The Columbus of AIDS

National Review, Nov 6, 1987

The Columbus of AIDS

GAETAN DUGAS, a handsome French-Canadian airline steward, seems to have won the honor of being the first man to bring IADS to the American continent, according to an impressively researched new book by Randy Shilts, himself a gay, entitled And the Band Played On (St. Martin's). There is much that is important about this book, involving as it does the etiology of the epidemic, the ideological coverups among gay spokesmen and organizations, and federal policy.

Shilts's research has been examined, and its results confirmed, by Professor Marcus Conant of the University of California at San Francisco, who, however, advises that if Dugas had not introduced the virus here, some other homosexual undoubtedly would have.

Dugas, known to medical researchers as "Patient Zero,' picked up the disease in Europe through sexual contact with Africans. Traveling on his airline-employee privileges, he spread it here from coast to coast, through sexual practices that involved some 250 partners a year. Even after he was diagnosed in 1980 as communicating a possibly fatal sexual disease, he refused to restrict his sexual activity, claiming he could do what he wanted with his own body. Toward the end he showed his bath-house sexual partners his purplish Kaposi's sarcomas. "Gay cancer. Maybe you'll get it,' he would say. Dugas died in 1984.

AIDS's primary tie is to homosexuality, as one of NR's editors somberly reflected while witnessing thousands of gays protesting in Washington last week. But there's more to it than that. Presumably two homosexual men, in a long-term monogamous relationship, would not be especially liable either to contract or to spread the disease. AIDS is connected with promiscuity, of the sort that figures in the sexual career of Dugas. Yet promiscuity is part of the standard behavior of a great many homosexuals, though data are sketchy.

In 1980, public health specialists were worried about the spread of such venereal diseases as gonorrhea, syphilis, and herpes--a direct result of the so-called Sexual Revolution. Medical researchers wondered what would happen if a new element were dropped into the disease equation. Now they know.