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This would be the book review thread, yes?
I recently finished Randy Shilts' And The Band Played On. I'm surely this book has been discussed here many times, but in short, it's about the early phases of the AIDS pandemic, starting from late 70s and ending in 1985 (the book was published in 1987). The book was actually written very well and engagingly, it is no wonder it is probably still the best-well-known "popular" work on AIDS, something I had seen referenced dozens of times before actually reading it.
It's so popular, in fact, that one of the things that I kept thinking about while reading was: how much has this book, in particular, affected how the world (over)reacted to the Covid pandemic? Let's consider some of the things Shilts talks about:
These days, the book is probably the most famous for its attacks on Reagan admin and its unwillingness to answer the pandemic early on, only belatedly getting into the game during the later phases when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop decided to take initiative on his own to send information on the pandemic to all Americans, recommend the use of condoms etc. This mostly seems to have less to do with social conservatism, though this plays a part, but rather the general small government agenda and unwillingness to use federal funds for new efforts.
Actually, this part of the narrative (about the book) might be a bit exagerrated, as Shilts basically portrays almost every public instance - not only the federal government but also states and cities, particularly New York - as slow to respond and uneager to spend money. In comparison, during Covid times, almost every government suddenly decided that money's no thing when it comes to saving lives, with many governments going quite deep in debt at least for a while.
The book is probably the second most famous for Shilts's anger against the 80s gay community, particularly its unwillingness to admit that having a new, mysterious but fatal STD going on meant that it's time to put limits on culture that encourages men having sex with hundreds and thousands of men, particularly regarding the battle by Shilts, some public health officials and a part of the gay movement to close the bathhouses in San Francisco and other cities. I've actually seen some people talk about these things - promiscuity in 80s gay culture, the bathhouse struggle - as some sort of forbidden knowledge that you are not wanted to know, even though they're front and center in, again, the best-known popular work on AIDS crisis (which was also made into an also-well-known HBO TV movie.)
Anyway, even though Covid and STDs are two very different things (a closer equivalent was monkeypox, and a lot of people seemed to fear that it would become an AIDS-like epidemic, but it seems like that after the health system moved on to implicitly treating it as a STD, it was brought to control reasonably quickly - of course, the infrastructure and culture for keeping actual STDs in control has improved considerably post-AIDS, especially among gay men), much of debates about lockdowns did revolve around places like bars and other places where a lot of people (gay and straight) mingle - usually not perhaps as closely as in the sex-oriented bathhouses, but still. Of course the devil-may-care, who-knows-if-it's-even-real, I'll-get-it-anyway attitudes like the ones expressed by number of subjects of ATBPO, like that of Gäetan Dugas, one of Shilts's gay villains, were denigrated as "plague carriers" and the like.
Alongside the bathhouse narrative, Shilts concentrated on the blood banks, which become aware at a fairly early point that their blood is contaminated and poses a considerable risk to hemophiliacs and many others needing blood transfusions. Shilts blames the profit-seeking motive, which is also mentioned when talking about the bathhouses (whose owners often made stack and were moves and shakers in the local gay communities), and there's many cases where the blood bankers and bathhouse barons are shown willing to refer to high-minded ideals about privacy and freedom when they really just cared about not losing the revenue streams. Of course with Covid, states were quite willing to run over businesses, even letting some (like bars) go under.
Shilts also shows the scientific community being unable to decide on a narrative early on (somewhat unfairly at places; Shilts almost seems to demand the scientists to have immediately converge on the correct narrative from the beginning, whether this was actually possible or not), and much energy being spent on, for instance, turf wars between European and American scientists on who actually found HIV and what to even call it. With Covid, the scientific community often seemed conspicuously willing to go in lockstep and offer recommendations even with paltry knowledge on what happens, like with the "Covid-is-not-airborne/no-actually-it-is" twists and turns, or the early decision that lab leak is not possible and all suggestions on it would be conspiracy theory, something that might actually have been mostly just European and American scientists being unwilling to do anything that would prevent cooperation with Chinese scientists on this issue.
One specific figure who was fingered as a source for must misery in ATBPO is none other than Antonio Fauci, who made an early statement that AIDS might spread by touch in some situations, leading to massive panic and increasing considerably people's unwillingness to be in any contact or touch with AIDS sufferers. Whatever Fauci's role with Covid was, it's pretty remarkable that after this AIDS debacle he still was the one who implicitly became the American pandemic czar, and I think one reason why he was so willing to take this role - fit or not for it - was the feeling that after his reputation being blackened by actions during one pandemic he now had the chance to repair it by tackling another one.
Again, COVID pandemic and its reprecussions are surely a topic that has enough material for whole libraries of analysis, certainly it can't be just be explained by reference to AIDS history, but I haven't actually seen people talk about this particular book in connection to its effect on COVID debate, so I wanted to hear some opinions on this.
Book review thread!
My problem with the comparisons is that the strongest ones are also the most obvious. In particular,
is like…a stock villain. The kind of character young-adult authors add when they want to make readers feel a little more mature. The profit motive has been a bogeyman since at least the Gilded Age. And there was still enough post-2008 class warfare in the atmosphere to get people riled up. Was this a lesson learned from the Reagan era, or was the age of Gordon Gekko just less willing to intervene in capitalism?
The other standout is transfer of information. Does the book address how institutions shared their data? Because I’m imagining heated phone calls and corkboards with string. The kind of medium which makes for good TV but not necessarily the right decisions.
In 2020, we got to watch the COVID counters go up in real time. We didn’t get to see it, but the scientific consensus was congealing at roughly the same speed. The Internet makes stuff happen faster, but there’s still no way to speed up the real-world information. Every notion has to be preconceived.
I dunno, if you have people making profit on running a blood bank or a sex-oriented bathhouse, I'd image they would actually go and fight over their right to do just that if banning or regulating those things would cut into the said profits, especially if they can also just argue that it's not time to be hasty since there's no full certainty on how the virus transmits or how likely the blood is to be contaminated.
Conferences and mail, mostly, as far as I've understood. Certainly the book couldn't make a comparison to the current, more rapid spread of information, since they didn't have a time machine.
I think Shilts puts his thumb on the scales a bit for that evaluation, especially for bathhouses.
He makes a big deal out of them as a "100-million dollar industry" and charging 5/10 dollars a
headperson, and that is an investment: the Club Baths would have definitely gone (and did eventually go under!) when closed. Totally fair point! But the other side of that's the extent the Club Baths founder had been a gay activist over a decade before opening his first bathhouse, and went into that field knowing it'd blacklist him from most normal ventures. When it comes to revenue and ideals, there's really little in And the Band Played On that really excludes the option 'both'; just what Shilts wants to portray.More significantly, while Shilts mentions the long incubation time for HIV, the work as a whole kinda glosses over the extent that drove so many other problems. There was no blood test until 1985; understandings of the high real transmission rate and true number of cases were projections and guess-work, and often wrong (as you mention Fauci and the spit-take). He mentions as an aside different times where the expected incubation period increased -- ten months, a year, two years, five years -- but he only really talks about minimizing estimates of incidence to show obviously misguided activists. But they were only obviously wrong in retrospect: in many cases, they were doing the math and statistical analysis correctly, just with garbage numbers coming in.
I think there's a stronger argument for blood banks (though the strongest arguments come well after the 1980-85 block that Shilts focuses on), but even that has to trade off against the often-serious risks low available blood would involve.
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