Randy Shilts

During
his college days, he came out publicly as a gay man at age 20, and ran
for student office with the slogan "Come out for Shilts."

This
is the seventy-seventh post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

Randy
Shilts (August 8, 1951 – February 17, 1994) was a pioneering gay
American journalist and author. He worked as a freelance reporter for
both The Advocate and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as for San
Francisco Bay Area television stations.

Early life

Born August 8, 1951 in Davenport, Iowa, Shilts grew up in Aurora,
Illinois, with five brothers in a politically conservative,
working-class family. He majored in journalism at the University of
Oregon, where he worked on the student newspaper, the Oregon Daily
Emerald, becoming an award-winning managing editor.

Journalism

Shilts graduated near the top of his class in 1975, but as an openly gay
man, he struggled to find full-time employment in what he characterized
as the homophobic environment of newspapers and television stations at
that timeAfter several years of freelance journalism, he was finally
hired as a national correspondent by the San Francisco Chronicle in
1981, becoming "the first openly gay reporter with a gay 'beat' in the
American mainstream press." Coincidentally, AIDS, the disease that would
later take his life, first came to nationwide attention that same year
and soon Shilts devoted himself to covering the unfolding story of the
disease and its medical, social, and political ramifications.

Books

In addition to his extensive journalism, Shilts wrote three
best-selling, widely acclaimed books. His first, The Mayor of Castro
Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, is a biography of the first
openly gay San Francisco politician, his friend Harvey Milk, who was
assassinated by a political rival, Dan White, in 1978. The book broke
new ground, being written at a time when "the very idea of a gay
political biography was brand-new."[

Shilts's second book, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the
AIDS Epidemic (1980–85), published in 1987, won the Stonewall Book Award
and brought him nationwide literary fame. And the Band Played On is an
extensively researched account of the early days of the AIDS epidemic in
the United States. The book was translated into seven languages and in
1993 was made into an HBO film with many big-name actors in starring or
supporting roles, including Matthew Modine, Richard Gere, Anjelica
Huston, Phil Collins, Lily Tomlin, Ian McKellen Steve Martin and Alan
Alda, among others. The film earned 20 nominations and 9 awards,
including the 1994 Emmy Award for Outstanding Made for Television Movie

His last book, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military
from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, which examined discrimination against
lesbians and gays in the military, was published in 1993. Shilts and his
assistants conducted over a thousand interviews while researching the
book, the last chapter of which Shilts dictated from his hospital bed.

Shilts's writing was admired for its powerful narrative drive,
interweaving personal stories with political and social reporting.
Shilts saw himself as a literary journalist in the tradition of Truman
Capote and Norman MailerCriticism and praise

Although Shilts was applauded for bringing public attention to bear on
gay civil-rights issues and the AIDS crisis, he was also harshly
criticized (and spat upon in Castro Street) by some in the gay community
for calling for the closure of gay bathhouses in San Francisco to slow
the spread of AIDS.  Shilts maintained his sense of integrity in spite
of being called "a traitor to his own kind" by a fellow Bay Area
journalist.[In a note included in The Life and Times of Harvey Milk,
Shilts expressed his view of a reporter's duty to rise above criticism:

I can only answer that I tried to tell the truth and, if not be
objective, at least be fair; history is not served when reporters prize
trepidation and propriety over the robust journalistic duty to tell the
whole story

Shilts was also criticized by some segments of the gay community on
other issues, including his opposition to the controversial practice of
outing prominent but closeted lesbians and gay men.

Nevertheless, his tenacious reporting was highly praised by others in
both the gay and straight communities who saw him as "the pre-eminent
chronicler of gay life and spokesman on gay issues” Shilts was honored
with the 1988 Outstanding Author award from the American Society of
Journalists and Authors, the 1990 Mather Lectureship at Harvard
University, and the 1993 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National
Lesbian and Gay Journalists' Association.[

In 1999, the Department of Journalism at New York University ranked
Shilts's AIDS reporting for the Chronicle between 1981 and 1985 as
number 44 on a list of the top 100 works of journalism in the United
States in the 20th century for his reporting on AIDS.[8]

Illness and death

Shilts declined to be told the results of his HIV test until he had
completed the writing of And the Band Played On, concerned that the test
result, whatever it might be, would interfere with his objectivity as a
writer He was finally found to be HIV positive in March 1987. Although
he took the anti-HIV drug AZT for several years, he did not publicly
disclose his AIDS diagnosis until shortly before he died.

In 1992, Shilts came down with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and
suffered a collapsed lung; the following year, he came down with
Kaposi's sarcoma. In a New York Times interview in the spring of 1993,
Shilts observed that,

HIV is certainly character-building. It's made me see all of the shallow
things we cling to, like ego and vanity. Of course, I'd rather have a
few more T-cells and a little less character.[



Shilts died, aged 42, at his 10-acre (40,000 m2) ranch in Guerneville,
Sonoma County, California, being survived by his partner, Barry
Barbieri, his mother, and his brothers. His brother Gary had conducted a
commitment service for the couple the previous year.  After a funeral
service at Glide Memorial Church, Shilts was buried at Redwood Memorial
Gardens in Guerneville.[

Legacy

Shilts bequeathed 170 cartons of papers, notes, and research files to
the local history section of the San Francisco Public Library. At the
time of his death, he was planning a fourth book, examining
homosexuality in the Roman Catholic Church.

As a fellow reporter put it, despite an early death, in his books Shilts
"rewrote history. In doing so, he saved a segment of history from
extinction”   Regarding And the Band Played On, historian Garry Wills
wrote, "This book will be to gay liberation what Betty Friedan was to
early feminism and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was to
environmentalism." NAMES Project founder Cleve Jones described Shilts as
"a hero" and characterized his books as "without question the most
important works of literature affecting gay people."[

After his death, a longtime friend and assistant explained the
motivation that drove Shilts: "He chose to write about gay issues for
the mainstream precisely because he wanted other people to know what it
was like to be gay. If they didn't know, how were things going to change

In 1998, Shilts was memorialized in the Hall of Achievement at the
University of Oregon School of Journalism, honoring his refusal to be
"boxed in by the limits that society offered him. As an out gay man, he
carved a place in journalism that was not simply groundbreaking but
internationally influential in changing the way the news media covered
AIDS." A San Francisco Chronicle reporter summed up the achievement of
his late "brash and gutsy" colleague:

Perhaps because Shilts remains controversial among some gays, there is
no monument to him. Nor is there a street named for him, as there are
for other San Francisco writers such as Jack Kerouac and Dashiell
Hammett. . . . Shilts' only monument is his work. He remains the most
prescient chronicler of 20th century American gay history.

In 2006, the award-winning Reporter Zero, a half-hour biographical
documentary about Shilts featuring interviews with friends and
colleagues, was produced and directed by filmmaker Carrie Lozano