“I’ve got gay cancer. I’m gonna die, and so are you.”

Gaëtan Dugas, a flight attendant in the 1980s, would reportedly say those now-infamous words to men after he had unprotected sex with them, according to Randy Shilts, a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle and author of the 1987 book And the Band Played On. Shilts named Dugas the “Patient Zero” of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic in the US, essentially blaming him for bringing the disease to America.