Important and moving

A fascinating and moving book that rewrites a wrong done to one man via the historical record. Along the way, the early years of the North American AIDS epidemic are sensitively and carefully explored.

I wept at several points during the book.

An important listen for anyone who cares about epidemiology or queer history.

The reader gave a very gentle and sensitive performance, and should be commended.

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Not An Evidenced Persuasion; An Attack

This was deeply disappointing to me. I couldn’t get through it. By chapter four it came across as hammering and repetitive with very little substance. Its title led me to hope it would be a sort of memoir of Dugas, un-demonising him and providing a more rounded, contextualised view of him and his role in the AIDS epidemic relative to others’ roles. That would have been interesting and persuasive to me. Instead, it seems to draw heavily on secondary analysis of commentary on Dugas provided in the esteemed journalistic classic, ‘And the Band Played On’, by journalist Randy Schiltz.

The author of the book I am reviewing now rightly criticises the unfounded and/or flawed attacking of marginalised groups, and the othering of whole continents, as cesspools and walking disease vectors. He gives an interesting and helpful contextualisation of this common approach and human behaviour in the context of things like the Black Death and even crime detection to show how people are wont to laser in on individual people, specific peoples, and/or specific places as prime ‘culprits’ in the uncontrolled and even ostensibly knowing, wilful and intended spread of crime or disease, rightly criticising this for the mythology it usually is.

He also rightly points out that Dugas cannot have been the monster portrayed in Band. Otherwise he’d be notorious in household memory on a level with ‘Doctor’ Harold Shipman, or Graham Young, the ‘Teacup Poisoner’. The fact that he’s not is very telling in its own right. If there was as much hard evidence of Dugas’s intentional spreading of AIDS as Schiltz maintains in Band, it would be more than enough grounds on which to at least detain, if not convict him, under SOME legal charge or other pre-existing at the time.

These aspects all function well as an introduction, and draw the reader in. Unfortunately after that the book descends into little more than dissecting Schiltz’s character, biography, political position, personal motivations, journalistic leadings and self-professed claims as contributing factors towards a supposed campaign of blame and name-blackening criticism towards Schiltz in order to expose his lies about Dugas, thus exonerating the latter’s name.

One can’t help but sense a loss of the primary goal of this book taking place in the process - was it written primarily to bring down Schiltz, or primarily to illuminate the real Dugas in an alternative light to the one Schiltz casts him in? Thus far, it has failed to do the latter, and by now I’ve lost the will to push on in the slim hope that it may yet make a course adjustment to this effect. Even if it did, my criticisms of how long it has taken to even start to do that would remain, hence reviewing without having finished the book.

It’s not a bad book at all on AIDS coverage and representation during the epidemic, and in terms of the memory of the epidemic subsequently. It’s not bad if you want a commentary on supposed journalistic impartiality and public risk versus patient confidentiality and rights when said patient is both free and fully mobile yet able to transmit serious disease. And if you like seeing prominent celebrated figureheads and their works torn down and scathingly critiqued along with their basic characters and motivations, fair enough - you’ll like this. But if you were coming here looking for the same sort of thing I was, don’t bother.

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