You're not just imagining it: the 1980s are back! It's not just Netflix drowning us in nostalgia with Stranger Things and Fuller House. Women are wearing scrunchies, Ghostbusters and Blade Runner are returning to the multiplex, Hulk Hogan is back showing off his moves on videotape, and Teddy Ruxpin is returning to toy stores. Just for fun, we even elected a 1980s curio as President of the United States! But is everything we remember about the eighties the totally tubular truth? "Just say no," says Jeopardy!'s Ken Jennings, so we've asked him to take us on a DeLorean ride back in time, separating the "Straight Up" facts from the "sweet little lies" of our foggily remembered Bartles & Jaymes youth. As they say, knowing is half the battle.
The Debunker: Did "Patient Zero" Spread AIDS to North America?
One of the most memorable elements of And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts's best-seller about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, is the case of Gaëtan Dugas, a flight attendant from Quebec whose coast-to-coast travels—and recklessly prolific sexual habits—spread AIDS across the continent. Shilts called him "Patient Zero," and the media ran with the story, calling Dugas "the Columbus of AIDS" and taking it as fact that he was the index case, the disease's vector from Europe to America.
It's true that Dugas contracted HIV in the early 1980s, and a CDC study published in March 1984, the same month he died of AIDS, was able to trace the virus's spread through many of his partners. His job and unusual first name, which his partners tended to remember, made him invaluable to scientists: he was one of the easiest-to-track cases in the early days of AIDS research. But Shilts's use of him as a plot device was based largely a mistake of typography. The CDC study had actually labeled Dugas as "Patient O," with 'O' standing for "out of California." There was never any indication that he was North America's "Patient Zero" at all!
Subsequent research has found that HIV was first introduced to the United States from Haiti in 1966, so Dugas was over a decade late to be "Patient Zero." This year, a biologist from the University of Arizona used genetic data from blood samples of early AIDS cases to demonstrate that Shilts had done Dugas wrong. "On the family tree of the virus," he wrote, "Dugas fell in the middle, not at the beginning." But Shilts's creation, the sociopathic gay man who single-handedly creates the AIDS epidemic through willful promiscuity, checked a lot of stereotype boxes in the 1980s, and is now the only way millions of people remember Gaëtan Dugas.
What airline, whose advertising slogan is "Your world awaits," did Dugas fly for?
Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.