Previous Entry - Patient Zero Part 1
It’s taken less than a month for monkeypox to completely fall off of the media radar. Has the epidemic subsided? Possibly. Vaccines have been made available for those most at risk (gay men). Is it still out there? Definitely, as social events geared towards gay men who enjoy sex with multiple (often anonymous) partners have been allowed to proceed in the meantime. Have behaviours changed? Certainly not, which is why we will continue with this series, so that my dear readers are equipped with the knowledge that has been shared thus far and that can then be deployed for when the next inevitable epidemic strikes this specific community.
In the previous entry of this series, we were introduced to Gaetan Dugas, a French-Canadian Air Steward who would go on to become the avatar of AIDS, its ‘Typhoid Mary’. Gaetan was an incredibly promiscuous gay men who traveled across North America (and beyond), and was quite meticulous in tallying up his sexual conquests, a record which helped the CDC put together its first AIDS cluster study, and also helped it prove that HIV was a sexually-transmitted disease.
Gaetan died in Quebec in June of 1984, known only to his family, his co-workers, his friends in the various gay communities across North America, and a select few healthcare and medical research professionals dealing with HIV. He might have been lost to time, like many of those first cases of AIDS in North America, had it not been for the dogged detective work of Randy Shilts, the journalist who has appeared throughout this series, and whose vital history of those days ‘And the Band Played On’, has been liberally excerpted thus far.1
Vilification
Randy Shilts had a problem: by 1986, he had amassed a mountain of research and documentation that would be used as source material for the book that was to become ‘And the Band Played On’, but he was struggling with how it could make an impact and push forward AIDS research, especially through obtaining government funding directed towards the cause.
Randy wasn’t the only one with that problem; his publisher, St. Martin’s Press, couldn’t figure out how to publicize the book either. Randy’s editor at St. Martin’s, Michael Denneny (also a gay man), “panicked”, and called up an ex-boyfriend (also gay) who was an unemployed publicist. He recommended to Michael that they highlight all the material about Gaetan Dugas and send it to the New York Post, considered a ‘reactionary’ and ‘homophobic’ newspaper. In Denneny’s opinion, this was a “brilliant” suggestion.2 Now he just had to convince Shilts to play along.
Denneny:
I mean it took me most of a week of really hard fighting with Randy. He was appalled by the idea. And I said, “You don’t do this we are going to sell four thousand copies of this book, and Larry [Kramer] says two hundred thousand people are going to die.” And I said, “I don’t know if his number’s right, but a shitload of people are going to die. You know, I don’t mind getting my hands dirty. I don’t mind using yellow journalism. If this is the only way we can get this damn book on the agenda, we’ve got to do it. It would be immoral not to do it.” And I said, “I understand it’s tabloid journalism at the worst. I understand all your objections.” The book is massively an attack on the Reagan administration. The media was not going to review an attack on the Reagan administration—they simply were not, in 1986. They were not going to pick up the failures of the medical research establishment, or the government. That wasn’t a sexy story to them. Yeah, but the man who brought AIDS to America, especially because he’s a fag, and a foreigner? That was a sexy story to them.3
“If you don’t do this, we’ll only sell 5,000 copies, mostly to gay people”, Denneny said to Shilts, trying to reason with him. Denneny explained patiently to an initially-reluctant Shilts that this was the way to put AIDS back on the front page of the news for the first time since Rock Hudson’s death. Shilts relented and the gambit worked. Gaetan Dugas, aka Patient Zero, became THE scapegoat for AIDS overnight when the book was published in 1987, three years after his death.
“Yellow Journalism”, Shilts retorted to Denneny upon hearing his strategy for the first time. Sensationalism sells, and the sales of the book took off like a rocket, with Randy becoming a journalistic celebrity in the process. One of the most notorious and sensationalist reports covering ‘And the Band Played On’ came from 60 Minutes:
Denneny’s strategy worked and AIDS once again landed on the front page of the news. It came at a cost to Shilts’ journalistic principles (though many of his detractors claim otherwise), and to Gaetan Dugas’ reputation, along with his family who were then inundated with journalists seeking quotes from them. Everyone wanted to talk to the family of Typhoid Mary:
Two days after the Post’s headline, a journalist who covered AIDS issues for Le Soleil (the Sun), the Quebec City daily newspaper, interviewed members of Dugas’s family. Their shock and outrage about the media circus was evident in the article published the following day. Largely sympathetic in its approach, the article offered readers the family members’ perspectives, presenting them as unwitting victims of a mean-spirited media: “It was with consternation, sadness, and bitterness that the family of the deceased Gaétan Dugas, of Ancienne-Lorette, saw his photo projected nationally on the Radio- Canada TV newscast on Wednesday evening.” The article gave space to Dugas’s mother and sister to voice their anguished dismay with the media’s “web of ‘untruths’” and the family’s exhaustion from the attention. Madame Dugas, Gaétan’s widowed seventy-four year old mother, complained that such a story ignored the constant support her son had given to humanitarian efforts during his life—perhaps a reference to the flight attendant’s assistance to AIDS Vancouver (an affiliation that will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 6). She also feared above all else that the story would cause irreparable harm to his surviving siblings.
One of Gaétan’s married sisters, Hélène, told the newspaper that neither the author nor his publishing house had made any effort to contact the family and that the news stories and Radio- Canada’s coverage had caught them completely by surprise. Pointedly, she felt it important to mention that no family member had spoken to the English-language CBC, countering the claims broadcast on Montréal Ce Soir and published in Le Journal de Montréal. She emphasized that her brother had never hesitated in seeking treatment for his illness and that in the coming days the family would review their options, not only for protecting their private life but also whether they had any recourse in the event that Gaétan’s confidential medical files had been breached.4
Ever since, Denneny has consistently defended his strategy. From an interview in the mid-1990s:
Denneny insisted that his decision to focus on Dugas was a “venial” rather than “mortal” sin and that it would have been far worse to take no action in the face of thousands dying from inaction, prejudice, and hostility: “It is like the Holocaust was going on, and so maybe you have to fight dirty. The world doesn’t always give you the option to keep your hands clean. I mean had I not done that and we sold four or five thousand copies of the book and essentially resulted in silence on the national level, then I would feel real guilty. That I think would have been a real mistake.”5
It was for the ‘greater good’.