So hey, here's a thing I don't think a lot of folks know: That whole "Patient Zero" thing? The French-Canadian airhost who supposedly spread HIV all over America?
That's not real. That's not what happened or how it happened.
Gaëtan Dugas was a sexually active, gay, French-Canadian airhost. He was diagnosed so early, he participated in a study to prove HIV was sexually transmitted. (Yes, this was WAY back.)
Gaëtan kept an address book (people used to do that), and the researchers used it for contact tracing.
Gaëtan's submission of his address book of sex partners pretty much sealed the deal on HIV being sexually transmitted. And because he submitted a record that extensive, he was at the center of a lot of the contact tracing.
On charts, Gaëtan was marked "O." Not 0, O. For "Out of California."
But this was misinterpreted as a zero by a different research group down the line. And the narrative of an out-of-control (and foreign, and flamboyant) super-spreader was just just too delicious for the media to resist.
Full doc here.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jamd...
Gaëtan's family has never publicly commented on anything, but have been known to say to friends, "He did everything he could to help the researchers, and this is the thanks he gets."
Which is incredibly sad.
They aren't wrong. Blaming victims reduced the chance they would seek help and control the spread.
We had people harranging Sen Danforth at town halls, demanding gays be sent to camps "for their own good" back then. (To his credit, Danforth was horrified.)
Those days were wretched.
I was in an LGBTQ bowling league sometime around 2004 and remember looking around and coming to the realization, at the time, the gay men in the group were all up to about age 40, and then about 55 and older, with no one in the age bracket in between.
I knew this story but not about the doc. What Dugas provided was epidemiologically invaluable, but if his family tried to set the record straight it would discourage others from disclosing. I don't know if that's the reason for their stoicism on this, but god is it heartbreaking. Thanks for sharing.
