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rfmcdonaldRandy Shilts' And The Band Played On identitfied a Québécois flight attendant Gaetan Dugas as the individual who played a critical role in the early spread of HIV, thanks to air travel's role in facilitating innumerable sexual encounters. Dr. Andrew Moss, in a letter sent to the New York Review of Books, summarizes the theory:
Moss goes on to argue that the cluster was an artificial construct based on the false assumption that the mean incubation period for AIDS was one year, rather than the average of ten years, and that many of the cluster's members also had sexual partners capable of transmitting the disease. Then again, as one poster in alt.folklore.urban observed in 1997, unless a) Shilts was engaging in the wholesale fabrication of evidence or b) dozens of unconnected people were united by a desire to destroy the posthumous reputation of Gaetan Dugas, he had been told as early as 1982 that he had contracted a transmissible and potentially fatal STD but continued to engage in unprotected sex with multiple partners.
I was pleasantly surprised to come across Guy Babineau's article The Prettiest One: Remembering Gaetan Dugas, originally published in Xtra! West. Partly an examination of publicity strategies of the book publishing world, partly an examination used (in very different ways) by Shilts and by homophobes to paint a picture of a homogeneously jet-set/promiscuous gay subculture in North America in the 1980s, partly a remembrance of Dugas by his contemporaries. "The Prettiest One" provides an interesting examination of a man who has so often been described, and in a purely negative light.
The patient zero story--in its various versions, that Gaetan Dugas, a Canadian flight assistant, "brought AIDS to" California or San Francisco or the United States--is based on a study by David Auerbach and Darrow published in 1984. The study presented a "cluster" in which forty persons among the first few hundred reported with AIDS in the United States were linked together by sexual contact, self-reported or reported by "close companions," in the five years preceding onset of AIDS symptoms. Mr. Dugas (who was not identified) is placed at the center of the cluster: the inference is that he infected the persons who reported having sex with him, they infected the persons who reported having sex with them, and so on.
Moss goes on to argue that the cluster was an artificial construct based on the false assumption that the mean incubation period for AIDS was one year, rather than the average of ten years, and that many of the cluster's members also had sexual partners capable of transmitting the disease. Then again, as one poster in alt.folklore.urban observed in 1997, unless a) Shilts was engaging in the wholesale fabrication of evidence or b) dozens of unconnected people were united by a desire to destroy the posthumous reputation of Gaetan Dugas, he had been told as early as 1982 that he had contracted a transmissible and potentially fatal STD but continued to engage in unprotected sex with multiple partners.
I was pleasantly surprised to come across Guy Babineau's article The Prettiest One: Remembering Gaetan Dugas, originally published in Xtra! West. Partly an examination of publicity strategies of the book publishing world, partly an examination used (in very different ways) by Shilts and by homophobes to paint a picture of a homogeneously jet-set/promiscuous gay subculture in North America in the 1980s, partly a remembrance of Dugas by his contemporaries. "The Prettiest One" provides an interesting examination of a man who has so often been described, and in a purely negative light.
