Book Review

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

Award-winning gay writer Randy Shilts tells how angrily the gay male community reacted when he and others told gay males that their promiscuous, unhealthy lifestyle was to blame for the AIDS epidemic

“…with AIDS there was a lot of pressure on writers not to write anything negative about the gay community, not to do anything to indicate the honest truth, which is that the gay community had some role in it. Once the virus got into the community, it didn’t spread by itself. We had a community that was virtually engineered to ensure the rapid proliferation of a sexually transmitted disease, and people didn’t really do anything about it. About 1983 I started working on AIDS full time here at the [San Francisco] Chronicle, and there’s been incredible pressure on me—even to the point of death threats—not to report honestly on AIDS. (Contemporary Authors, Vol. 127, pg. 404)

Death threats! Randy Shilts has a most perceptive term for this angry reaction from gays. He calls it:

“...the desperation of denial: how, when something is so horrible you don’t want to believe it, you want to put it out of your mind and insist it isn’t true, and how you hate the person who says it is.” (And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, by Randy Shilts; New York: Penguin Books, 1988, pg. 182. In 1988, Shilts’s book won the
non-fiction book award from the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, & Transgendered Roundtable of the American Library Association )

In And the Band Played On, Shilts catalogues the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, and the dangerous sexual practices utilized by gay men, to be found in the gay male community. These practices, combined with incredible promiscuity, are the factors which Shilts says caused the gay male community to be “virtually engineered to ensure the rapid proliferation of a sexually transmitted disease…” Not only the usual diseases, like syphilis or gonorrhea, but hepatitis and the “Gay Bowel Syndrome”—amebiasis, giardiasis and shigellosis—and other diseases were continuously epidemic in the gay male community.

Unfortunately, the same diseases are peaking once again in the gay male community. Gay magazines, newspapers and websites frequently have articles on this problem (see, e.g., www.gayhealth.com). Shilts sees the ongoing problem of sexual promiscuity as inherent to male homosexuality:

“Promiscuity was rampant because in an all-male subculture there was nobody to say ‘no’—no moderating role like that a woman plays in the heterosexual milieu.” (And the Band Played On, pg. 89)

The only compassionate approach we can make is to confront this denial with the truth, spoken firmly, but in love, and to offer help for change.