Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1951: Randy Shilts

65 YEARS AGO: (d. 1994) The pioneering gay journalist came out relatively early, while still in college at the age of 20, when he ran for student government at Portland Community College with the slogan “Come Out for Shilts.” That was in 1971, when coming out was still something of a novelty. In 1972, he transferred to the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he chaired Eugene’s Gay People’s Alliance. His run for student Senate in 1973 with a Chicano activist running mate drew the attention of the New York Times and radio commentator Paul Harvey, who commented on the unlikely coalition between gay people and Latinos. While at the U of O, Shits was managing editor for the campus paper, the Oregon Daily Emerald, which also happened to be Oregon’s third largest morning daily.

After graduating in 1975, he had trouble finding a job despite his tenure at the Emerald and graduating at the top of his class. After working freelance, including writing several articles for The Advocate (which was then a Los Angeles-based monthly newspaper), Shilts was finally hired in 1981 by the San Francisco Chronicle as perhaps the first openly gay reporter in the American mainstream press. The following year, he published The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, the critically acclaimed biography of the slain San Francisco Supervisor and personal friend, Harvey Milk.

When he went to work for the Chronicle, he was given the gay beat. But this quickly proved to be no ordinary ghetto beat, because that very same year a new disease was stalking the gay community. Shilts would wind up devoting much of his career to covering the disease and its impact on medicine, politics, society and, specifically, the gay community itself. His second book, 1987’s And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic brought him international fame. Shilts was justly praised for bringing mainstream attention to the AIDS crisis, and for providing a exhaustive and lasting chronicle of one of the most important chapters in gay history.

But he was also rightly criticized for popularizing the mythology surrounding “patient zero,” an Air Canada flight attendant by the name of Gaëtan Dugas (Feb 20), who was unfairly portrayed as the central figure in allegedly spreading AIDS across North America. Shilts’s book didn’t make that allegation directly, but Shilts’s naming Dugas as the so-called Patient Zero and tying him to rumors of a handsome man deliberately infecting unsuspecting tricks in bathhouses across the continent turned Dugas into one of the book’s more notorious villains. In 2013, Shilts’s editor admitted that he convinced Shilts to make Dugas the “first AIDS monster” as an attention-getting literary device.

“We lowered ourselves to yellow journalism. My publicist told me, ‘Sex, death, glamour, and, best of all, he is a foreigner, that would be the icing on the cake,'” said Shilts’ editor, Michael Denneny, in an interview. “That was the only way we could get them to pay attention. … Randy hated the idea. It took me almost a week to argue him into it.”

It worked. When the book first came out, the New York Times, Newsweek and other publications said they weren’t interested in reviewing a book that criticized the Reagan administration’s and medical establishment’s response to the AIDS crisis. But when new publicity materials focused on Dugas as  “the Quebecois version of Typhoid Mary” (quoting Shilts’s description of him in the book), the New York Post jumped all over it with the headline, “The Man Who Gave Us AIDS.”

And the Band Played On shot to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List and stayed there for five weeks, and was nominated for a National Book Award. Despite criticisms of its treatment of Dugas, And the Band Played On proved to be a monumentally important work. Before its release, AIDS activists and researchers struggled to draw attention to the growing epidemic. The book is credited for adding thousands of new activists to the growing AIDS movement. And despite its deplorable treatment of Dugas, it is still, thirty years later, the single most important account of the AIDS epidemic in America, and is likely to remain so for generations to come.

Shilt’s third book, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military, was released in 1993, just as the fight over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was heating up. But by then, Shilts was already ill from the disease he covered in And the Band Played On. In fact, he had been tested for HIV while writing And the Band Played On, but he declined to be told the result, concerned that knowing it would interfere with his objectivity. He became ill with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a common opportunistic disease, in 1992, and developed Kaposi’s sarcoma a year later. He dictated the last chapter of Conduct Unbecoming from his hospital bed, but he lived long enough to see that book make it to print and to see And the Band Played On made into an HBO movie. He died in 1994.