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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.

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