Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
This book has always intimidated me. For three decades I have heard words like “powerful,” “scary,” “depressing,” and even “a necessary evil” to describe And the Band Played On. I was afraid to really know That much about “the gay man’s disease.” I was squeamish about the how vivid I imagined the details to be. I anticipated TMI – Too Much Information – about deviant sex and the agonies of dying. In other words I was in denial and afraid.
And the Band Played Onhas got to be one of the best pieces of journalism I have read in a long, long time. Shilts’ reporting of every aspect of the AIDS epidemic is nothing short of mesmerizing. From the very beginning controlling the spread of AIDS never stood a chance. AIDS was to be ignored by everyone. If you were heterosexual you didn’t want anything to do with the gay man’s disease. If you were homosexual you didn’t want someone telling you how to have sex, disease or no disease. Shilts does a fantastic job bringing to light the political power struggles that kept education and research about AIDS in the dark for nearly a decade.
Intriguing lines: “A group of drag queens, dressed as nuns and calling themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, had picked the day for their debut” (p 14). “Being gay in New York was something you did on the weekends, it seemed” (p 27). “When a London gay switchboard’s lines broke down because they were so overwhelmed with AIDS calls, telephone company employees refused to fix them because they were afriad of contracting AIDS from the wiring” (p 565).
PS~ Remember my statement about being afraid of TMI, of learning something I realllly didn’t want to know? Well, Shilts did not disappoint. Not only did I get the full description of what fisting (with the whole frickin’ arm) was all about, but I learned of the practice called rimming. Politely put, it’s the human to human equivalent of licking an overflowingly full porta-potty. Good lord.
PPS~ What changed everything for me: learning that Randy Shilts took an HIV test while writing And The Band Played On; that he insisted on not knowing the results until the book was finished so as not to bias his writing; that he learned he was HIV positive on the day he sent his manuscript in…and finally, that in 1995 he died just like the AIDs patients he vividly described in his book.
~*LunaSea*~ 