And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

In those early years, the federal government viewed AIDS as a budget problem, local public health officials saw it as a political problem, gay leaders considered AIDS a public relations problem, and the news media regarded it as a homosexual problem that wouldn’t interest anybody else. Consequently, few confronted AIDS for what it was, a profoundly threatening medical crisis.

Don’t offend the gays and don’t inflame the homophobes. These were the twin horns on which the handling of this epidemic would be torn from the first day of the epidemic. Inspired by the best intentions, such arguments paved the road toward the destination good intentions inevitably lead.

There was only one reason for the lack of media interest, and everybody in the task force knew it: the victims were homosexuals. Editors were killing pieces, reporters told Curran, because they didn’t want stories about gays and all those distasteful sexual habits littering their newspapers.

The gay plague got covered only because it finally had struck people who counted, people who were not homosexuals.

In history, Marc Conant warned, Ronald Reagan could go down as the president who did nothing while thousands died. And thousands and tens of thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands would die, he wrote. Most of them needlessly.

Conant is right. Even Reagan's supporters can't deny that Reagan's late response to the AIDS crisis is a black mark on his presidency.

Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely. And everybody also agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late.

Hindsight is 20/20

To Francis, the Hudson episode was not a celebration of one man’s courage but an indictment of our era. A lot of good, decent Americans had perished in this epidemic, but it was the diagnosis of one movie star, who had demonstrated no previous inclination to disclose his plight, that was going to make all the difference.

Even as he plotted his latest militant exploit or planned his 1988 campaign for supervisor, Cleve wondered if he would survive.

I am happy to see that Cleve Jones is still alive in 2020, and still working as an activist.

The United States, the one nation with the knowledge, the resources, and the institutions to respond to the epidemic, had failed. And it had failed because of ignorance and fear, prejudice and rejection.