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. Dugas paid a price for his appetite and his daring. He developed Kaposi’s sarcoma, underwent chemotherapy for that, suffered from Pneumocystis pneumonia and other AIDS-related infections, and died of kidney failure at age thirty-one.
