Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic by Richard A. McKay

Author:Richard A. McKay [McKay, Richard A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2017-09-07T13:02:33+00:00

Figure 4.4 Artwork accompanying the serialized “Patient Zero” story, Chicago Tribune,

November 1, 1987, sec. Tempo, 1, Randy Shilts Papers (GLC 43), LGBTQIA Center, San

Francisco Public Library. Framed image of fl ight attendant measures 7.5 × 10.4 cm. © Tom

Herzberg. Reproduced with permission from the artist. This image, by Chicago- based ed-

itorial illustrator Tom Herzberg, introduced the Tribune’s serialization of the “Patient

Zero” excerpts from Shilts’s book. At the bottom of this page, below the fl oating image of

the uniformed air steward, a reader of the Tribune would have seen a pixelated, black- and-

white photograph of a crowd of about twenty people walking toward the camera. Four of

them had a fi ngerprint stamped on their faces, suggestive of the spread of one individual’s

virus. A photograph of Dugas from his 1984 obituary in Le Soleil lay buried in the section’s

fi fth page, perhaps indicating the decreasing signifi cance of Dugas’s actual likeness to the

development of the mythological fi gure of “Patient Zero.” In a September 2016 e- mail to

the author, Herzberg recalled being intrigued by the idea that AIDS could be traced to one

person, and given the feature’s emphasis on identifying Dugas, he developed the idea of

featuring a fi nger print. Since the job was a rushed one and the technical process involved

in rendering an artistic fi ngerprint was too time- consuming, he simply used his own. This

image and the accompanying story were distributed to more than 1.2 million readers of the

Tribune’s Sunday edition.

Giving a Face to the Epidemic 219

the woman noted dryly, “it appears he was man of the year for a number

of years.”80 It would seem that People magazine took such a suggestion se-

riously: the publication featured Dugas as one of the year’s “25 most in-

triguing people” in an issue released two weeks later, alongside Princess

Diana and other luminaries of the period. The entry, which reused the

60 Minutes photograph of Dugas, suggested that the fl ight attendant was a

“human explosive” who “never fully understood or accepted his role as a

major transmitter of the virus” and was “sexually active to the end.”81

In Halifax, this magazine article infuriated those fl ight attendants

who had been close with Dugas. As his friend and former colleague De-

siree Conn recalled, it was an affront not only to Dugas’s memory but

also to their profession:

I remember reading that and being so angry, and I mean I’m not gay, but I

was so angry about what they were accusing him of. And I thought to myself,

“Okay, how many people before Gaétan— Gaétan, when I knew him, thought

he had cancer— so how many people before him who thought maybe they

had cancer didn’t really have cancer at all but had AIDS?” So how dare they

[ speaking slowly] say that, and how dare they say that when he knew he had

AIDS that he didn’t care about other people and actually tried to spread it

on purpose. . . . But when that particular issue of People came out, everybody

was so up in arms, we were buying them to throw them out, [ pausing] because

we were

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