This study will examine Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On, focusing on pertinent elements of the AIDS epidemic and the stigmatization of victims of the disease. The study will argue that the most powerful institutions in the United States in the 1980s failed to deal effectively with the AIDS threat for economic, political, and egotistical reasons.
The heart of Shilts' message is that AIDS was not effectively highlighted by the media or effectively treated by the government and the bio-medical community because it was seen as "The Gay Plague" (352). Consciously and/or subconsciously, these institutions did not see gays as a group of people who were as important as other groups. It was believed that only gays could acquire the disease, and that gays were engaging in "perverse" behavior which brought the disease upon themselves. One "homophobe" from the Midwest, a doctor, "described the gay community as a 'living, breathing cesspool of pathogens." He called gays "a subclass of people, who . . . are consuming prodigious amounts . . . of fecal material" (352). In other words, gays were seen as deserving of "their" plague. The only thing that could be done, the same doctor said, was to isolate them from non-gays.
Media response was symbolized by Patrick Buchanan's article, which declared, "The poor homosexuals---they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution" (311). Buchanan's article in May of 1983 was important because it set a media trend of denying the importance and danger of the spreading AIDS epidemic, and because it signaled the position of the Reagan Administration which would be in office for six more years:
Where would President Reagan, who had somehow managed to make it through two years of the epidemic without whispering a word about it, end up on AIDS? . . . Now, with AIDS in the headlines, those days were coming to an end and the first signs of . . . backlash came with this c...