Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.
In Episode Eleven of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘And The Band Played On’, I will tell you how I began my search for the true cause of AIDS. Before I do I just want to take you back to Luc Montagnier and his book ‘Virus’, the paperback version of which was published in 1994. On p180 he writes: ‘Our immune system is built for short battles, blitzes of a sort. It is less prepared for the guerilla or trench warfare.’ I find this comment interesting in terms of thinking about the immune system overload, burnout and collapse theory of the cause of AIDS. On p183 he states: ‘According to the hard-core virologist, the virus (HIV) kills the T4-cells it infects, and the whole disease springs from that. This is a naïve and simplistic conception that betrays a certain intellectual rigidity or quite simply an ignorance of everything that happens to fall outside one’s narrow area of specialization.’
This actually leads me quite nicely onto the book I have read at least five times between the middle of February 2021 and today, November 25th 2024, ‘And The Band Played On’, written by the male homosexual journalist Randy Shilts. Published In 1987, according to Amazon, ‘And The Band Played On’ was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting. An international bestseller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed movie (which I watched on Youtube in November 2020), Shilts' expose revealed why AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked during the early 80's while the most trusted institutions ignored or denied the threat. One of the few true modern classics, it changed and framed how AIDS was discussed in the following years.’ So, it’s a seminal, hugely influential work; a foundation stone, a gospel, of the official ‘HIV causes AIDS’ narrative. According to Bill Darrow, a key figure in the original CDC AIDS Task Force, Randy Shilts ‘knew everything, and I mean everything.’
When I originally started reading the book in February, 2021 I was still pursuing Hooper’s polio vaccine HIV origin hypothesis, so this first reading was coloured by that perspective. The second time around, in March 2021, I was looking for an alternative explanation for the cause of AIDS and the first 124 pages were very instructive. Going back to the Montagnier quote earlier, ‘the naïve and simplistic conception’ that the ‘virus (HIV) kills the T4-cells it infects’, on p43 of ‘ATBPO’ Michael Gottlieb exclaims ‘Hot damn. What kind of disease tracked down and killed such specific (T-4) blood cells?’ I believe this is one of the most misleading and damaging sentences ever written in the AIDS canon.
Elsewhere in the first 124 pages, Shilts spends pages telling the reader about the self-inflicted damage some promiscuous gay males were causing their own bodies and immune systems. The sex, drugs and rock’n’roll life style, practiced in the decade after the 1969 Stonewall Riots, of this subset of the gay male community, focused around the bath-houses in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. This lifestyle involved lots of unrestrained, unprotected sex, washed down with copious amounts of street drugs and ‘poppers’, alkyl nitrite inhalants, as well as a huge volume of antibiotics and steroids. By 1979, the number of cases of STIs, hepatitis, bowel diseases, a by-product of fecal ingestion, and cytomegalovirus in this community were off the charts.
I learned that, just like WW1 did not just happen in July 1914, or 9/11 came out of nowhere, so ‘AIDS’ did not appear out of a clear blue sky in the late 70s/early 80s. In 1976, a condition known as Gay Bowel Syndrome (mentioned on p18-19 ‘ATBPO’) was officially recognized. That year a paper called ‘The Gay Bowel Syndrome: clinico-pathologic correlation in 260 cases’ was published. This is the introduction to the abstract:
‘The clinical and pathological findings in a group of 260 homosexual men comprising 10% of a private proctologic practice (in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York) are reviewed. A clinical pattern of anorectal and colon diseases encountered with unusual frequency in these homosexual patients is termed the gay bowel syndrome. Concurrent infections with two or more pathogens should be anticipated.’
Shilts wrote that cases of GBS in San Francisco increased 8,000% after 1973 and even gay physicians like David Ostrow and Dan William voiced their concerns about the public health implications of the commercialization of boundary-free sex, whose only limit was the stamina of the involved individuals.
Thank you for listening to Episode Eleven of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. I will continue telling you about my search for the cause of AIDS in Episode Twelve of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’
Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.
‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/0312374631 Shilts
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Virus-Co-discoverer-Tracks-Rampage-Charts/dp/0393337030 Montagnier
http://www.annclinlabsci.org/content/6/2/184.full.pdf Gay Bowel Syndrome, 1976
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