Patient Zero in AIDS crisis was misidentified, study says, rewriting early history of virus

I was working at a medical publication when the news first started to filter out about what was then called HTLV-III. My boss didn’t want me to write about it (“Who the hell cares about a bunch of faggots?” he said), but I wrote about it, anyway. One of my high school friends was the first in the city to die:

Newly published research is rewriting the earliest chapter of the historical account of how the AIDS epidemic began in the United States. The work, detailed in a study released Wednesday, discounts the long-held notion that a French-Canadian flight attendant, whose story was highlighted in the seminal book “And the Band Played On,” brought the virus to…