RANDY SHILTS

103

RANDY SHILTS

JOURNALIST

A pioneer in reporting on civil rights for homosexuals, Shilts became a prominent spokesman on AIDS and wrote a best-selling book on the epidemic And the Band Played On (1987).

Born August 8, 1951, in Davenport, Iowa, Randy Shilts grew up in Aurora, Illinois. In college in Oregon he came out as a homosexual and became involved in gay rights. After graduating from the University of Oregon in 1975, he embarked on a career in journalism, but could not get a staff job because of discrimination against gays. After years of free lance work on California TV stations and national magazines, he was hired by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1981. The first openly homosexual reporter on a mainstream U.S. newspaper, he began work there only weeks after the detection of what was then thought to be a new "gay" disease: AIDS.

Shilts is the author of The Mayor of Castro Street (1982) about Harvey Milk, an openly gay San Francisco City Supervisor who was murdered in 1978. His chronicle of the AIDS epidemic And the Band Played On alerted readers to the human toll taken by the disease. Criticized for subjectivity and for overdramatization of "Patient Zero" (see card 61), the work is still the best history of AIDS. It was made into a TV movie in 1993. That same year Shilts completed a book on another timely homosexual issue, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military, and he revealed that he has AIDS. Diagnosed HIV-positive in 1985, he said he had kept his condition secret, feeling it might harm his career: "Every gay writer who tests positive ends up being an AIDS activist," he said, "and I didn't want to end up being an activist. I wanted to keep on being a reporter." Next Card 104: ELIZABETH TAYLOR: Actress, Philanthropist

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