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

by Randy Shilts

Sunday‚ July 28 AIDS was on the front page of virtually every Sunday morning paper in the United States. Any local angle was pursued with a vengeance, and entertainment sections were crowded with retrospectives on Rock Hudson’s career. There was something about Hudson’s diagnosis that seemed to strike an archetypal chord in the American consciousness. For decades, Hudson had been among the handful of screen actors who personified wholesome American masculinity; now, in one stroke, he was revealed as both gay and suffering from the affliction of pariahs. Doctors involved in AIDS research called the Hudson announcement the single most important event in the history of the epidemic, and few knowledgeable people argued.