Consider my enthusiasm curbed.
I think about it every year on July 4, and have done so for a good while, but on the occasion of the “America 250” hokum it’s a tad more pressing.
After all, I was a month shy of 16 for the far more dignified Bicentennial celebration, symbolized by Operation Sail on July 4, 1976.
The highlight of the bicentennial for many New Yorkers was Operation Sail, colloquially known as “the Tall Ships,” which featured more than 200 vessels, including the 16 tall ships from around the world that made up the Grand Parade of Sailing Ships. The flotilla went up the Hudson River that Fourth of July, and I had prime seating.
It wasn’t only New Yorkers.
Everywhere else in the United States, we fired up the tube, selected one of three television networks, and watched “film at 11.” There was something elegant about the scene that stuck in the collective memory, rendering patriotism almost palatable for an hour or two.
This said, it is highly doubtful that I thought very much again about the Tall Ships until 1990, when I got around to reading San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts’ 1987 book, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic.
Shilts opens his book with the Tall Ships, deployed here as equal parts nostalgia for simpler times (an emotion almost never as straightforward as it might seem) and historical marker presaging the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
The world came together in the harbor, seemingly unified for a New York minute, but the seeds of disease may well have traveled with them, and the greatest default mobility in human history would henceforth spread the pestilence to the planet’s most remote corners.
I’m aware that Shilts’ book has not always aged well. In particular, his discussion of “Patient Zero” was controversial from the very start, although I’ll point out that in Shilts’ own words, “Whether Gaëtan Dugas actually was the person who brought AIDS to North America remains a question of debate and is ultimately unanswerable.”
And, Shilts didn’t always find himself in tune with the gay community in San Francisco, in what strikes me now as an eerie forerunning of the mask debates flaring during COVID-19.
Finally, almost four decades later, we know so much more about HIV/AIDS. This fascinating podcast from 2011 is well worth 30 minutes of your time, and let me tell you, I’m not a science type of guy.
The Cell That Started a Pandemic (Radiolab)
Gaetan Dugas … was soon dubbed Patient Zero, and labeled by the media as the cause of the AIDS epidemic. But as Carl Zimmer and David Quammen explain, Dugas was absolutely not Patient Zero.
Admittedly, it’s been 15 years since this podcast, but it appears that today we remain ensconced at those rough coordinates in terms of what is known. Significantly, we’ve made progress in treating HIV, overcoming the retrograde “danse macabre” efforts of political and religious obstructionists.
Obviously, journalists strive for accuracy. Shilts is no exception, even if the anger and frustration he felt as a gay man writing such a book as this coexists with objectivity, residing just beneath the surface of his prose.
I believe And the Band Played On still matters, and that Shilts’ errors, and the unavoidable dated frame of reference, are less important in the final analysis than his achievement in bringing consciousness of AIDS to a wider audience, and moreover, in educating these readers about what it means to be gay.
Of course, by which I mean: I needed to be taught these things, and when I read Shilts’ book back in 1990, finally I learned at least some of them, becoming a more fully realized human being in the process.
For this, I’m grateful. I should have been more aware, sooner; my failure in this regard is entirely on me.
Shilts died of AIDS-related causes in 1994. His book was tremendously influential, and it may be time for a reread, before Albert Mohler or JD Vance comes around to burn it.
Now every July 4, I think about the ships, and this book, and what it was about; the band played on as the Titanic sank — and here we are, full circle, back at America 250.
