current reading: and the band played on.

I am in Houston & back at school!

Saturday night, C picked me up from the airport, and we had a super late breakfast-dinner at IHOP where I humiliated him by starting to eat my eggs with my hands before the server went off to grab the utensils. It's nice being back! It's even nicer coming back to a suite full of laughter and homemade tamales, courtesy of suitemate B's grandma.

Over the winter break, I checked out "And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts, which was mentioned in my immunology class last semester.  I thought (hoped) it would be a thin paperback book, but the 600-something hardcover book barely fit in my purse.

So far, I'm less than half way through, but it's fascinating to read through the development and discovery of AIDS. According to the book, AIDS spread rapidly because of the prominent practices of bathhouses and clubs in the San Francisco scene among the gays, and because the patients displayed vastly different pathological symptoms as result of their weakened immune system, it was difficult for the doctors to make the connection and see that the disease was caused by a common virus. In addition, because the disease was common among the gay population (even called Gay Related Immune Deficiency in the beginning) and the media preferred not to write on this subset of people, there was few interest among the researchers who would rather focus on diseases that received heavier media spotlight.


My first response in hearing about AIDS and its emergence in SoCal/NYC was how frightening and confusing it must have been for a disease to be linked to a behavior, especially one that is constantly shunned and ostracized in society. I mean, as the book mentions many times, pathogens are color, race, sexuality, gender-blind. I can only imagine all the "told-you-so's" and the "God's punishing you" finger pointings that happened while the origin of the disease was being investigated. Isn't this crazy though?, that a disease can be linked to some common-behavioral population? Imagine if a disease broke out among the liberals, or people who slept on their back or... ate yogurt with their forks. It'd be difficult not to read into such interesting happenings.


Initially, I thought the title was about the enduring nature of humans even through the disease, but I read that the title was referring to how the band continued playing on the sinking Titanic ship.


What I found even more interesting was that Randy Shilts, who was gay himself, wrote the book while he was tested for AIDS, and postponed finding out the results until he finished the book. He did indeed find out that he was HIV-positive, and later died of the very complications he wrote about in the book, pneumocystis c. pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma.