Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

Another perceived starting point was Gaëtan Dugas, the young Canadian flight attendant who became notorious as “Patient Zero.” You’ve heard of him, probably, if you’ve heard much of anything about the dawning of AIDS. Dugas has been written about as the man who “carried the virus out of Africa and introduced it into the Western gay community.” He wasn’t. But he seems to have played an oversized and culpably heedless role as a transmitter during the 1970s and early 1980s. As a flight steward, with almost cost-free privileges of personal travel, he flew often between major cities in North America, joining in sybaritic play where he landed, notching up conquests, living the high life of a sexually voracious gay man at the height of the bathhouse era. He was handsome, sandy-haired, vain but charming, even “gorgeous” in some eyes. According to Randy Shilts, author of And the Band Played On (which includes much heroic research and a fair bit of presumptuous reimagining), Dugas himself reckoned that in the decade since becoming actively gay he had had at least twenty-five hundred sexual partners.