Killing Patient Zero
I watched this documentary on Amazon Prime.
The documentary focuses on Gaétan Dugas (1953-1984), a Canadian flight attendant who was falsely identified as patient 0, and accused of being the person who introduced AIDS (or Gay Related Auto Deficiency, GRID, as it was known at the time) to North America.
Fran Lebowitz says in the documentary that it’s hard for young people who didn’t live through that period of history to really comprehend, it wasn’t just a case of homosexuality being disapproved of or your parents disowning you because they didn’t like it, it was actually illegal. You can know that as a fact but without having lived through it, you can’t really understand. In 1967, Canada relaxed their homosexuality laws slightly and homosexual sex that took place in private between two consenting adults was legalised. This was so monumental to the LGBT community at the time and having a lot of sex became a way of proving you were liberated. The 70s were all about disco, sex, drugs, freedom and the way the men in the documentary talk about this time is like it was the best of their lives, they did not know what the next decade would bring…
What really struck me whilst watching the documentary was how the epidemic was dealt with, I think because AIDs was seen as “Gay Cancer”, there was less of an effort made to investigate the disease and I don’t think it’s unfair to say that if this was an illness that was effecting the heterosexual population to the same extent it was effecting the gays, it would have been made more of a priority. They show in the documentary an interview that was done with Larry Speaks who was the press secretary to President Reagan, when he was asked about the AIDs epidemic, he says “what’s that?” he’s told it is the gay plague, that it’s serious that 1 in 3 people who had got it at that time were already dead and Larry actually laughs, “I don’t have it, do you?” That’s how seriously the deaths of these men were treated by the government. The way the government responded to the epidemic was criminal because if it had been taken seriously from the beginning and researched properly, less people would have died. If you look at the way the Covid 19 pandemic has been handled for example, there were world wide lockdowns to prevent the spread of the virus and extensive research to create a vaccine within a year, if Covid was only effecting a marginalised community would the response of been the same? 36 thousand people died before President Reagan even commented publicly.
Another interesting fact that I learned was the only reason “Patient 0” was even named was because the epidemic wasn’t being properly reported in the mainstream media, so in 1987 reporter Randy Shilts published a book, And the Band Played On, in that book he named Gaeten Dugas as patient 0, Dugas was then vilified by the media as the person who knowingly and purposefully spread AIDs throughout North America (Gaeten was not in fact patient 0 or even the first person in North America to contract the virus, yes he had lots of sex but he had actually cooperated with researchers and was a large reason that they were even able to track the virus to begin with, the only reason he was identified as patient 0 was because of a typo on some research documents) Although the main point of the book was to show that institutions such as the government had failed because of prejudices they had towards the gay community, Gaeten was demonised in the process and painted as a monster. It worked to the extent that it got people talking, the New York Times published eleven articles after the publication of the book. Friends of Gaeton who lived through the AIDs epidemic contribute to the documentary and are understandably critical of Shilts book, they speak of the fatalism that many gay men felt at the time, that it was inevitable, that it was already in them, this feeling of carrying around death led them to have more sex as a means of feeling alive. They also don’t blame Gaeten, nobody knew, nobody understood how it was spread.
Randy Shilts also died of AIDs related complications in 1994.
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