“How Many Dead Hemophiliacs Do You Need?” And the Band Played on (1993)

Abstract

The early and shameful history of HIV/AIDS in the United States, and the decimation of the U.S. gay population throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, is not well known to the majority of healthcare practitioners who were licensed in the twenty-first century. But it must be, and this film is the conduit. And the Band Played On is a faithful representation of the 1987 630-page book of the same name, written by journalist Randy Shilts. As an openly gay reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, in a city that had the largest population of gay males at that time—roughly 17% of the city’s population was gay (KQED 2009), Shilts tracked the deadly pandemic from its first appearance around 1979 through the disease’s infancy and early childhood, signing off in 1987, when he completed the book. In “AIDS Years” 1987 was a timeframe that was considered a turning point in HIV/AIDS, when it finally began to be treated like a twentieth century infectious disease instead of a seventeenth century plague, and the year that azidothymidine (AZT), the first anti-retroviral medication for AIDS, was introduced. Shilts refrained from taking the HIV antibody test until he completed the book (60 min 1994); he tested positive and died of AIDS in 1994 at age 42, two years before protease inhibitors were discovered. His greatest contribution to society and medicine was writing down what occurred so that the tragic ethical violations and medical harms that characterized this time period can be taught to future generations of practitioners who now regard AIDS as casually as type 2 diabetes, and who may even see a cure for AIDS in their professional lifetime.