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

by Randy Shilts

The story of the first Wall Street Journal piece on the epidemic would later be cited in journalism reviews as emblematic of how the media handled AIDS in the first years of the epidemic. The reporter, it turned out, had long been pressuring editors to run a story on the homosexual disorder. He had even written a piece in 1981 that the editors refused to print. Finally, the reporter was able to fashion an article around the twenty-three heterosexuals, largely intravenous drug users, who were now counted among GRID patients. With confirmation of bona fide heterosexuals, the story finally merited sixteen paragraphs deep in the largest-circulation daily newspaper in the United States, under the headline: “New, Often-Fatal Illness in Homosexuals Turns Up in Women, Heterosexual Males.” The gay plague got covered only because it finally had struck people who counted, people who were not homosexuals.