Killing Patient Zero

After the Stonewall riots and at the height of the gay liberation movement in America, an entire generation were busy celebrating their newfound emancipation, unaware of an impending epidemic – a disease that was largely ignored by politicians and the mainstream media. Gaetan Dugas was a French-Canadian flight attendant, who offered to help early scientific research into the origins of AIDS. An unfortunate series of events followed and he would be vilified as Patient Zero, the man who gave us AIDS. This feature documentary based on Richard McKay’s groundbreaking book, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic, will clear Dugas of being anything other than a highly sexually active gay man, someone who – like hundreds of other gay men – refused to be re-pathologized by the scientists and doctors of the time. Many gay men and women who lived through that terrible time were also interviewed here, most notably, Fran Lebowitz.