skygiants | (no subject)

As part of my resolution to read more nonfiction, I asked my dad to recommend me some of his nonfiction books when I went home for the 4th last weekend. (For background: my dad is an infectious disease specialist who treats a lot of AIDS patients.) He pulled out his copy of Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic and said, "didn't I ever make you read this before?"

The answer being 'no', I read it.

This book is . . . brutal. As you're reading, it starts to feel like just about every chapter ends with a sentence that boils down to "and this INCREDIBLY STUPID DECISION was going to cost thousands of lives later on!" It would come across as melodramatic if it weren't so obviously true. The number of criminally self-interested, oblivious, or just well-intentioned and dumb decisions that lead to the spread of the epidemic is pretty staggering. (The blood banks' utter refusal to admit that AIDS could be spread through blood transfusions until 70% of US hemophiliacs, among others, were infected with HIV is just one blatant example. Of many.)

Randy Shilts was one of very, very few reporters who was assigned to cover AIDS in the early years of the epidemic; the book carefully reports pretty much everything that happened from the time the first people in New York City started falling inexplicably ill until Rock Hudson confessed that he had AIDS in 1985 and all of a sudden - after four years - the US media finally got majorly involved in the AIDS story. (Shilts is scathing about just how ridiculously much of a turning point the first case of official celebrity AIDS was in the fight against the disease, and rightly so.)

Shilts was also a relatively prominent member of the gay San Francisco scene in the 70s and 80s, and although he does his best to keep himself out of the story, it shows. He does an incredible job showing the staggering impact on both the gay community and on the individuals within it, with in-depths portraits of many of those who were infected, and doesn't go into as much detail on several other groups hard-hit by the virus. This is half-fair - at first, AIDS was completely perceived as a gay disease in America, and most of the politics centered around this - and half-not; there's not much at all on the epidemic among Haitians, and when Africa is (sparsely) discussed the focus was almost always on the Brave White Doctors Risking Themselves in language that made me cringe a little.

I was born in 1985, when this book ends (though there's an epilogue updating for 1987, written I think for the second edition.) I only knew the very top layer of this story; in 2009, AIDS is kind of a matter-of-fact reality. Among all the other reasons this book is kind of a gutpunch, it's incredibly chilling to read about the epidemic from the start and realize how much it's affected the society I've lived in my whole life.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

darthrami.livejournal.com

I read that book in Junior High (in fact, Randy Shilts died ... while I was reading it, or shortly thereafter), and it definitely colored the way I view the world, our health system, and politics.

From:

skygiants

Yeah. It's . . . really not going to be leaving me in a hurry.

From:

nepheliad.livejournal.com

I've always loved that book; I think it's because of my dad, who tells the story from his own perspective as one of the doctors in NYC who had the first cases in his lap, trying to figure out what was going on.

Of course, now I wonder if he knows your dad.

From:

skygiants

Oh man, that has got to be fascinating to hear. I'm so going to be asking my dad about it next time I see him - he would have been just finishing up med school and starting his residency over that time.

. . . and wow, it's definitely possible! :O My dad's Philly/South Jersey-based now, but he did his residency in NYC.

From:

agonistes

People laugh at me and The Golden Girls, and I laugh at myself, but --

It's still a show that, in the mid-to-late 80s, with good ratings, was doing the episodes where Betty freaking White was the spokesface for somebody who might have AIDS, and where Bea Arthur was the one saying "no, this is not just a gay disease, this is an everybody disease, and we need to stop stigmatizing people right now and actually do something about it and provide support to these people." They were advocating safe sex and condom use and exploding things like the you-can-catch-it-from-a-toothbrush myth.

When TV is doing a better job than the CDC, that is just... ugh.

From:

skygiants

It's . . . insane, is really the only word for it. And really kind of gross, some of the politics at play - apparently the Reagan administration basically refused to launch safe sex campaigns. Because, you know, that might make it look like they were officially condoning gay sex and we CAN'T HAVE THAT.

(But man, good for the The Golden Girls!)

From:

agonistes

Srs. >:( Other reading about the 80s and AIDS: Dan Savage, surprisingly enough. Skipping Toward Gomorrah and The Commitment, which are great reads apart from this subject, both touch on what it was like to be coming out when AIDS was still gay cancer.

From:

skygiants

Oh awesome, thanks! *makes note*

I have a doctor-memoir about treating the first AIDS cases that my dad gave me to read too that looks good, too, and that I will definitely be posting about once I've read it.

From:

vivien

It was a scary time to come of age sexually, let me tell you. I had many gay friends, and our small theater community had lost a couple of men to "cancer". My best friend's brother died of AIDS, but my friend is still alive and looking fabulous, so we were of the age to hear the message about safe sex.

I was knowledgeable, livid against the Reagan administration (even then), and vocal against all the Reagan Youth/jerks at school and their crude AIDS jokes.

I'm glad you read the book. It's important to remember.

From:

skygiants

Oh god - yeah, I just bet.

(I was looking in a paper this morning, and there was a photograph of a protest sign in California - "PLEASE Do not cut the funds for HIV". The more things change . . . :/)

From:

gramarye1971

I love that episode (well, and many many others) of the Golden Girls. I know that some people complain about the Very Special Episode trope that the series occasionally did, but there's a lot of good stuff in it -- especially when the series was willing to confront stupid myths that were quite literally killing people.

From:

agonistes

Yes. Exactly. And considering the focus of the series is four people who fit demographics that society still tends to forget or overlook... I've never had a problem with the Very Special Episodes for that reason. The whole series is a Very Special Episode, and it was at its best, as far as I'm concerned, when it dealt head-on with pertinent social and political issues.

From:

schiarire.livejournal.com

Lists it!

From:

skygiants

Ji, half of the section epigraphs quote The Plague!

From:

schiarire.livejournal.com

:O

*trembly hands*

From:

futuresoon.livejournal.com

I haven't read the book, but one of my favorite memories in middle school was my science class watching the movie--a school of upper-middle-class mostly-white mostly-Christian thirteen-year-olds going all still and quiet watching something none of us had even imagined before. You wanna educate kids on AIDS, show'em Gandalf dying of it. I wasn't the only one who needed to dry their eyes when it was done. A couple years later I saw it in another science class, and it hit just as hard as it did the first time. If you were affected by the book, I'd strongly recommend the movie, too--the gutpunch is all the worse when it comes with faces.

From:

skygiants

I've been definitely eyeing the movie as soon as I heard about it - I really want to see it. Though . . . I think I am going to wait a little and give myself some time to digest some nice cheerful media first. *rueful*

From:

elspeth-vimes.livejournal.com

The extent to which misinformation allowed, and still allows, for the spread of AIDS is terrifying.

And actually crosses over in interesting ways with folklore, a subject that Diane Goldstein covered in Once Upon a Virus (http://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Virus-Diane-Goldstein/dp/0874215870/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247079897&sr=8-1). We read part of it in my legends class this past year. It focuses mainly on AIDS in Newfoundland, which is a serious problem (especially for women) and has a whole group of legends attached to it which makes the spread worse. ...If you want some more points of view on the matter, you may well not. >.>

From:

skygiants

It really is. Even with the AIDS education programs we have now, I was still learning things about the disease in the book that I never remembered hearing growing up.

- oh wow, that book sounds seriously fascinating. *bookmarks* Thank you! (More points of view are always a good thing, I think.)

From:

elspeth-vimes.livejournal.com

I think we spent about two weeks in my high school health class going over what the right information about AIDS is, and what the wrong information is.

The part we read was very interesting and absorbing! I kind of want to get it myself. (I believe so as well.)

From:

magwana.livejournal.com

Not only did the book seriously neglect global AIDS, it ignored people of color in America almost entirely.

A friend did his masters' project on major gay media (The Advocate, Out, etc.) - I don't remember the time frame, but I believe it was a content analysis of a few years in the early aughts - and basically there's no mention of gay people of color dealing with AIDS.

So it's an ongoing problem. But man, I love that book. The humanity! But also the SCIENCE. Fascinating.

From:

skygiants

Yeah - there are a couple of gay people of color who get a closer look, but again, if they do it's generally because they were major figures in the San Francisco gay scene with which Randy Shilts was most familiar, and really I can only think of two. Though I was most disappointed that there didn't seem to be any interviews with any of the Haitian-Americans who were one of the major early risk groups, especially since every other group got at least one in-depth 'case study'.

That sounds like an incredible master's project!