I wonder… There were some quite damning quotes in Shilts’ book if I recall correctly. (It turns out it was “Patient O”, for Outside-of-California-which became misinterpreted.) Portrayed in Shilts’ work as some villainous disease-spreader, France claims there’s no such evidence of this. One interesting addition, which I’d remembered from Shilts’ book, is the retribution of “Patient Zero”, Gaetan Dugas. This book covers many of the same bases as And The Band Played On. The HBO film of Kramer’s play The Normal Heart is great too, as is a documentary on Kramer himself, Larry Kramer in Love and Anger. I can also recommend And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts which, while clocking in at like 900 pages, reads like a breeze-I’d guess because the story is driven by absolute fury and urgency. Miraculous, almost, and I can believe it took at least the 5 years since the documentary came out to compose. There hasn’t been a book like this in a long time, and it’s a masterful and powerful narrative. The book is a behind-the-scenes expansion upon the documentary, and weaves in the author’s personal account of the crisis-essential documentation. As is the documentary of the same name, which I would advise watching first. Having acknowledged and relieved myself of authority, I want to share some things I’ve been thinking about. Though I’m inclined to think he was just “boring person: gay variety” rather than “all other gays are boring.” (It’s like that mathematical cow joke.) MY POINT IS I admit on that basis I’m not qualified to comment on the gay community. He was as close a window into the gay world as I had, and it wasn’t pretty. One is me, the other is my husband, the third is some friend who came to visit-and would not stop talking about himself! OMG in one week I learned every film he’d ever liked, every celebrity he thought was cute, every misfortune that ever befell him.

Did that really happen? I have an immense and bizarre hunger for how the world was once horrible…īefore I go any further, I need to say: I’ve hung out with three gay people in the last five years. Reading these two books, it’s just so difficult to take in. There are a number of parallels, such as the principle of survivor’s guilt, and how the experience of being so heavily marginalised becomes unforgettable no matter what progress is made after the fact. Quite appropriate and interesting to have read straight after Laurence Rees’ The Holocaust. I’m on a non-fiction binge, and this was a great one.

How to survive a plague by david france