Recently I read a book that was very influential and impactful to me and it made me think a lot about civil liberty and equal treatments that we have or don’t have in the United States. The book is called “And the band played on” by Randy Shilts, and it is about the AIDS epidemics in the 1980s in America, and the population that was impacted the most by it was the LGBT community. The book is a work of journalism which followed the epidemic from the late 1970s to around 1987. The book centers around healthcare facilities and public health organizations that dealt with AIDS and the struggle of researchers and doctors and the gay community to make the government focus on the epidemics. The book revealed a lot about the politics surrounding public …show more content…
When a few doctors first found out about the disease, they were discouraged to follow it because they were told that it wouldn’t be important. As thousands of Americans were dying, the government ignored the doctors’ request for more funding because it was a “gay disease”. In New York, where the most cases of AIDS took place, mayor Ed Koch turned a blind eye to the gay community and their suffering by refusing to provide more funding for shelter and healthcare for AIDS patients or promote sex education for the gay community in order to curb the disease. Hospitals were refusing to accept AIDS patients because they didn’t want to be known as “the AIDS hospital”. Media ignored the epidemic because they thought it was embarrassing to talk about gays and their sexual lifestyle. For this reason, not many people were aware of the epidemics and the government faced no pressure from the people to act on the epidemics. Not until there were cases of blood transfusion patients and prostitutes and drugs users who were heterosexual and got AIDS that the public finally paid attention to the epidemics, because not until then that the media started covering the issue. Even when media started covering AIDS, they rarely talked about the gay people who were affected the most. The reaction from the heterosexual community was suggestion to curb the epidemics within the gay community only so that the heterosexuals would not be affected. In their view, it was not a problem if the gay community were destroyed as long as the heterosexuals were well and healthy. This mentality again allowed the government to ignore the epidemics until Rock Hudson’s death that finally motivated the government to act. Homophobia was also one of the reasons why many leaders in the gay community were so sensitive with the public’s move on AIDS. They were afraid that