses and etc., etc.

He said, "You know, people just don't get it,

eh, because if I was in the bathhouses

the way they say that I'm in the bathhouses,

I'd be exposing myself to all kinds of random,

opportunistic infections.

I have... I don't know m-much about it,

but I learned when I did go to the bathhouses

or have a lot of casual sex, I used to come down with things,

and they were hard to get rid of,

so I just stopped doing it."

He wasn't having casual sex.

Good evening.

I'm Michael Papas with Channel 10

"Gayblevision Vancouver."

There was a recent panel discussion in Vancouver.

On the panel were doctors and other men

associated with the AIDS problem.

An overflow crowd attended,

seeking information and other advice

as to how to deal with the AIDS problem in Vancouver.

On the panel that evening

was Dr. Brian Willoughby, who explained.

AIDS... the... the disease

we're here to talk about today, then...

is a new phenomenon wherein people's ability

to fight infection is defective.

They had brought in a v... uh, a person

from the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City.

What brings me here is our concern over an epidemic

that is killing gay men...

all over the world,

The doctors presented as much, I think, as they knew,

and I... my recollection is, they tried to be

pretty scrupulous about what they didn't know.

So, one of the things you can do

to decrease your risk of contracting AIDS

is to decrease the number of different sexual partners.

There was almost disbelief in the room

that that was something that we needed to do,

because it was a New York thing or a San Francisco thing.

It wasn't a Vancouver thing.

The things we do know about it

in terms of who suffers from it...

certainly suggests that it is some kind of infection.

We, the panel, talked for maybe about an hour...

you know, 10 or 15 minutes each...

and then the floor was open for questions.

Can I... Can I take this question?

Screwing around didn't...

doesn't give somebody AIDS.

I mean, it does, and it doesn't.

In other words, every contact you have,

you're increasing your opportunity of being infected

if, in fact, this is a contagious agent,

which has never been proven.

I believe there's some kind of, um, tests

being done on AIDS in Vancouver.

Attending that forum af-affected my life

very, very distinctly

in as much as the concept of safe sex was introduced.

And I started to practice safe sex,

which is maybe perhaps one of the reasons

that I'm still here today.

And probably the third or fourth person to get up

had a French Canadian accent.

A man went up to the mic.

I only saw him from the back.

And that was Gaétan.

It was a little difficult to understand exactly...

some of the concepts he was trying to convey,

but what I appreciated about his interaction there

was that he was standing up for himself.

He s-sort of took the tone,

"How can you sit up there advising people

to have less sexual partners to avoid an infectious agent

when you don't even know that this is caused

by an infectious agent?"

Which, on face, is a valid question.

Okay, hey...

And studies indicate that...

And it's not everybody.

So there is a... a chance of risk involved,

but the majority of the people are fairly promiscuous.

It wasn't my place to say, "Get him off the mic,"

but I could tell that we were... that it was turning into

not a public information session,

but a... a kind of battle.

It is speculation, but...

It got to the place where I thought...

"Thhhhhhhh...

This is not really good."

So I leaned over to Jeff Maines and said, "You know,

we need... you need to get him off the microphone soon,

or he will destroy whatever good we may have done

over the last hour with these questions."

And I think what was interesting

about Gaétan's attitude towards that is that, in a way,

he did not want to change his sexual behavior

because there was no s... clear proof.

And... so, again,

I think because he was a... he was this target

for so many people, he was say... he was saying to them,

"Prove to me that this is how you get it,

and then I'll change my behavior.

But until you can prove that,

I'm not gonna change anything."

"I remember, after one medical setback,

holding him in his apartment

and him telling me that he wasn't afraid of being dead.

He was just scared of dying.

He never expressed any great sense

that life had been unjust.

He just seemed determined to make the best

of whatever time he had left."

I thought it was very brave of him to still be working.

He'd taken some time off, and then he'd come back.

I think that was... He came back for a last period,

and when he did come back, he actually looked great.

He was in a good mood, giggling like he always did.

"Dar-ling."

Gaétan was having trouble making it to flights,

and he was booking off last-minute

because he was starting to feel too ill to work.

More than anything, he wanted to keep flying.

He didn't want to be booked off sick.

He loved flying. That was his family.

That was his freedom.

We didn't know who would survive this

or who wouldn't survive this.

It was possible that, you know,

things were going to work for him.

And so, um, consequently, I just met him in that spirit.

And, you know, we both giggled, and as we were giggling,

I just, you know, uh, touched up his makeup,

because I could see that it hadn't been

properly applied, you know?

It was too cakey, as well.

I remember it being too cakey

more than not covering the lesion.

He'd covered the lesion, but, you know,

just a softer look.

That was the last time I saw him.

I didn't see him after that.

Key to the success of the cluster study

was the cooperation of Case 57, Gaétan Dugas,

whose personal sexual network

extended to a large number of men in many cities.

For me, the cluster study, um,

is a very interesting landmark scientifically

'cause it really helped, um, convince the world

that this was a sexually transmitted disease.

'Cause here, you have this cluster of patients

who are connected by lines which reflect sexual contact.

So, this shows 40 men

who were eventually linked

by sexual contact by their diagnosis.

And the person who connected cases

from both the west and the east

is shown in the middle of this diagram.

And he has links to eight different men...

four on the West Coast, four on the East Coast.

This is the person that we called

the Out of California Case.

Later on...

we tried to show these cases by early onset,

and you'll see that this Out of California Case

was one of two, four, six

who had symptom onset before 1980.

So he was an early case,

but he wasn't necessarily the earliest case

in this cluster of 40 different men.

He originally was called Patient 57,

then "Patient O" for Out of California Case.

And that's the way it was shown and displayed

to my colleagues at CDC.

Few months later, everybody's talking about "Patient Zero,"

and I don't know what they're talking about.

"Who are you talking about? Patient Zero?"

"Come on, Darrow.

You were the one who told us about him."

"I told you about Patient 57

or the Out of California Case...

Patient O."

"Oh, that was an "O"?

We thought it was a zero."

The "Zero" lost association, uh, with "Out of California"

and then began to communicate other meanings...

particularly the association

with zero as absolute beginning...

but one with profound consequences

for how the term was subsequently understood.

I think, right now, AIDS is nine parts politics

and one part science, so writing about the science

and the elegant genetics of the AIDS virus

misses the point.

The point right now is, we're not getting treatments

because of political problems,

and that's not being written about.

I think it's important to say

that until the epidemic started occurring

outside of the gay community,

that the mainstream media

largely wasn't paying attention to it.

You've got to remember that the problem here

is that we're moving slow in a situation

where the enemy is time.

Because the more time you give an epidemic,

the more it's gonna spread.

In the early '80s,

Randy Shilts was the only newspaper reporter

writing regularly about the spreading AIDS epidemic.

And I think I felt more of a responsibility, uh,

and a determination to report on AIDS

'cause, to me, AIDS wasn't something

that just happened to other people.

It happened to... to people I knew and I care about.

He felt that he was the only person

that could report on this, that could deal with this,

and... and highlight it and show what it was becoming,

uh, 'cause none of the other media outlets

were reporting on it.

I was very proud of him.

He forced the "Chronicle" to let him cover it

when virtually...

eh, there was nobody else covering it

basically on a daily, weekly basis.

When you go back to the history,

the alpha and the omega of the AIDS epidemic

is the Rock Hudson diagnosis.

That wakens the public and really wakens the media.

The media starts covering it.

I think it was also perceived at the time

that Rock Hudson was heterosexual,

which he wasn't.

And people said, "Well, if Rock Hudson

could get it, I could get it."

What happens then is a story of... of national failure,

and it gets to the central thesis of my book,

which is that AIDS didn't just happen.

It was allowedto happen.

"And the Band Played On" is the natural outgrowth, really,

of the articles that Randy's writing

at the "San Francisco Chronicle."

I think he could see that this was a issue

bigger than a... what a daily newspaper could cover.

Randy Shilts really went out of his way

to, um, carefully document in detail...

in excruciating detail...

the moral, ethical, and criminal negligence

of the Reagan Administration.

Randy Shilts came to CDC as a newspaper reporter

for the "San Francisco Chronicle"

early in the epidemic and interviewed a number of us...

Jim, me, and others.

He attended virtually every AIDS meeting

in the United States.

He was always there

and always interviewing people.

I mean, I was probably interviewed by him

dozens of times.

He asked me a lot of questions about the cluster study

and Patient Zero and so forth.

Eh, Randy Shilts did what any good reporter would do

in tracking down Patient Zero.

Well, here's a story of this guy that's coming to San Francisco

and being identified.

The... the hotline's lighting up.

People are talking about him all over town.

What journalists wouldn't try to find out who that was?

I've talked to Marcus Conant about this,

and he confirms that Randy asked him several times,

was narrowing things down slowly,

and then called him back and said,

"I don't need your help. I've figured out who it is."

Shilts' interview notes are headed with a boxed inscription.

"Gaétan is Patient Zero."

I remember the moment that Randy became aware of Gaétan

and how all the s...

charts c-came back to him.

The researchers from the CDC

were able to track down Gaétan, and through his cooperation...

and he was very cooperative with the CDC researchers...

were able to establish sexual links

between 40 of the first 248 gay men

who were diagnosed with AIDS in the United States.

That's when I realized, not only was he going to use my name

and the name... names of other government employees,

but he was also going to...

name patients.

And I told him, "No, don't do this.

This is not a good idea.

You shouldn't name Patient Zero."

Randy responded, "I've got to do it.

The government's not gonna do anything about this problem

unless I name names."

By using everybody's name in this book...

and I use everybody's name;

he's not singled out at all...

I think I make it... put the disease

on much more of a human scale.

The publicist working on the book...

a young woman named Diane... came up to my office

on Friday afternoon in tears, saying,

"We're gonna"...

You know, "We're not gonna get any publicity.

Everybody thinks it's been covered.

They don't want to cover it.

They're seeing it mainly as an attack

on the Reagan Administration

and on the medical establishment... the CDC."

I panicked.

I called up an ex-boyfriend of mine

who happened to be a publicist,

and I said, "John, I know you're out of work,

so you have time on your hands.

I'm in big trouble.

I need you to spend the weekend reading this manuscript."

And he suggested the following,

which I thought was extraordinarily clever.

"The Band Played On," the story of Patient Zero

comes up on 11 pages out of a 620-page book.

He's only mentioned in 11 pages.

And he said, "You pull this material out,

you gathered it together,

and you present it to the "New York Post,"

a miserably homophobic newspaper.

This story has everything they want.

It has beauty. It has death.

You know, he's an airline steward,

and best of all, he's a foreigner.

He said, "They're gonna eat it up."

Randy hated the idea.

I called him Monday night after talking with my friend,

and he was appalled.

And he said, you know, "This is yellow journalism."

I said, Yeah."

But I said, "If we don't do this,

you're gonna sell 4,000 or 5,000 copies of this book

basically to gay people.

It's gonna have no impact, you know, on the media.

It's gonna have no impact

on the national, uh, medical establishment,

and it's not gonna do

what the function of this book is to do,

which is to put this on the national agenda."

And he finally agreed.

W... Very, very reluctantly.

And we presented to the "Post," and they fell for it.

It was like cultural judo

where you were using the strength of your enemy

to get your own...

end.

And, essentially, that's what we did.

I mean, he pred... He told me exactly the headline.

"The Man Who Gave Us AIDS."

When I received this phone call,

I just happened to pick up the phone in the newsroom.

And, uh, this young woman from "60 Minutes," uh,

named Barbara Drury...

um, Researcher Producer, I think was her role...

um, explained that, uh, they were doing a documentary

and that one of the main characters in it

was from Quebec City.

And she needed someone to drive her to Quebec City from Montreal

and to translate with the family.

And on the way, she had a copy of Randy Shilts' book,

"And the Band Played On."

And that's when the true horror of the story

was revealed to me... that, uh... that they were

preparing a documentary based on this book,

and this book had evidence

that the man who brought AIDS to North America...

the gay man who done that... was Gaétan Dugas,

and that he was from a suburb of Quebec City.

When I walked in the door of the house,

it was very clear to me early on that this was a family

who really loved this young man

and, um, who were very sorrowful about his death.

And they were asking me, "What"...

You know, "What do you think we should do?"

I remember them asking me that.

And... And I said, "Well, you do one interview,

you're going to have everyone lined up here at your door."

They were horrified when they learned

that this book that was coming out

was going to name Gaétan as the Patient Zero.

Kai Babineaux, who interviewed me...

I mean, he asked me, had I ever thought of the impact

it would have on Gaétan's family and his friends?

And I had to honestly say, "No, I hadn't."

I th... I can only say, I think they must have had

a really difficult time

going through the bad press after,

which I think is, you know, shocking.

It... I mean, I find that to be a crime, nearly.

And his family must have suffered after his demise

for a long period of time.

I remember his sister, who was a dental hygienist,

saying, um, you know, "So, that's the reward he gets

for cooperating with the researchers?"

Randy Shilts was focused on showing

that the institutions that had been created

to respond to this very type of... of tragedy

failed to respond because of the prejudice

against the people who were suffering from the disease,

and that was the motivation behind his book.

By the time President Reagan

delivered his first address on AIDS

in May 31st of this year at that AIDS fundraiser here

in... in Georgetown, 36,000 Americans were dead

or dying of this disease.

What a sad statement that is

that that many people could be dead or dying

before the President will even give a speech on the subject.

"The Time"... "The New York Times,"

within the next... something like 15 days

had 11 stories on the book.

11 articles in 2 weeks

on a book that they had refused to review.

"The Band Played On" essentially broke the silence.

That was the most important thing the book did.

It... It basically cracked that wall of silence.

But, at the same time, Shilts engages

in his own demonizing,

and I find particularly unfortunate

his demonizing of the Canadian flight attendant, Gaétan Dugas,

whom he transforms in the course of his book into Patient Zero.

And really, that idea of Patient Zero as a figure...

as a popular term...

comes from "And the Band Played On."

It's funny how much the Patient Zero narrative

almost jumps out from the rest of the book.

It does seem tacked on.

It does s... It does seem very opportunistic

and very sensationalistic.

My take on Shilts' construction of Gaétan Dugas in the book

is that Shilts presents him to be someone

who is completely uncaring

about how his behavior might affect other people.

It's an act of projection, I think, on the author's part.

He takes his own anger and rage and bitterness,

and he makes this character called Patient Zero.

What Randy was doing was saying,

"Yes, we are, you know, fucking ourselves crazy,

and we are mindless, you know, he-hedonistically"...

You know, some of that is... a little bit of it is credible,

and some of it is internalized homophobia.

A real degree of it is internalized homophobia.

There isn't any gay person who doesn't reveal this.

And, uh... And Randy certainly had his...

his share of all this.

So, the idea that gay men were going out

and intentionally giving the disease, it wasn't that.

It was that sex was one of the few joys

that people had in life.

And so, the idea...

and it was very widespread...

that, "Whatever's causing this,

I already have, and you probably have it, too"...

this is the main reason why a lot of gay men

didn't adopt and embrace safe sex practices

when it came out

because everyone believed it was already too late.

It wasn't this dark, evil portrait

that... that Randy came up with.

There was one part in the book

where he was at a steam bath with someone...

and at the end of their sexual act, he said,

"I've got gay cancer,

and now you're going to get it, too."

And... that struck me

as very unlike the Gaétan that I knew.

That Gaétan really knew he was, uh...

spreading something...

Uh...

I can tell you one thing.

If Gaétan knew...

he... he, uh...

that he was killing somebody

by having sex with them, he wouldn't...

eh, h-he... he would not have done it.

Uh, h-he would have stopped having sex with whoever.

If he... if he knew exactly?

No.

That's... that's not the person that I know.

Gaétan was not like that.

He was charming and everything, but very, very caring.

No way.

There's no way he would have continued this.

I... I didn't blame Gaétan.

Y-You know, had I become HIV-positive, I...

I never went through a period

where I blamed Gaétan, uh, for that,

because at that time, again,

I don't think people really understood,

and at the time, as well, it wasn't...

Everything wasn't lumped into one thing.

It was... You had Kaposi's sarcoma,

and they were trying to figure out why some people had that.

And you had PCP, and some people were...

and they were trying to figure out why some people had that.

They hadn't connected all the dots yet...

that it was all one thing.

Um, so I didn't... I don't think I ever went through a period

where I blamed him.

So, the original cluster study...

and there's a very famous graphic

showing everything pointing to this one individual...

really, I think, spoke to the general public

that there was a... a Typhoid Mary-type syndrome,

a Patient Zero syndrome going on.

So, here, the key issue was...

where it's sometimes called "latency period"

or "incubation period."

It's the time from infection to when you get sick, right?

So, if you read the cluster study,

the assumption there is the time from infection

to when you get sick is of the order of two years,

So, okay. Two years. That's some time.

So they constructed this diagram

in which Gaétan is linked

to all these people by having had sex with them,

wi-within approximately two years of their diagnosis.

Okay. So, Okay. Two years. Good.

'Cause no one thought at the time

that this was a virus that takes, on average,

10 years to... to produce symptoms.

When you see somebody sick with AIDS,

what you're seeing is the result

of something that happened 10 years before.

And when you see somebody in the mid-'80s, where we now were,

it's the result of getting infected in the mid-'70s.

And that's true. That's what happened.

So this was like a slow-motion epidemic

that had taken place in the past,

and what we were seeing was the result of that.

So, this cluster is nonsense,

because if A infects B,

B is not gonna get sick for ten years.

And if B gets sick within two years of A,

then you know for sure that A didn't infect him.

It's the opposite of what it appears to say.

Patient Zero, Gaétan Dugas, did not infect those people.

That's not true. That's false.

Dugas is at the center of a cluster of people

who are impacted by HIV.

That part of it is true.

But if you move the dial over left or right 5° or 10°,

you're going to find someone else

who's at the center of a cluster

that just starts over again because of their contacts.

If every individual had been able

to recall the information

to the same quality that Gaétan had

and had been willing to share it,

this image would look completely different.

There just so much, uh...

blaming of communities, uh, at that point...

the gay community, of... of... of course...

or gay male, uh, community...

trying to find an other.

Otherness bringing it here from otherwhere, you know?

And he was Mr. Otherwhere, you know?

They had him picked for that role,

and everybody leaps on it.

As soon as you put that out in the air,

everybody wants to believe something like that.

"Bad person brought it here from bad country.

And, uh...

That's where religion comes from,

is a need for an explanation that doesn't exist, um,

so we can blame God, you know?

Or the devil.

Um, or in this case, um, some poor flight attendant.

But the myth... the Gaétan myth separate from the science.

It's a whole separate thing, you know.

That's not what it's about. It's not about science.

It's about projecting ideas of sickness and disease

and evil onto somebody, you know?

I-It's scapegoating. It's... He's...

He's a classic scapegoat, you know?

I mean, it's weird, because nobody knows

what he's being scapegoated for.

Originally, he was the Out of California Case, you know?

And then he's like "the first man with AIDS"

or the man who brought it to America, or...

Who knows what he is.

He's like the mysterious, evil character.

He's the scapegoat. Every society needs a scapegoat.

It's... It's universal, right?

It's a magical way of getting rid of evil.

You put it on the scapegoat.

Then you drive it out, and it dies.

Takes the evil with it.

I think the... the application

of morality to a... a disease is a mistake

because it interferes with the ability to deal with it.

Um, it's a scientific phenomenon.

It's a h... It's a human tragedy

no matter where it is and who gets it.

First of all, the people who were religious...

you know, Christian fundamentalists,

whatever they were called then...

um, then they believe this was a punishment from God.

They believe that.

They believe these things.

These things that they say, they believe.

I mean, this may be, you know, a function

of my own, uh, personality,

which is, I just don't care what other people do.

I don't care.

You believe in all this crazy religious stuff.

Go ahead, but don't impose it on me.

Anal sex in particular

had been, for so long, demonized.

Sodomy. We have... We have laws

which specifically demonize anal sex.

And then, for us to have, at great cost,

thrown off the shackles of that,

and then to see anal sex in particular

demonized once again as the best transmission method

for what became known as HIV...

um, these sort of realities

have a terrible impact on self-image,

have a terrible impact on how we...

how we navigate our sex lives,

let alone how a mass public takes up our sex lives.

And I do believe homosexuality is a moral perversion.

Uh, participates in every kind

of bloody and filthy, uh, kind of sexual activity.

One of the terms I remember used a lot was "general public."

General public was people who were innocent

of the kinds of practices

that gay men were "indulging" in.

One of the words I saw a lot in the media.

One of the words that I identify with homophobia.

Somehow, gay men "indulge" in sex.

Other people don't indulge in sex.

Of course, it was tragic

when a young child got HIV from a blood supply,

but it was also tragic

when a 19-year-old man got HIV from a sexual encounter.

Patient Zero, uh, was very helpful to us

in a number of ways

when he was very open about his sexual partners,

which allowed Bill Darrow to do the work

that led to the cluster creation.

He also agreed to come to Atlanta

to give a large amount of blood,

thinking if anybody has a new virus, he has it.

Well, for several years, we had the conversation

between myself, Mike Worobey...

who's a molecular phylogeneticist

at the University of Arizona...

saying, "Let's try to figure out

what Patient Zero represents."

Was he really the first case?

How does he tie into the early epidemic?

So Mike Worobey agreed to do genetic sequencing

on some very early samples that we collected.

I think it was Harold who said, you know,

"We've got the Patient Zero samples, as well,

and why not look at those?"

And... And for... for me, you know...

someone who does this sort of evolutionary stuff...

"Patient Zero" has never been a thing.

It's always been clear that, um...

Ag... As I say, he was just, you know, one of lots of people

who were infected.

There has been an idea

that he may have been the... the conduit

that connected the early epidemic...

let's say, in New York City to... to the West Coast.

Well, it's not his...

His is sort of a typical New York City sequence,

and there are other sequences...

early sequences from New York City

that are much closer to the West Coast...

uh, from nameless individuals

that we're not talking about or making films about.

And then, when we did a...

generated the sequence from Patient Zero,

we put that into the family tree,

and it just fell randomly in the middle.

You would expect from evolutionary theory

that if a... if a sample was the founder,

that it would form a base branch to the tree.

Um, when it doesn't,

that means that it is not the founder.

It was just an average,

mundane HIV Subtype B from the time.

And with Patient Zero...

Gaétan Dugas in particular...

Um, you know, I-I didn't realize until Harold Jaffe told me

that he made a special trip s... to... to CDC in Atlanta, uh,

really just to, um... uh, donate samples.

I-I find it remarkable that this guy did this

and he's emerged into our consciousness

as something special, in large part

because he helped epidemiologists

who were trying to figure out what was going on.

Very unfortunate,

because people interpreted that zero

to be the starting point of the epidemic.

And this person who had nothing to do

with starting this epidemic was accused of being the source,

which was never our intent, never meant to be.

I think the... the... the crucial contribution

Gaétan Dugas made was his very active cooperation

in a moment of extreme fear when...

He's French Canadian. He could have been deported.

But he's going to Atlanta when he's very ill.

He's going to San Francisco to meet with this...

the researchers.

Gaétan Dugas m... really was crucial

to us understanding that AIDS was

a sexually transmitted disease, and therefore,

he should be acclaimed as a hero of the epidemic,

of the fight against AIDS.

The toll of AIDS is demonstrated on that memorial.

Those people who died of AIDS

were the guinea pigs

who made our lives a lot better.

People have to remember that this community went

and supported all those folks.

And this memorial is there to... to just make sure

that they're immortalized.

When those first five cases were reported,

there were already 250,000 gay men infected with HIV,

and by the time the virus was discovered

and an antibody test was commercially available,

there were perhaps 500,000 gay men infected

in the United States, and the vast majority

of those men have died.

There's more than one aspect. There is the personal aspect

of actual human beings who died,

um, and then, there is this culture

that disappeared in five seconds.

All the plays never written, the performances never sung.

The books never written.

Even the audiences that never filled the seats.

All the people we lost...

all of the older people

who could have been mentors to me

to show me how to get older as a gay man, that I don't have.

The gay men that I personally, uh, lost

and many of the gay men

that I worked with at the airline

were bright, kind,

fun, nice people.

They wanted the same things out of life

that all the rest of us want.

They wanted to have a relationship,

to be loved...

to grow old together, m-many of them...

and they contributed to our society in many ways.

And it is absolutely devastating

that we lost so many.

I have this belief, uh, or theory...

not that there's a big difference between those two...

that AIDS is what caused gay marriage.

You know, that all these astonishing changes

in society's, um, idea o-of... of being gay,

I don't think that would have happened without AIDS.

If you can stay in Atlanta

and buy a house in the suburbs

and marry your boyfriend

and be a dentist, they do.

So, you know, it turns out

that the average homosexual

turned out to be more average than homosexual.

This is a surprising thing to me.

It's something that has not been universally welcomed

by gay communities.

I know that I do.

I'm happy about it.

Um, I won't call her my wife,

but I'm happy to have a legal piece of paper.

There's nothing more important

than having someone in your life, you know,

to be your witness, to be your partner,

to be there when you need something.

I always had so many friends,

I never saw marriage as something necessary.

But the older I get, the fewer friends there are.

And so, now I understand on a deep, personal level

what it means to have someone who's been a witness

to your life's journey to be there with you to the end.

And suddenly, here we are now with gay marriage

and gays in the military,

where they've been excluded before.

All of that happened...

"And the Band Played On" played an important part

in that recognition

that there was a large number of gay men in America.

But the AIDS epidemic was really the thing

that focused us on the fact

that there were large numbers of gay men...

that your uncle, the... the bachelor,

your... your brother, your son...

maybe even your dad... was gay.

It took 800,000 gay men to die

for the American public to realize

that homosexuals were a large part of this community.

That was really the legacy of the AIDS epidemic.

You know, now's the time to say what the impact was

on... on his family and, um...

and for his memory to be, uh, you know...

uh, w-washed clean

of this, you know, horror that was, uh...

um, you know, put upon them, really,

I went to see him in Quebec City at the hospital,

and he didn't know I was coming because I couldn't say

if... if I was able to get on a flight or not.

So I showed up there, and, um, he said to me...

Gaétane! Gaétan!

Then he was very self-conscious of what he looked like,

because he had those, um, see...

the... the... the purple, eh, spot on him from, um...

KS? Ye... KS.

And, eh, so, he's going... covering his head.

And I said, no, no, no.

So then, he said to me, ehm, "But you know what?

I will get a Dalmatian dog,

and I'll take him running on the beach

so we'll look the same, like we're twins."

S... You know, he made humor.

Like, he wasn't...

Yeah, he was, uh...

That's how I knew him, so...

I dec... Okay, I decided to do this...

for Gaétan.

Like, I just felt,

Well, this is my chance to really, eh, show him

how much I loved him, you know?

By coming forward and say, "No, this is not true.

No, this is not true."

Uh, this photo...

this photo, I think, is probably the nicest one

because he looks very sweet,

and he's just sitting there being sweet.

This one was probably the most famous one.

He's kind of...

in the air.

He's flying,

He's having a good time.

He looks angelic.

He's like this golden boy, you know?

Um, in the air.

And this is the one where he was trying to show his dick.

He doesn't manage to get his dick in the picture.

Uh, this picture I didn't send to "Life" magazine

because another friend

who has great gallows humor sense said,

"Don't send that one to 'Life.'

They probably don't want to see the murder weapon."

So they didn't get this one.

You have it, somehow.

That is all of them, actually.

Eh, it's saying...

"I'm saying goodbye."

"I love you, and I'm waiting for you...

in heaven," basically.

And "Gaétan."

Of course, the airplane.

Eh, our job, and...

Ah.

It says, um... Well, the last part is,

"W-We'll, um"...

"We'll see you in heav"...

"We'll see you in heaven."

Pfoof.

I can't remember the first part.

That's age.

The first part...

"I'm s... I'm saying goodbye to you.

I love you...

and I'm waiting for you in heaven."

That's beautiful.

And I'll see him there.

I'm already talking to him.

I don't know what the legacy of the photos is.

Hopefully, they I... portray him in a positive light,

because, uh, he's not so...

sort of a... a negative in a sad story.

He wasn't negative or a sad person.

Like, he was very happy and, you know, funny.

And, um...

Uh, so I think the photos represent him

kind of nicely, if you will.

Like, he... he looks like an attractive young guy

who's enjoying himself, and that's who he was.

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