Throwback Thursday Remembers Randy Shilts’s “And the Band Played On”

September 11, 2025
HANK ORSO

Whoo doggie, these are some rough times we're living through, huh? Well, rougher for some, but if you're reading the internet crystal ball, pretty rough for all of us down the road. Did we ever get a real break? Looking back in our history for Throwback Thursday, the film And the Band Played On popped up as having premiered on this date, September 11th, in 1993. It chronicles a time that, for many of us, still goes down as the roughest we've ever had it. When AIDS and the surrounding hysteria and relentless death count seemed insurmountable.

Based on the comprehensive 1987 book by Randy Shilts, it follows in grand and in-depth journalistic style the race to find anything that could medically treat and help the growing number of patients who started dying in the late seventies. It's part gay cultural history, part medical thriller, and part political intrigue as Shilts systematically and chronologically lays out the first cases to be discovered, the rapid rise in new cases on the coasts, then in the "fly-over" states, and across the globe. It also details the in-fighting and political strategizing within and between the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the American vs. French doctors vying to stay ahead and be the first to identify a cause, to put their name on it first, and of course, a conservative government under Ronald Reagan, who went years before ever mentioning the disease on television. Only after his personal friend, Rock Hudson, became ill did Reagan and most of America see this as something that could happen to anyone. It was no longer just a "gay plague."

And the Band Played On premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival on September 2, 1993, before being broadcast on HBO on September 11, 1993, and later on NBC and ABC with parental content warnings. With a 2 1/2 hour run time, it takes its time to roll out a condensed but concise amount of information, with scenes that reflect both the anger of a community at the myriad systems that failed them, and the human drama across all walks of life that became unwittingly affected. Yer boy Hank here still remembers an early scene where a middle America housewife speaks with her husband's doctor, and her innocent ignorance when confronted with the idea that her husband contracted the virus through male sexual contact, and she says, "I don't understand. How can a man have sex with another man?"

The film stars Matthew Modine as Dr. Don Francis of the CDC, Alan Alda as Dr. Robert Gallo of the NIH, and Francis's main antagonist, vying for the spotlight over the French Researchers. Sir Ian McKellan plays Bill Kraus, a gay rights and AIdS activist, who becomes the central human face throughout the miasma of medical and political institutional fighting and struggles. But there is also a slew of famous faces who signed on for small parts, especially encouraged to do so after the likes of Lilly Tomlin and Richard Gere became attached to the project. Steve Martin, Glenne Headly, Bud Cort, Phil Collins, B.D. Wong, Richard Masur, Angelica Houston, Richard Jenkins, Swoozie Kurtz, and Donal Logue are just some of the recognizable faces brought in to tell this horrific, humanistic, and fascinating history.

If you've never seen it or even heard of it, I highly recommend you seek it out. and read Shilts's book of the same name. He manages to give the dry, exhaustive medical and political history along with the emotional, warm, human stories that lived and died between those worlds. Shilts is credited as one of the writers and lived to see the film released, dying the following year of complications due to AIDS.

Shilts appeared on this 60 Minutes story about the epidemic, but more specifically about "Patient Zero" Gaeton Dugas, a French Canadian airline attendant believed at the time and in Shilts's book to be the man solely responsible for introducing AIDS to America, as dozens of early cases traced back to him. This was later disproven (after Shilt's death) through more advanced genetic analysis of stored blood samples, where it was found that the virus was already present in men before Dugas arrived on the scene. But this highlights the importance of early investigations, flawed as they were, and the guts for such a revered news show to place focus on this subject.