"Patient Zero" and the "Recalcitrant" Queer

On October 6, 1987, the New York Post boasted, in a major front-page headline, that it had uncovered, “THE MAN WHO GAVE US AIDS.”  That man, Gaetan Dugas—christened “Patient Zero”—became the scapegoat extraordinaire of the AIDS crisis, though not on account of the Post’s reporters.  Instead, author Randy Shilts and his publisher, St. Martin’s Press, planted the story with the Post to promote Shilts’ book, And the Band Played On.  The book thereafter rode the wave of revulsion to the best-seller list.  A promiscuous gay male flight attendant with an alluring Quebecois accent—a man who refused to give up sex even after learning of the infectious and deadly nature of his ailment—was a world-wide villain.

My presentation focuses on the timing of the “Patient Zero” revelation, a full six years after America’s AIDS epidemic was first “discovered.”  I argue that Shilts’ depiction of Dugas was uniquely suited to the 1987 moment, especially to social conservatives’ last-ditch efforts to foreclose normalization of people with AIDS.  The myth syncs with a relatively late legal trend to lock up so-called "recalcitrant AIDS carriers.”  Since various legal authorities had already opted to protect certain key civil rights for PWAs, the “Patient Zero” hysteria represented social conservatives’ best hope to quarantine PWAs by singling out those who refused to stop having sex.  Furthermore, by coupling a close reading of Shilts’ text with quarantining efforts circa 1987, I conclude that Shilts crafted the “Patient Zero” myth to more broadly demonize what I call "recalcitrant queers," those who preached a sex-positive, non-monogamous vision of homosexuality even in the face of the AIDS crisis.  The end result was to broadly stigmatize a queer lifestyle amidst the larger public, while politically jeopardizing the civil rights of only a more concentrated group of PWAs.