whose name had recently been leaked to the media and who faced a boy-
cott from parents of students at the school where he taught. Indeed, the
story about the boycott against Smith peaked in Canada at exactly the
same time as the “Patient Zero” story broke.68 Smith later suggested,
65. Ed Jackson, interview with author, Toronto, September 14, 2008, recording C1491/
48, tape 1, side A, BLSA. In their recorded testimonies, two interviewees based in San
Francisco reported single unprotected sexual encounters with Dugas between 1980 and
1982. At the time of interview in July 2007, one, Josh Lancaster (pseud.), was HIV- positive
and angrily convinced that he had contracted his infection from the fl ight attendant and
not his other San Francisco bathhouse encounters; interview with author, July 28, 2007, re-
cording C1491/12, tape 1, side A, BLSA. The other man was HIV- negative and believed
that his encounter with Dugas in Vancouver— after which he immediately began hearing
stories of the fl ight attendant’s “gay cancer”— may have helped him by raising his aware-
ness of the risks associated with AIDS at an early date; Ross Murray, interview with au-
thor, July 29, 2007, recording C1491/15, tape 1, side A, BLSA.
66. Bill Lewis, “Case May Set Precedent, Decision Expected Feb 14,” Body Politic,
February 1979, 7– 9.
67. Media contact record sheets, folder: Media Contacts: October 1987, box 91– 143/11,
ACT Records.
68. See, for example, Canadian Press, “AIDS- Fearing Parents Plot Boycott,” Vancou-
ver Sun, October 9, 1987, A6.
210
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with good humor, that he had not been aware of the story about the fl ight
attendant at that time: “If [ chuckling] there was an AIDS story carried
in Halifax, it was me, because two or three a times a week at least, some
parent would be saying something idiotic, or the school board would be
making an announcement, so they were getting their quota of AIDS sto-
ries just locally.”69
In contrast to the hospital in Quebec City, which readily confi rmed to
Le Soleil that Dugas had once sought treatment there, the US Centers
for Disease Control held a silence over Dugas’s identity. Harold Jaffe,
the former KS/OI Task Force member who spoke for the organization in
an interview published in mid- October 1987, denied the idea that “Pa-
tient Zero” referred to a single individual who brought AIDS to “North
America or California or Canada.” It would be impossible to know this,
he said, and besides, “For every individual we were aware of, there were
probably 10 that we weren’t aware of.” He also refused to confi rm or
deny whether Dugas was “Patient Zero,” saying that the CDC had never
identifi ed this man.70 Given its long history of work in venereal disease
control and its early history of gathering the names of individuals with
AIDS, the CDC believed it was vital for its interests and credibility that
a silence was kept on the identity of “Patient Zero.”71
The Dugas family crafted another silence. Apart from their few spo-
ken words to Le Soleil, family members refused to comment publicly.72
Before the New York Post broke the story, CBS Television recruited a lo-
cal Canadian reporter to gain the family’s cooperation for a 60 Minutes
69. Eric Smith, interview with author, Halifax, August 1, 2008, recording C1491/36,
tape 1, side B, BLSA.
70. “‘First AIDS Patient’ Story Dismissed,” A3.
71. This silence continues largely to the present day. In his 2008 oral history interview,
Bill Darrow referred to this man consistently as “Patient O.” When Harold Jaffe and the
author began jointly drafting a collaborative article in 2013, the former requested that the
fl ight attendant’s name be removed and replaced with “Patient 0,” preferring that the iden-
tifi cation be held at arm’s length through a citation of And the Band Played On.
72. This strategic silence, like that of the CDC, extended for decades. In October 2007
a reporter from Le Soleil had contacted Dugas’s sister and sister- in- law to ask what they
thought about reports announcing a recent scientifi c theory that HIV had arrived in the
United States in 1969. They replied that it had brought the family some relief, but having
had their name “blackened,” they preferred to let the subject die, wishing to speak of it no
more since they were fed up with “all this s— ” (my translation); Ian Bussières, “Agent de
bord exonéré d’avoir propagé le sida en Amérique: la famille de Gaétan Dugas soulagée
mais amère,” Le Soleil [Quebec City], October 31, 2007, 17.
Giving a Face to the Epidemic 211
episode. She recalled that “I was a journalist with CBC TV in Montreal
and a researcher from 60 Minutes contacted our newsroom looking for
someone who’d translate between French and English on a ‘secret’ as-
signment to Quebec City. I picked up the researcher at the Montreal air-
port and she told me the chilling story on the drive to Quebec City. She’d
made an appointment to speak to the Dugas family, to ask for access to
family pictures and interviews.” The Canadian reporter was struck by her
own attachment to and sympathy for the Dugas family members, and she
found herself contemplating how to protect them from the media’s gaze:
They were very decent people who’d adopted Gaetan Dugas and deeply loved
him. There was a mass card with Gaetan’s photo on their refrigerator door.
His sister, a dental hygienist, had nursed him and was concerned that, if this
was known publicly, she’d lose her job. I was able to give the family some
options to cooperating with 60 Minutes (in French) that the 60 Minutes re-
searcher was unaware of. The parents were very concerned about control-
ling the story in order to protect Gaetan’s reputation. . . . I found myself pro-
foundly protective of them and would not give out their address to my French
or English colleagues when the story broke in Canada. The Dugas family did
not cooperate with 60 Minutes to the best of my knowledge. They did not be-
lieve the researcher’s assurances that the story would not be sensationalized.
Indeed it was, with Gaetan being called the “Typhoid Mary of AIDS” . . . I’m
sure they were devastated. His mother told me he’d take her on trips and was
very kind and loving to them. A good son.73
Indeed, the 60 Minutes piece on “Patient Zero”— a long- awaited fi rst
piece of investigative reporting from that program on the epidemic—
was deeply exploitative. It was allegedly focused on the Reagan admin-
istration’s lack of attention to AIDS— a strategic nonresponse to the ep-
idemic which ACT UP had begun to protest with the adopted battle
phrase “silence = death.”74 Yet the fi rst half of the segment, as the
73. Marie Wadden, e- mail message to author, June 6, 2008. This e- mail was sent in
response to a nationally broadcast interview about my research on CBC Radio’s Sounds
Like Canada, June 4, 2008.
74. Douglas Crimp, “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,” in Crimp, AIDS, 3–
16. In early 1987, members of the silence = death Project, an activ
ist design collective,
mounted visually striking posters across New York City that carried this phrase. The slo-
gan appeared in white capital letters beneath a pink triangle, all set against a black back-
ground. The collective’s members, who shortly thereafter participated in ACT UP’s inau-
212
chapter 4
cultural scholar Leo Bersani noted, was an examination of “the mur-
derously naughty sexual habits of Gaetan Dugas.” This choice of con-
tent resulted in a report that was sensational from its beginning, Bersani
maintained, “with the most repugnant image of homosexuality imagin-
able: that of the irresponsible male tart who willfully spread[s] the vi-
rus after he was diagnosed and warned of the dangers to others of his
promiscuity.”75 While the program’s producers did not add any new in-
formation to Shilts’s version of the story, they managed to acquire sev-
eral photographs of the fl ight attendant, and thus they were able to put a
face to the disease for their North American audience (see fi g. 4.2).
Viewers were invited to gaze upon the shirtless torso of Dugas and
ponder his motivation as the camera zoomed in slowly to a close- up
(see fi g. 4.3). The program’s host, Harry Reasoner, matter- of- factly—
and without a trace of irony— explained, “Patient Zero is the name that
Dr. Dritz and the medical detectives used to describe this man, the air-
line steward, to protect his identity. Randy Shilts reveals that he was a
French- Canadian named Gaetan Dugas.” A jump cut to a tight shot of
the fl ight attendant accentuated Reasoner’s designation: “Patient Zero—
one of the fi rst cases of AIDS.” Finally, the last jump cut brought the au-
dience face- to- face with an extreme close- up of Dugas’s eyes: “the fi rst
person identifi ed as a major transmitter of the disease.”76 The program
also reproduced the cluster diagram in a misleading animated cartoon it
labeled “Cluster Study Patient Zero.” The animation began with a sin-
gural activities, loaned their distinctive image to the new activist group for wide use in its
protest work; see Douglas Crimp, “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,” in Crimp,
AIDS, 3– 16; Christian Liclair, “Silence=Death- Project,” The Nomos of Images (blog),
ISSN: 2366- 9926, December 30, 2015, http:// nomoi .hypotheses .org/ 198. Since the 1970s, a
transnational network of European and North American gay rights activists had adopted
the pink triangle— the emblem which male homosexuals were forced to wear in Nazi con-
centration camps during the Second World War— as a symbol to challenge cultural silences
around homosexuality and to promote gay pride; W. Jake Newsome, “Migrating Memo-
ries: Transatlantic Commemoration of the Nazis’ Homosexual Victims in West Germany
and the United States” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical
Association, Atlanta, January 10, 2016).
75. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in Crimp, AIDS, 202.
76. Lowell Bergman, “Patient Zero,” 60 Minutes, CBS, airdate November 15, 1987, on-
line video, 14:10, https:// www .youtube .com/ watch ?v = Sc7bYnH2Zpo. For a critical discus-
sion of the media’s use of images of PWAs to “reveal” what one British tabloid called “the
disturbing truth about AIDS sickness,” see Martha Gever, “Pictures of Sickness: Stuart
Marshall’s Bright Eyes,” in Crimp, AIDS, 108– 26, quotation at 115.
Giving a Face to the Epidemic 213
Figure 4.2 Host Harry Reasoner introducing “Patient Zero” segment on 60 Minutes,
CBS, broadcast November 15, 1987. With the name “Patient Zero” authoritatively stamped
across Dugas’s forehead, there is nothing in this message to indicate the contingent and
unplanned route by which the designation came into being. This episode of 60 Minutes
was the fi fth most watched television show nationwide that week (topped only by four sit-
coms), according to the Nielsen Ratings service. The program reached twenty- one million
households with television sets (Associated Press, “It’s Waterloo Again for ‘Napoleon,’”
Orlando Sentinel, November 19, 1987, E8).
gle circle containing the numeral 0 fi lling an otherwise blank and grid-
lined dark blue canvas. As the camera pulled back, the other cluster case
connections, represented by spokes and unnumbered colored circles,
popped outward from this central point, until the full cluster diagram
fi lled the frame, rotated slightly counterclockwise so that the length of
the network was now arrayed horizontally across the screen. This ani-
mation suggested an inexorable growth outward from “Patient 0,” the
only identifi ed case. It represented a subtle yet powerful misinterpreta-
tion of the connections traced by Bill Darrow, one which further empha-
sized and naturalized Dugas’s supposedly central role.
John Greyson, a Toronto artist and fi lmmaker who was involved with
AIDS Action Now! (an Ontario- based activist group modeled on ACT
UP), was struck by the intensity of the media’s gaze on the fl ight atten-
A
B
Figure 4.3 Gaétan Dugas,
“the fi rst person identi-
C
fi ed as a major transmitter of
the disease,” as described in
voiceover by Harry Reasoner
on CBS program 60 Minutes,
broadcast November 15, 1987 .
The sequence of images began
with ( A) a torso shot, zoom-
ing in slowly to ( B) a close- up,
jumping to ( C) a tight shot,
and fi nally jumping to ( D) an
extreme close- up. The pro-
gram’s editors employed jump
cuts to bring millions of view-
ers up close with the man Rea-
soner described as “a central
D
victim and victimizer.”
Giving a Face to the Epidemic 215
dant and the family’s studied silence. Before the Canadian Film Cen-
tre accepted him as a resident in the organization’s three- year directors’
program, he incorporated the media’s handling of the “Patient Zero”
story into two art pieces he produced in 1989. In one, initially published
as “Requiem for Gaetan” in 1988, a viewer fl ips across several fi ctitious
television channels searching for a documentary on the life of Dugas.
On the last channel, the viewer catches the end of the documentary,
and here Greyson conceptualized the reaction of the fl ight attendant’s
mother as one of defi ance, resisting the commodifi cation of her image as
the mother of “Patient Zero” and shifting her strategy of silence to one
of invisibility:
click
Channel 17: . . . close- up of Gaetan Dugas, the black and white photo from
the National Enquirer. A disembodied voice, a woman, bitter and clipped,
Québécois.
“Look, I’ve done a lot of research on my own. I’ve talked with maybe two
dozen specialists, here, in the United States, in Europe. They all say there’s
no such thing as a Patient Zero, it doesn’t make sense medically, the epide-
miology is all wrong. The cluster groups around the continent, and the num-
bers,
indicate no one person could have been responsible. Plus all the new
stuff about co- factors. And I’ve told a thousand reporters— but do you think
anyone has printed it? Not a chance. They just want a photo of Patient Zero’s
mother. So forget it.”77
Elsewhere in the piece, Greyson employed the fi ctional Mallory Kea-
ton — a teenaged character from Family Ties, a popular contemporary
American television series starring the Canadian actor Michael J. Fox
as Alex Keaton with Justine Bateman as his sister Mallory— to ventril-
oquize his critique of Shilts. “I want to explore the book’s double mes-
sages,” Mallory— a scatterbrained character cast here as a wise fool—
tells Alex, “the simultaneous critiquing and validation of the mainstream
77. John Greyson, “Liberace’s Music Helped Cure Me,” in Urinal and Other Stories
(Toronto: Art Metropole and the Power Plant, 1993), 268– 69. Earlier versions of this work,
which Greyson initially wrote to highlight a strong culture of lesbian and gay video produc-
tion in Canada, were published in British and Canadian gay periodicals: see Square Peg 19
(1988): 28– 29; Rites, September 1988, 12, 18; and the Vancouver- based Video Guide 10, no. 3– 4 (November 1989): 8– 9, http:// www .vivomediaarts .com/ wp - content/ uploads/ 2015/
06/ VGUIDESno046small .pdf, accessed February 24, 2017.
216
chapter 4
medical establishment; the appropriation of gay liberation discourse to
buttress deeply conservative positions; and fi nally, Shilts’ dangerously
reactionary views concerning sexuality and its regulation.” Mallory con-
tinues, “Right now I’m working on how he constructs the Gaetan Dugas
story, turning him into the dangerous, exotic Patient Zero, a latter- day
Typhoid Mary.” There is a dark irony at play when Greyson has Alex,
backed up by the show’s recorded laugh track, mock his sister and ask
her if she is “on drugs.” Greyson would continue pondering the main-
stream success of the “Patient Zero” story. Needing to develop a feature
fi lm proposal for his fellowship at the Canadian Film Centre, Greyson’s
critique would evolve into an unusual fi lm project, Zero Patience, which
will be examined in greater detail in chapter 5.
Michael Denneny was concerned that if only fi ve thousand copies of
Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic Page 35
