Lay the blame for hundreds of thousands of deaths at Ronald Reagan's feet. ( )

As I read this book, I couldn't help asking myself, over and over, how people could possibly have let it all happen like that. How could the bathhouses stay open so long? Why was almost no one willing to use a condoms or curtail their activities? Why were federal and local governments so unwilling to do anything?

From this late vantage point, it is easy to wonder that. Having seen AIDS, if there was to be another disease like it in sneakiness and severity, we'd likely catch on quicker, because we'd be able to say, oh, this is like AIDS, better not fuck it up this time. I was born while the events on page 435 were happening, more than two thirds of the way through the book, and grew up in a world where AIDS was a reality, where blood drives have requirements, and where condom use is taught in school. Queer people are freer than they've ever been and getting freer every day. Jonathan Larson has long since written that song asking us how we measure a year.

In the early 1980s, none of this was true. Medicine had recently conquered small pox, most STIs were treatable with a quick dose of antibiotics, nothing like AIDS had ever been see before, and even the Ebola virus had been quickly and efficiently dealt with; that the medical establishment would clear up a new disease quickly was a given. Queer people were liberating themselves but still rightfully wary of oppression and hate, wary of any attempt to curtail civil liberties or have their lives looked upon in askance. Frank public discussion of sex was a non-starter, condoms were uncouth, and Reagan was president.

Let's talk about the Reagan administration for a second. If any one person could have changed the course of all this, it was Reagan. If he had been at all interesting in spending money on anything besides mucking around in the Middle East and Latin America, AIDS would have been less of a fiasco than it was. That it took so long to figure out what was going on was directly the fault of the administration's unwillingness to fund research at the CDC and other agencies, in the name of fiscal responsibility. The man got through a term and a half without ever publicly addressing the issue! It is true that many other people made many other mistakes, but the buck stopped at the top.

So, why did the AIDS crisis end up so badly? Because no one wanted to believe it could be so bad, and Republicans hate you.

I thought of myself well versed is recent social/political history such as this, but, oh man, was this book as eye-opener. I'd only ever heard good things about ACT UP and Gay Men's Health Crisis, how they were so important and vigilant in helping the get the response to AIDS rolling. Being from down-state New York myself, I'd never heard just how abysmal the response was of New York City and New York State in the first half of the '80s. I'd never heard how San Francisco was so far ahead of the game, and how that city had the first AIDS hospital ward, and at one point was spending more on AIDS than the federal government. I have new-found appreciation for some members of the government -- Henry Waxman, Dianne Feinstein, among others -- for their roles in it all.

I couldn't stop reading this book. Even though it is over 600 pages and I read it during my last two weeks of grad school. It is engaging and heart-wrenching and mind-blowing.

There was a commercial on TV 10 to 15 years ago, where an actor went through some Suburbia, USA, and asked what it would be like if such and such high percentage of people had died, with so many orphans, and empty houses and what not. And then the actor told us that that's what it's like in some locales in Africa, where whole families are dying of AIDS daily. As the people in this book died off, I thought that's what it must have been like in the certain neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco. Gay men would watch everyone they knew die horribly -- AIDS is not a pretty death -- and then wonder when their turn would come. Could you imagine that among your own circle? I could, especially because, like some of the gay men depicted in this book, we've been in and out of each others' beds (though now with rampant condom use and HIV/STI tests that are taken regularly, things are obviously much safer) over the last few years. But what if? I can hardly imagine it, except that I can and the thought is horrifying. And here we have an account of the people who lived through (or not) such a reality. May it serve as a warning to us all, and a memorial to them. ( )

And the Band Played Onhas got to be one of the best pieces of journalism I have read in a long, long time. Shilts' reporting of every aspect of the AIDS epidemic is nothing short of mesmerizing. From the very beginning controlling the spread of AIDS never stood a chance. AIDS was to be ignored by everyone. If you were heterosexual you didn't want anything to do with the gay man's disease. If you were homosexual you didn't want someone telling you how to have sex, disease or no disease. Shilts does a fantastic job bringing to light the political power struggles that kept education and research about AIDS in the dark for nearly a decade. ( )

wonderful depiction of what went on when the aids epidemic first started...the denial, the politics to keep the bath houses open, the fear, the hatred against the gay community. Randy Shilts did a fine job of putting it all together. ( )

Way over-documented account of the genesis and progression of the aids crisis. Strong, impactful writing with meticulous detail of every minute development in the crisis makes this a long, tough read. Lots of technical medical information coupled with never-ending political confusion takes away from the impact of the human tragedy that this disease wrought. ( )