Rxn Paper

Marvin Santos Introso – EL Reaction Paper “And the band played on” was a story of the discovery of the AIDS virus. From the early days in 1978 when numerous San Francisco gays began dying from unknown causes, to the identification of the HIV virus. Researchers began discerning a mysterious new disease that apparently affects only homosexual males. American and French researcher team manage to identify and name the disease which is AIDS working separately but only before already a lot of people has been infected by the disease. Different sociological thinking was portray in the film. By using the 4 lenses of sociological perspective to view the film we can see how sociology operates in the society. First is seeing the general in the particular, we can see the general in the particular in the movie on how certain gay people reacted to disease. We can see that One of the two major issues that affected me the most is how it took so long for the government and other faction included (like the Blood bank) to take actions for the disease to at least be controlled. We can see in the film that the blood bank could not even approve to spend money in making tests on the bloods they are offering to check whether it has the disease or not, also public bath houses at first was unable to be closed although there are reasonable doubts that it could be the main cause of the spread in the virus. I could not believe that in these severe cases these factions manages to think only about their selves and for their well being only. I believe that the effect of the disease could have been controlled if he government had taken its action sooner. Another issue that called my attention was how the French and American research team had conflicts in resolving the identification of HIV that lead to the delay. Both of them should be working together in defeating the disease for the good of the whole, instead they opt to clash over who discovered the virus first holding up the research. Conflicts like these must be resolve quickly in these extreme cases to benefit the whole society. The message of the film could be best explain by the paradigm “Symbolic Interactionism”. We can clearly see in the movie that people act toward things based on the meaning of those things have for them; and these meanings are derived from social interaction and modified through interpretation. People interact with each other by "interpreting or defining” each other's actions instead of merely reacting to each

other's actions. One great example of these in the movie was how it was hard for the government to close the public bath houses, because these were symbols of sexual freedom for the gays they know that closing it would violate their freedom and will have harse reactions from the gay community. And that closing these house would create different meanings that will yield unwanted results.