And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is a 1987 book by San Francisco Chronicle journalist Randy Shilts.

The book chronicles the discovery and spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) with a special emphasis on government indifference and political infighting—specifically in the United States—to what was then perceived as a specifically gay disease.

The book is an extensive work of investigative journalism, written in the form of an encompassing time line; the events that shaped the epidemic are presented as sequential matter-of-fact summaries.

As described in the book, television announcer Bill Kurtis gave the keynote address and told a joke: "What's the hardest part about having AIDS?

"[4] Shilts focuses on several organizations and communities that were either hit hardest by AIDS—and were given the task of finding the cause of the disease—or begging the government for money to fund research and provide social services to people who were dying.

This was largely due to the general public's limited knowledge of the importance of protected ("safe") sex and IV drug using practices in preventing the transmission of diseases in the 1970s and 80s.

Shilts' sources in the gay community tried to remember the last time everyone they knew was healthy, which was the United States Bicentennial celebration in 1976 when sailors came from all over the world to New York.

[10] Shilts describes the desperate actions of the group to get recognition by Mayor Ed Koch and assistance from the city's Public Health Department to provide social services and preventive education about AIDS and unsafe sex.

[12] Jones formed the NAMES Project that created the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the largest folk art display in the world.

Some—like Marcus Conant, James Curran, Arye Rubinstein, Michael S. Gottlieb, and Mathilde Krim—would also realize their professional life's courses in dealing with patient after patient who showed up in their offices with baffling illnesses, most notably lymphadenopathy, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, Kaposi's Sarcoma, toxoplasmosis, cytomegalovirus, cryptosporidia, and other opportunistic infections that caused death by a grisly combination of ailments overtaxing a compromised immune system.

With no information on how the disease was spread, hospital staff were often reluctant to handle AIDS patients, and Shilts reported that some medical personnel refused to treat them at all.

[15] Around the same time gay men were getting sick in the United States, doctors in Paris were receiving patients who were African or who had lived in Africa with the same symptoms as the Americans.

Parisian researchers Jean-Claude Chermann, Françoise Barre, Luc Montagnier, and doctor Willy Rozenbaum began taking biopsies of HIV-infected lymph nodes and discovered a new retrovirus.

[31] After Hudson's death and in the face of increasing public anxiety, Reagan directed Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to provide a report on the epidemic.

It was from this unique vantage point that he repeatedly criticized the U.S. news media for ignoring the medical crisis because it did not affect people who mattered; only gays and drug addicts.

[34] Many stories called AIDS a "gay plague" or "homosexual disease" in articles that pointed to it showing up in new populations, like hemophiliacs or people who had received blood transfusions.

[38] It remained on The New York Times Bestseller List for five weeks, was translated into seven languages, nominated for a National Book Award, and made Shilts an "AIDS celebrity".

Writer Jon Katz explains, "No other mainstream journalist has sounded the alarm so frantically, caught the dimensions of the AIDS tragedy so poignantly or focused so much attention on government delay, the nitpickings of research funding and institutional intrigue".

[43] Two years after it was published however, Shilts remained "fundamentally disappointed" when a radical response to the AIDS crisis did not materialize, despite the reaction to his book.

Howard Markel, in the American Journal of Public Health, notes Shilts' tendency to assign blame, writing "A requirement of the journalist, and certainly the historian, however, is to explain human society rather than to point fingers".

[40] Jon Katz in Rolling Stone refutes this by stating "[Shilts] fused strong belief with the gathering of factual information and the marshaling of arguments, the way the founders of the modern press did.

[39] Although Sandra Panem in the journal Science praised Shilts' efforts and the attention the book brought to AIDS, she criticized his simplistic interpretation of science and the ways research is fostered and accomplished in the U.S. Panem furthermore believes Shilts gives appropriate weight to the issue of homophobia hampering attention on the disease, but remarks that even if AIDS had struck a more socially acceptable group of people, similar delays and confusion would have slowed medical progress.

[53] Wendy E. Parmet, a professor at Northeastern University Law School, highlights the greatest strengths of And the Band Played On to be "the pain and courage of individual confronted with AIDS" and how it "eloquently portrays the human side of the crisis" and believes the blame others criticized to be justified; but Parmet considers his technique of assigning an omniscient point of view a weakness, suggesting that it blurs the lines between fact and fiction.

"[59] Time titled its review of And the Band Played On "The Appalling Saga of Patient Zero", erroneously restating the claim that Dugas had brought AIDS to the continent.

"[4] The original study identifying Dugas as the index case had been completed by William Darrow, but it was called into question by University of California San Francisco epidemiologist Andrew Moss.

Moss wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Review of Books, "There is very little evidence that Gaetan was 'patient zero' for the US or for California," while also stating that Shilts did not overstress Dugas' lack of personal responsibility.

"[61] Many years later, in the 2000s, it was shown, by tracing the roots of the virus, that it had spread from Africa to Haiti, and then to the U.S. in the mid-1960s, before Dugas would have been very sexually active, if at all, and before he was working as a flight attendant.

He also revealed that he received abuse from gays for the articles he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle supporting the bathhouse closures, as well as for And the Band Played On, saying it was common for him to be spat upon in the Castro District.

It was produced by Aaron Spelling, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, and starred Matthew Modine as epidemiologist Don Francis and Richard Masur as William Darrow at the Centers for Disease Control.