In 1993, the book was adapted into a two hour HBO film starring Matthew Modine as Dr. Don Francis, spearhead of the CDC's research against mounting budget cuts, and Alan Alda, playing into his Hawkeye persona with a sadistic twist of greed as Dr. Robert Gallo, a nearly-megalomaniac lead in the field of retrovirology who cannot fathom not being part of the biggest outbreak in modern history. The clip below illustrates the film's treatment of Dr. Francis as a David standing up to a Goliath of medical bureaucracy.
Yeah. Let me just say that Aaron '90210' Spelling produced this one. Now do you get the picture?
For it's time, the film was breaking some ground by being honest (but certainly NOT graphic by any stretch), showing blatant gay sexuality and not apologizing for it.
But what exactly is the sexuality that they highlight? Take a moment and consider the now-debunked myth of 'Patient Zero', Gaetan Dugas. Shilts focuses one of the main points of his book on the sort of homo-boogieman who hops from city to city as a flight attendant, frequenting the nation's bath houses, practicing unsafe sex, and infecting anything he can with AIDS. The film features his wispy rebuttal/denial that maybe he could be the reason so many are dying, and shows him bouncing around still even after he has been told he has a deadly STD (see clip below).
This is contrasted with the monogamous Ian McKellan as Bill Krauss, a gay political liaison to Washington DC, who nearly survives the plague before finding a KS lesion in the film's final act. On his death bed, he is tended to by a former lover and visited by former co-workers, serving as the most personal of the film's hundreds of deaths.
The issue here is the absolute polarization we see of the gay community that borders on ridiculous, with one side which wants to close the bath houses of San Franciscio staged as avenging angels, and the other end of the spectrum that wants to keeps the tubs open shown as a group of narcissistic sheep blindly led to the slaughter. The baths are shown in an early scene (see below) as seedy havens for promiscuous nitrous poppers. The film essentially highlights all the bad of the baths without exploring any of the reasons why people ever went to the tubs in the first place.
It is important to remember, the public baths, just as much as a park, river bank, or restroom, were coded, safe places where men who otherwise lived closeted lives went to find intimate contact with other men. By the time Shilts begins his account in 1980, San Francisco has only been a gay-friendly metropolis for a few years, Harvey Milk having been killed just two years before, and gays were far from loved as they are these days, so some chose to remain closeted and just sneak downtown once in a while for a quick liaison.
What has to be taken into account also now is Shilts's timeline. He opens the book with a prologue in 1976 during the American Bicentennial celebrations on July 4th, alleging this was when the HIV virus entered the US population. Dugas is visibly ill with telltale KS lesions in 1980, and dies in 1984 of liver failure. So according to Shilts, Dugas infects basically all of San Francisco, most of Fire Island, and part of Manhattan in less than eight years and seeds death with all those men who are dead by the end of the book. Below is a segment from '60 MINUTES', divided in two parts, wherein Shilts explains his book and its theories.
Except this is absolutely impossible. The HIV virus takes years to eliminate the T-Cells that are needed to keep the body's immune system going. Even unprotected and unmedicated, an infected patient takes years to even become symptomatic, let alone advance from HIV to full-on AIDS, when they begin to exhibit KS lesions. Dugas simply couldn't have infected the first people that died of AIDS as the film shows, even if he was infectious as of 1976. The entire theory is based upon a timeline which is too compact for the biology of the virus. Expand the timeline, perhaps by several years, and the first group of infected patients could not have included Dugas, as he only became sexually active in 1972. Andrew R. Moss, Ph.D, at the time a member of the Department of Epidemiology and International Health at the University of California, San Francisco, repudiated Shilts in a 1988 letter to The New York Review of Books following the publication of Dugas's name, wherein he said "Mr. Shilts and Dr. Darrow [an epidemiologist featured in the book] should both repudiate the “patient zero” story." (Click here for full text).
The problem is that the paradigm is based on extremes. Dugas is the personification of promiscuous sex, Krauss as gay love. We see the entire film based around what was called a 'gay cancer' told from the heterosexual viewpoint of Matthew Modine. There isn't even any mention of Larry Kramer and ACT-UP or other issues which led to the full-on formation of an epidemic. We merely see it in terms of greed and bigotry simplified into a very polarized view of not just homosexuality but general humanity. This is the sad flaw of this important record.
