Randy Shilts - WikiHQ

Randy Shilts (August 8, 1951February 17, 1994) was an American journalist and author. After studying journalism at the University of Oregon, Shilts began working as a reporter for both The Advocate and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as for San Francisco Bay Area television stations. In the 1980s, he was noted for being the first openly gay reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.

His first book, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, was a biography of LGBT activist Harvey Milk. His second book, And the Band Played On, chronicled the history of the AIDS epidemic. Despite some controversy surrounding the book in the LGBT community, Shilts was praised for his meticulous documentation of an epidemic that was little-understood at the time. It was later made into an HBO film of the same name in 1993. His final book, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, examined discrimination against lesbians and gays in the military.

Shilts garnered several accolades for his work. He 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. Diagnosed with HIV in 1985, Shilts died of an AIDS-related illness in 1994 at the age of 42.

Early life

Born August 8, 1951, in Davenport, Iowa, Shilts grew up in Aurora, Illinois, with four brothers in a conservative, working-class family.

In high school, Shilts founded a local chapter for Young Americans for Freedom. and ran for student office with the slogan "Come out for Shilts." Randy Shilts was one of the first openly gay journalists to write for a major US newspaper. His writing focused on LGBT issues, including the struggle for gay rights.

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 time. Shilts later wrote an exposé of Goodstein's brand of EST, the Advocate Experience. Shilts also says The Advocate was a "publication that had all these dirty classified ads in it. That I couldn't send the publication to my parents that I worked for because it was all filled up with 'Gay white man wants somebody to piss on', you know?" He subsequently worked as a freelance journalist until he was 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." AIDS, the disease that would later kill him, 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. During the early years of the AIDS crisis, he denounced San Francisco's gay leaders as "inept" and "a bunch of jerks", accusing them of hiding the emerging epidemic. 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 was later made into an HBO film of the same name in 1993, with many prominent 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 twenty nominations and nine 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 saw himself as a literary journalist in the tradition of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. Undaunted by a lack of enthusiasm for his initial proposal for the Harvey Milk biography, Shilts reworked the concept, as he later said, after further reflection: <blockquote>I read Hawaii by James Michener. That gave me the concept for the book, the idea of taking people and using them as vehicles, symbols for different ideas. I would take the life-and-times approach and tell the whole story of the gay movement in this way, using Harvey as the major vehicle. Fellow Bay Area journalist Bob Ross called Shilts "a traitor to his own kind".

Illness and death

Although Shilts recounted to The New York Times in 1993 that he had 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 1987 test result would interfere with his objectivity as a writer, he had stated in a separate interview that he had known he was HIV positive since 1985. In 2014, Shilts was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood that recognizes LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields."

Shilts was the subject of a 2019 biography, The Journalist of Castro Street: The Life of Randy Shilts by Andrew E. Stoner, released May 30, 2019, from the University of Illinois Press. In June 2019, Shilts was one of the inaugural fifty American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted to the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City's Stonewall Inn.

In 2024, author Michael G. Lee published When the Band Played On, a biography of Shilts, which Kirkus Reviews called "A nuanced portrait of a journalist and activist who sacrificed all while sounding a pandemic alarm." About the biography, Lee stated, "I think that he has a very substantial and complicated legacy. And I think that that legacy still plays out today. And I'm hoping that with this book it captures more of that complexity in a way that actually portrays the full human that he was."

Bibliography

Familiar Faces, Hidden Lives: The Story of Homosexual Men in America Today, by Howard J. Brown, M.D., Introduction by Randy Shilts, 1976 ()
The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, 1982 ()
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 1987 ()
Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military, 1993 ()

References

External links

"Alband (Linda) Collection of Randy Shilts Materials" at Calisphere
"AIDS at 25 – Reflections on reporter Randy Shilts," podcast by the San Francisco Chronicle
CBS 60 Minutes: Randy Shilts, interview that aired shortly after Shilts's death in 1994.
Randy Shilts on glbtq.com