And the Band Played On
by Randy Shilts
AIDS was allowed to happen. Shilts spent five years proving it.
For you if
you want to understand how the AIDS epidemic became the scale of catastrophe it did — and who decided, at every level, that it wasn't their problem
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Shilts's argument is stated in the premise: AIDS was allowed to happen. The virus was biological. The epidemic was political. While gay men were dying in San Francisco and New York, the Reagan administration refused to fund research, the CDC fought internally over resources, blood banks resisted testing for financial reasons, and the mainstream media mostly looked away because the people dying were gay. Shilts, the first openly gay journalist at a major American newspaper, spent five years and over a thousand interviews building the most comprehensive account of institutional failure ever documented — the federal government putting budget ahead of lives, health authorities placing political expediency before public health, scientists choosing prestige over urgency. He handed in the final manuscript and immediately tested positive for HIV. He died of AIDS in 1994 at 42. The biography is inseparable from the book. Some of Shilts's specific claims — particularly around the 'Patient Zero' narrative — have been disputed by epidemiologists since publication, and the 20th Anniversary edition should be read with that caveat in mind. What remains undisputed is the structural argument: that a government that had decided certain people's lives did not matter watched those people die and called it nobody's fault. The companion to The Deviant's War on the shelf — that book shows the state persecuting gay people, this one shows the state watching them die.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- North America
- Voice
- Written by a North America author
- Topics
- aids epidemic
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
