Kushner Meet Shilts

Tonight I saw the first live production of the play from which this blog's title comes- Angels in America, by Tony Kushner- specifically, Part I: Millenium Approaches (Part II: Perestroika will be next week.) Today I finished an amazing book I started reading almost two years ago, And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts. Although the latter is a work of non-fiction by a journalist, and the former is somewhat fantastical play incorporating elements of reality, history and politics, the two are perfect complements, in their depictions of the 1980 AIDS epidemic and its effects on the gay community and the nation.

Both works are intensely thought-provoking and show a glimpse of an America very different from that by which we are currently surrounded. I have written previously about the personal connection to many of the themes Angels as the source of inspiration for this blog's title.

Although I stopped reading Shilts' book for many months while I was taking courses, the book is a bit of a page-turner, with events unfolding chronologically as they actually happened. I found myself riveted and impressed with Shilts' ability to continuously investigate what everyone else was ignoring and to compile it all in so much detail and so consistently. My first instinct was that I wished I could ask him how he was able to either convince the San Francisco Chronicle to cover AIDS in such detail when nobody else was or how the Chronicle gave him the freedom to report on what he wished. Alas, I then discovered that the epidemic which he chronicled in such detail took his life in 1994- the year after his book was made into a film and that Part II of Angels received a Tony award-- he had waited until he finished the book to get tested for HIV in March 1987, potentially sacrificing years of life so that others would have the most objective account of what had happened. For me as a student of public health, would be practitioner of journalism, and aficionado of politics, the book creates such a vivid, nuanced picture, providing a model for many other issues.