Since the clinical emergence of AIDS in America in 1981, there have been bewilderingly diverse accounts of the origins of the multifarious human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the pathogen responsible for AIDS. The prolonged uncertainty about the mode of transmission, elusiveness about the major causes, and ambiguity about the nature and evolution of the disease led to intense speculations about the origins of the AIDS virus. Although diverse theories about AIDS origins in medical, media, and popular traditions exist, the most prominent theories effectively combine epidemiological ideas with notions of primitivism, exoticism, and contamination. Overall HIV origin legends can be classified broadly into four major categories: (1) animal transfer theory, (2) lab virus theory, (3) isolated case theory, and (4) Patient Zero theory. In different forms, these four major theories constitute the most recognizable urban legends about the origins of AIDS. Additionally, it is not only popular accounts but also scientific narratives that constitute the bulk of legends about the origins of the AIDS virus. Furthermore, many of these theories were disseminated through books, radio shows, the Internet, popular magazine articles, and celebrated scientific journals.
The most commonly propagated theory for the origin of HIV is the animal transfer theory. In scientific jargon, the transfer of infectious organisms from animals, both domestic and wild, to humans is called “zoonosis.” Animal transfer theory, with special reference to AIDS, supposes the passage of HIV from nonhuman primates to humankind. The most popular version of this theory is the African green monkey theory. It postulates the transfer of a variant of immunodeficiency virus from African green monkeys to humans. Although African green monkey theory was retracted around 1988, another suggested source soon gained prominence. Tracing the transmission origin in a West African monkey species, the mangabey (Cercocebus atys), this second variant of the animal transfer theory argues that the simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) “jumped the species barrier,” eventually mutating into lethal strains of human immunodeficiency viruses. This theory of the origin of HIV also maintains that humans contracted SIVs through consuming “bush meat,” injecting monkey blood, or participating in exotic transspecies sexual practices. In fact, in 1987, The Lancet, the British medical journal, published a letter citing exotic African sexual practices as a possible route of transmission. More recent work has demonstrated that the closest relative of the primary human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) is another simian immunodeficiency virus, one carried by chimpanzees (SIVcpz), thus supporting multiple transmission events from simians to humans. The animal transfer theory also maintains that HIV reached the general population during the 1970s when urbanization, consumption of monkey meat, and prostitution reached the critical threshold favoring the transfer of the progenitor virus from monkeys to humans and its evolution into HIV. This relationship between nonhuman primates and humans was taken so seriously by the World Health Organization in 1985 that it even requested that vaccines and reagents produced in monkey kidney tissue cultures undergo testing. Another, less popular zoonotic theory can be found in Newfoundland data that conceived the transfer of the HIV pathogen from sheep.
The second major theory about the origin of AIDS is called the lab virus theory. This theory presents HIV as a human-engineered pathogen produced either accidentally or deliberately in a lab. This conspiracy theory, which surfaced around 1986, implicated the CIA, U.S. government officials, and even scientists. Alan Cantwell’s AIDS and the Doctors of Death: An Inquiry into the Origins of the AIDS Epidemic (1988) and Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot (1993), together with a pamphlet by East German scientists Jakob and Lili Segal titled AIDS: USA Home-Made Evil, reinforced this speculation that HIV was laboratory engineered. Related to this argument is the theory that AIDS was wielded by the U.S. government in biological warfare to contain undesirable and disadvantaged populations, such as drug users, homosexuals, African Americans, and the poor. Another claim related to the lab virus theory is that the cures were withheld until the disadvantaged target population could be completely eradicated. Although such beliefs had definitive implications in AIDS education and risk-management programs, this idea was particularly popular among African American, African, and Haitian communities. Given the medical apartheid and medical mistreatment meted out to these communities, particularly among African Americans in such cases as the Tuskegee syphilis study, this notion of conspiracy and its attendant beliefs expresses the lack of trust of these communities in the political establishment.
Angels in America
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes—Tony Kushner’s two-play sequence (Millennium Approaches and Perestroika), first staged in the early 1990s and later adapted for television—confronted both popular mythologies and harsh realities of the AIDS epidemic. Kushner harnessed the immense power of the terror associated with AIDS in the 1980s to highlight notions of community, acceptance, exclusion, and marginalization in contemporary America. Kushner used the exclusion of homosexuals and AIDS victims as vehicles for social critique, but he also explored issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and social class. Kushner’s employment of the figure of Roy Cohn was particularly evocative of American mythologies concerning homosexuality and AIDS. Cohn, a notable participant in both the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and the McCarthy red-scare witch hunts, actively persecuted gays but is thought to have been a closeted homosexual himself; he died of AIDS in 1986.
C. Fee
A third major theory is the isolated case theory, which maintains that the HIV virus existed for a long time but went unnoticed. The best-known narrative related to this theory is the argument that a small, isolated group had the virus but also had an acquired immunity to it. This position, by implication, led scientists to identify the areas of high concentration of the virus and to establish and investigate the oldest HIV cases. Consequently, a frantic search by scientists and media investigators for earlier blood samples, medical statistics, and medical records led them to the African continent. In light of this theory, blood samples in Kenya and Uganda from the 1960s and 1970s were examined. Although AIDS appeared as a clinical problem simultaneously in America and in Africa in the 1980s, medical professionals widely assumed that AIDS was endemic in Central Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, creating apprehensions about the role of Africa in relation to the HIV virus forever. While the early cases document HIV in 1959 from plasma collected in the Congo, the most publicized case was that of a British sailor with Kaposi sarcoma, who died in Manchester in 1959.
A fourth and final theory of the origin of the HIV virus is the Patient Zero theory. According to the Patient Zero theory, Air Canada flight attendant Gaetan Dugas was responsible for bringing AIDS to North America. He is called “Patient Zero” after a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study report that held Dugas responsible for spreading the HIV virus in the North American region. Epidemiologists hypothesized that Dugas had carried the virus from Africa and infected many of his partners in New York and San Francisco even after his diagnosis. This theory about the origins of AIDS singled out Dugas as being solely responsible for spreading the virus in the Americas. In reality, Dugas developed lymphadenopathy in December 1979 and full-blown AIDS in 1981, later dying of kidney failure on March 30, 1984. Journalist Randy Shilts in And the Band Played On (1987) popularized the story of Dugas as a supercarrier of the HIV virus. Shilts’s obsessive focus on Dugas’s promiscuity made him a scapegoat of gay male sexuality. In 1988, Andrew R. Moss published an opposing view in the New York Review of Books, but Gaetan Dugas remained a figure of notoriety in AIDS origin narratives, including a prominent role in John Greyson’s critically acclaimed parody Zero Patience (1993), an AIDS musical comedy.
While one can dismiss those origin narratives that raged far beyond the most scientific debates surrounding AIDS as idiosyncrasies, at another level, they not only reveal common perceptions and social resistance in regard to the disease but also enlighten the underlying issues of public health management and risk perception. To that extent these theories, despite their apparent peculiarities and quirkiness, provide significant insights into how people make sense of the world around them. While the global magnitude and epidemic proportions of AIDS fueled these urban legends, these theories also offer some important lessons in bringing to the surface and revealing the underlying collective fears of a society.
Sathyaraj Venkatesan
See also AIDS Harry and AIDS Mary; Conspiracy Theories; Racism in Urban Legends; Urban Legends/Urban Belief Tales
Further Reading
Altman, Dennis. 1986. AIDS in the Mind of America. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meaning. New York: W. W. Norton.
Goldstein, Diane E. 2004. Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Grmek, M. D. 1990. History of AIDS: Emergence and Origin of a Modern Pandemic. Translated by R. C. Maulitz and J. Duffin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Treichler, Paula A. 1999. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Whatley, Mariamne H., and Elissa R. Henken. 2000. Did You Hear about the Girl Who …?: Contemporary Legends, Folklore, and Human Sexuality. New York: New York University Press.