A 1984 study planted the seed that would lead the media to falsely demonize Gaëtan Dugas as Patient Zero of an epidemic that would kill more than 700,000 people in North America
Gaëtan Dugas loved to fly. Adopted by a large family in the Quebec City suburb of L’Ancienne-Lorette, he grew up next to the airport, watching planes take off and wishing he were on board. He trained as a hairdresser, but once airlines lifted the ban on men doing the work of “stewardesses,” he found his dream job. He became one of Air Canada’s new cohort of male flight attendants.
In 2016, scientists debunked the Patient Zero myth with a conclusive study of blood samples that showed Dugas’ virus was unrelated to others in his cluster. By then, it had been established that the HIV/AIDS virus, which likely originated with African primates, had been circulating in North America since at least 1970, and that its incubation period was three or four times longer than the one or two years between sexual contact and illness in the CDC cluster.
Denneny recalls a PR woman coming into his office in tears on a Friday afternoon, saying no one wanted to cover the book. “I panicked and called up an ex-boyfriend who happened to be a publicist,” he says. “He suggested the following, which I thought was extraordinarily clever. The story of Patient Zero is only mentioned in 11 pages. He said, ‘You pull this material out and present it to the New York Post, a miserably homophobic newspaper. This story has everything you want.
His filmmaker friend John Greyson was more circumspect, however—he had the prescience to puncture the myth with his surreal musical satire, Zero Patience, a small Canadian film that premiered the same week in 1993 as Philadelphia, the AIDS drama starring Tom Hanks.
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