From that point on, Tiemeyer says, Dugas became lodged in the popular consciousness as Patient Zero — the source of HIV in North America and the scapegoat for a horrific new pandemic. A film version of the book, televised on HBO in 1993, further cemented Dugas as the key figure in the epidemic.
"This character, Gaetan Dugas, has every trait of a villain that America is looking for in the AIDS crisis," Tiemeyer says. "He's gay and unshamed about it. He's beautiful. He's even a foreigner who speaks with this seductive accent. He's the perfect villain."
But Dugas wasn't a villain — not at all.
In fact, people who knew Dugas told me he was charismatic, kind and energetic. Right before he died, Dugas volunteered at a nonprofit to help other people with HIV.
And he was critical to figuring out what AIDS was. Not only did Dugas fly to the CDC in Atlanta to donate blood samples, Darrow says, but he also offered the CDC a huge list of names of potential AIDS cases
"I think this is crucial," the University of Arizona's Worobey says. "In a way, it's not that surprising that you could place Dugas at the center of a cluster, because I'm quite certain he shared more names of people [who were lovers] than any other person in that study. So there's a kind of ascertainment bias [in Darrow's study]."
Worobey's research shows that by the late 1970s, nearly 7 percent of gay men in New York City were infected with HIV, and nearly 4 percent in San Francisco were infected.
By the time Dugas caught HIV, there were many people infected in the U.S., maybe even thousands of people, Worobey says. And the HIV sequence taken from Dugas' blood looks very similar to these other sequences. There's nothing special about it, Worobey says.
So Dugas couldn't possibly be Patient Zero. He's not even close.
"To me, there's something nice about going back and correcting the record," he says. "He has been blamed for things that no one should be blamed for."
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