67 pages • 2 hours read
Randy ShiltsAnd The Band Played On
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Death
Shilts consistently updates the narrative with the number of infected and killed by AIDS. But rather than leaving this information as data, he gives the statistics faces with stories. One of the most notable of these is Gary Walsh, whose acceptance of his death and his role liberates him: “I am love and light, and I transform people by just being who I am” (425).
Shilts shows that even in death, there is a beauty and freedom. When Bill Kraus waits in Lourdes at a grotto, next to the statue of the Virgin Mary, he comes to feel love and forgiveness: “he stared toward the Virgin, and began to see her as the archetypal mother, not the literal mother of God, but the source of all nourishment and hope” (538).
Death in this book is both the result of a series of mistakes in judgment and action, but it also serves as a symbol of relief from all worldly anxiety and fear.
Marches, Parades, and Protests
From the early chapters, the importance of public gathering for the gay community in the form of marches, parades, and protests is made clear. These marches are a way to be heard and seen and a show of strength and solidarity, especially before social media.
For instance, the protest that Cleve Jones organized after the assassination of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, known as the White Night Riot, serves as a warning and a display of communal anger, “a vivid affirmation that this generation of gay people weren’t a bunch of sissies to be kicked around without a fight” (17).
Afterwards, Cleve Jones organizes a similar protest in front of the White House, where gay leaders express their disappointment in the treatment of AIDS by the administration. When Gary Walsh decides to assemble a candlelight march for people with AIDS, it becomes a “hit” (284) with more than 6,000 people attending.
The most prominent example of a gathering that changes over the course of the book is the San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Parade. Initially, it is a moment of celebration of gay identity but as AIDS takes over, the parade is redefined to reflect the problems suffered by the community and later, the endurance shown by the community to combat AIDS. During the height of the epidemic, in 1983, “[a]s in San Francisco and New York, the gay parade in Washington drew the largest turnout in history” (335). By 1985, San Francisco’s parade took on a different feel in that the gay community did not give into its sadness or anger, but “mobilized to fight the epidemic” (569) and honored those that passed away by taking action.
Plague (and Its Signs)
Shilts makes repeated references to Albert Camus’s The Plague, an existentialist novel that tells the story of an outbreak that wipes out a large part of the population in an Algerian city. In many ways, when AIDS descends, the rate and the way it infects its victims is no less than a plague. Because it is a new retrovirus and there are delays in both funding and urgency, it affects the discovery, treatment and overall understanding of the disease.
The foreboding sign for most gay men is the appearance of the purple spots that arise from Kaposi’s sarcoma. For homosexual men who discover the purple lesions or are paranoid about getting them, this is a certainty of death. Other signs that show the devastation of the plague are the loss of weight as victims waste away, the series of brutal infections arising from weak immune systems, high fevers, neurological disorders and fluid filling their lungs in the form of Pneumocystis cariniipneumonia.
