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And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

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Randy Shilts
Randy Shilts

Randy Shilts was an American journalist renowned for his pioneering work in covering the AIDS epidemic. He is most celebrated for his book 'And the Band Played On,' which offered an extensive examination of the early stages of the epidemic and the response of the U.S. government and medical community. Shilts passed away on February 17, 1994. more

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“A contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via an insidious collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests. Wetiko is a psychosis in the true sense of the word, “a sickness of the spirit.”

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“An inner cancer of the soul, wetiko covertly influences our perceptions so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen. Wetiko bewitches our consciousness so that we become blind to the underlying, assumed viewpoint through which we perceive, conjure up, and give meaning to our experience of both the world and ourselves. This psychic virus can be thought of as the bug in “the system” that informs and animates the madness that is playing out in our lives, both individually and collectively, on the world stage.”

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“An upsurge in new cases, the highest number for one twenty-four-hour period yet, and an alarming rise in the contact curve. People who hadn’t been hit were getting bold. They were getting bored, going next door to talk to the neighbors, thinking things weren’t really that bad, gravitating back toward normalcy. Several shopkeepers opened their stores, defied the police to send them home, claiming the whole thing was blown out of proportion. They found out, soon enough, but by then other cases were breaking discipline. Another day, another big rise in new cases and a doubling of contacts.”

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“Leave everything and follow me,' Christ is sup- posed to have said; the commandment is infinite, it demands a new humanity. Enigmatic and naked. It sweeps away the grandeurs of the world. One kind of poverty destroys, another exalts. There is a great mystery in that: to love the poor means to love baneful poverty, to stop despising it. It means to love mankind. For man is poor. Irremediably. We are poverty, buffeted between desire and disgust.”

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“I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier. Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do — and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don't they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and maybe you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there—all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed. That's how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.”

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“My goal in going public was not to put my extended family to shame, or to get back at Brian for abusing my sister and me; rather, my mission was to give a face and voice to an epidemic that society stays hushed about.”

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