A new documentary examines the story of Gaétan Dugas, the gay man thought to have spread AIDS across America.

Pictured above: Gaétan Dugas, also known as “Patient Zero.”

Working as a flight attendant for Air Canada, Gaétan Dugas would customize his uniform so it fit extra tight. Male passengers who showed curiosity might disembark with his business card tucked in their pockets.

This audacious, buoyant character has been overshadowed in the 35 years since his death: Today, Dugas is best known as “Patient Zero,” mythologized in the media as the man who spread AIDS across North America.

The origins of that urban legend, popularized in Randy Shilts’ gripping 1987 history of the epidemic, And The Band Played On, are revisited in Laurie Lynd’s documentary, Killing Patient Zero, which will premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival on April 26. The film is based on Richard A. McKay’s 2017 book Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic.





Lynd was a film student at New York University in the ’80s, when HIV/AIDS was first spreading. “I had blinkers on,” the 59-year-old tells NewNowNext from his Toronto home. “I knew about it, but I didn’t know about it. I read Band in 1989 and it woke me up politically.”

Dugas appears on just 11 pages of the 600-plus page epic, but makes a chilling impression as a well-travelled and sexually adventurous gay man with AIDS. In 1984, one week after he died at the age of 31, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a cluster study that showed Dugas had a sexual connection to AIDS patients on the East and West Coasts.

While other AIDS patients in the study were labelled “Patient NY” for New York, or “Patient LA” for Los Angeles, Dugas was labelled “Patient O,” indicating he was the patient who connected the cases “out of California.” The designation became misinterpreted as Patient Zero.

Steve Christo/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

At the time, how AIDS was spread was still unproven: Medical experts considered poppers a possible cause. As a proud gay man who was happy to share the names of dozens of his sexual partners with the CDC, Dugas made a crucial contribution to early AIDS research. “The cluster study was the first tangible proof that this was a sexually transmitted disease,” explains Lynd. “That’s part of why [Dugas] should be proclaimed a hero.”

The Patient Zero theory went mainstream with the release of Shilts’ epic. The book’s editor, Michael Denneny, was determined to get Shilts’ message that the Reagan Republicans had ignored AIDS in the national discourse. He arranged for Dugas’ story to be pitched to the New York Post, which Denneny describes in the documentary as “miserably homophobic.” The paper ran the story as “The Man Who Gave Us AIDS.”

“I thought it was vile what they did with Patient Zero as a marketing hook,” Lynd says. “But Michael Denneny was using the homophobia of the press to draw attention to this important book. The act was heinous, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t work.”

While Lynd interviewed many colleagues, friends, and acquaintances of Dugas for the film, he was unable to persuade Dugas’ surviving family, including his five sisters, to participate. The family gave just one interview shortly after Dugas’ death and have never spoken publicly about him since.

Killing Patient Zero/Fadoo Productions

“I respect their silence,” Lynd says. “I worry that this film is going to stir it all up for them again. But I hope the greater good of clearing this innocent man’s name forever will make it worthwhile.”

Lynd came to understand that Shilts’ portrayal of Dugas—a bathhouse phantom callously infecting others to satisfy his own sexual desires—revealed the author’s own anxieties. (Shilts himself died of AIDS in 1994.) “In the midst of his heroic work to get AIDS onto a mainstream platform, Randy demonized a fellow gay man for something thousands of gay men were doing: enjoying their newfound sexual freedom and being rightly mistrustful of a medical establishment, which had so long sought to cure us,” Lynd says. “Gaétan’s wrongful vilification perfectly illustrates the entrenched homophobia that allowed a holocaust to happen to gay men.”

Revisiting the early days of AIDS has been an emotional experience for Lynd. “It’s been harrowing,” he says. “I lived through these years and one of the things that I find most upsetting is I feel like this story isn’t known.”

Now that Lynd has presented the redemption of Gaétan Dugas, he’s already thinking of a sequel of sorts. “My next film is going to be on Randy Shilts,” he says. “His name needs to be rehabilitated as much as Gaétan’s.”

Killing Patient Zero will premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival on April 26. Tickets and information can be found here.