Shilts, Randy Martin

▪ 1995

      U.S. journalist and author (b. Aug. 8, 1951, Davenport, Iowa—d. Feb. 16, 1994, Guerneville, Calif.), was a top-notch investigative reporter who became the nation's first openly gay journalist to work on a major U.S. newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle. He also was critically acclaimed for his weighty book And the Band Played On (1987), which chronicled the history of the AIDS epidemic in passionate yet unbiased prose. Because Shilts openly professed his homosexuality while he was attending the University of Oregon, after graduation (1975) he found it difficult to secure employment and went to work for The Advocate, a San Francisco gay publication. Frustrated by his job prospects, Shilts penned a book on assassinated gay-rights activist Harvey Milk. The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1982) appeared shortly after Shilts was offered a position at the Chronicle. There he covered the gay beat. He was struck by the growing number of young gay men who were afflicted with an uncommon cancer and succumbed to wasting ailments. The unknown syndrome was AIDS, first named Grid (Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disorder), and Shilts was at the journalistic forefront of the story. He lambasted the scientific and government bureaucracies responsible for impeding the disclosure of vital information to the public and called for increased medical research funding. His stinging indictment of those agencies in And the Band Played On, which was made into a television movie in 1993, coupled with his warnings about casual sex and the dangers of the San Francisco gay bathhouses brought AIDS awareness into the limelight. Shilts, who was diagnosed HIV positive in 1987, published Conduct Unbecoming (1993), a history of homosexuals in the military, before AIDS took his life.

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