Last night, after the kids were in bed, I dipped into my copy of Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, hoping to use the index to find the answer to some question that had occurred to me, and, next I knew, it was 1:30 in the morning, which alas was just a half hour shy of 3:00 a.m. What a wonderful and engrossing book! It's widely acknowledged to be a masterpiece of "gay literature"--a pale compliment, in my opinion. Yes, the center of the book is the early days of the AIDS epidemic, a qualifying gay theme. But the book succeeds on other levels--as a medical mystery, for example. In 1981, in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, single young men begin presenting at health care centers with ailments that end up being diagnosed as strains of skin cancer (Kaposi's sarcoma) or pneumonia (pneumocystic carinii). The former is bizarre because the disease is typically limited to elderly Mediterranean males, and the progression so slow that often the patient dies first of some other geriatric disease. But now, suddenly: all these single young men, mostly in their 30s and until recently in perfect health, few of them Middle Eastern, afflicted with an apparently virulent form--the progression, accelerated by what appear to be opportunistic infections, to pitiable deaths is rapid. The pneumonia is also idiosyncratic, the discouraging aspect here being its sudden high incidence together with resistance to the normal antibiotic cure. Instead of getting quickly better, the patient has a general downward trend, is stricken with other infections, and soon dies from, essentially, suffocation. What's going on? Shilts's handling of this aspect of his narrative is masterly, but it also is effectively interwoven with many other strands--national politics, city politics, the history and culture of the city of San Francisco, the fraught question of whether or not to close the bathhouses, the calculations and maneuverings of Mayor Dianne Feinstein, the mix of motives among medical researchers, a hundred or more gem-like portraits of minor actors--activists, investigators, doctors, caregivers, obscure GS-7 federal government employees at the Centers for Disease Control, patients, their friends and partners, the sometimes humorous interactions between wildly incongruent specimens of humanity: the cumulative effect is of some kind of hybrid encyclopedia and compendium of grief and human suffering. If I had to compare And the Band Played On to any other book I know, I'd choose Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, "a true-life novel" wherein the author, by examining, exhaustively and with sympathetic detachment, a Utah murder case in all its human elements, ends up writing a book more about what's sometimes called, quaintly, the human condition rather than anything so small as a mere murder case.
As Gary Gilmore's crime is to Mailer's big book, so is the AIDS epidemic to Shilts's. He was born in Davenport, Iowa, grew up with five brothers in Aurora, Illinois, and studied journalism at the University of Oregon, where he came out as gay and ran for student government with the slogan, "Come out for Shilts!" He landed a job with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1981, just when AIDS was beginning to ravage the city's large gay population. It became his beat, and in the course of his daily journalism he conceived of the book that became And the Band Played On. While working on the book, he was tested for HIV, but declined to be informed of the result for fear it might impair his objectivity. He thus read the first favorable reviews with the fresh knowledge that he was himself HIV-positive, a fact he kept to himself until shortly before he died, age 42, on February 17, 1994, seven years after the publication of And the Band Played On.
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