I was born in 1981. That year some of the earliest cases of what would come to be known as AIDS were diagnosed, although the disease had been present in the United States since the late 1970s. I can remember the fear of AIDS that floated around while I was in elementary school. There were stories about whether or not you could get AIDS from sharing a drinking fountain. I remember the news breaking about Ryan White, a hemophiliac who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. Reading Randy Shilts’s monumental work, And the Band Played On, brings so much back to life. Looking back over forty years later, this book not only recalls the fear and confusion and anger of the early years of the AIDS epidemic, it also brings back the years when it seemed like the progress of the LGBTQ+ rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s would be lost. Shilts also revivifies (at least on the pages of the book) some of the lives that were lost to disease and homophobia and bureaucratic inertia. This book is absolutely incredible.
Randy Shilts, a journalist for The Advocate and The San Francisco Chronicle, had a knack for captivating writing. And the Band Played On is written in short, punchy sections that document the epidemic and the fight against it in nearly daily (sometimes hourly) dispatches. Using interviews, newspaper articles, diaries, and other sources, Shilts puts us into the lives of activists like Bill Kraus and Larry Kramer, researchers like Luc Montagnier and Marcus Conant, plus many men who contracted AIDS or loved people who developed the disease. It’s hard not to get caught up in the stories. I fretted about men who discovered signs of Kaposi’s sarcoma or coughed from pneumocystis pneumonia. I also raged with Kraus and Kramer and others as politicians, researchers, the media, and the blood industry stalled and equivocated and argued while the death toll rose.
I’m glad I read How to Survive a Plague, by David French, before I read And the Band Played On. That book, about ACT UP and the successes of AIDS activism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, stayed at the back of my mind as a reminder that—in spite of all the death—AIDS would one day become a chronic, manageable condition instead of a death sentence. I don’t know if I would have been able to bear reading And the Band Played On without knowing the later history. And the Band Played On was published in 1987, the same year that ACT UP was founded. Shilts sadly did not live long enough to see the results of their work.
And the Band Played On isn’t a perfect book. Shilts got a few things wrong, notably in his treatment of Gaëtan Dugas. That said, I see this book as an important piece of history, one that captures so much of the emotion of the early 1980s gay community. Few historical works struck me as vividly as And the Band Played On. Perhaps it’s because the book is written by someone who lived in that community, loved in that community, and ultimately died of AIDS complications himself. It carries an emotional weight that a historian, writing decades later, would be able to achieve. It would also take a gifted historian to write with such tenderness about men saying their last goodbyes to their lovers or with such anger as scientists squabbled over credit for discoveries and politicians nickel-and-dimed AIDS research until the disease started to affect significant numbers of straight, white, non-drug using people.
One last thing to note. I don’t know if there’s a word for this emotion, but I felt a frustrated lack of surprise at how some people refused to change their behavior to try and avoid contracting AIDS. One of the long battles of the epidemic—on top of everything else—was what to do to slow the spread of the disease while researchers worked to identify the cause and find the best treatments for patients. Straight politicians were reluctant to promote safe-sex educational materials. Gay leaders resisted closing bathhouses, where men would gather to have sex, after years spent promoting gay rights. In the early years, some thought AIDS was just an anti-gay rumor and refused to change behaviors that might put them at risk. Later, straight people thought they were safe because it was a “gay disease.” If I had read And the Band Played On before the COVID-19 epidemic, I would have been utterly flabbergasted by all this. Because I have lived through a pandemic that was marked by similar ignorance and determination to maintain the status quo, I have a lot more sympathy for people who just didn’t believe they’d be the ones to catch and die from AIDS. Plus ça change.