Born On This Day- August 8... Pioneering Journalist Randy Shilts

Randy Shilts was a brave & pioneering gay journalist. He was the first openly gay reporter with a “gay beat” for major US newspaper- the San Fransico Chronicle. He was among the first to bring real attention to a newe series of illnesses that were causing gay men to die in the early 1980s. I purchased & read each of his books as they were published & they remain the best chornicle of American gay history of the end of the 20th century: 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: Gay and Lesbians in the U.S. Military: Vietnam to the Persian Gulf (1993). And The Band Played On became an award winning & critically lauded film for HBO, directed by Roger Spottiswoode & starring Alan Alada, Matthew Modine, Lily Tomlin, Ian McKellen. Steve Martin, B.D. Wong, Richard Gere, David Marshall Grant, Anjelica Huston, Richard Jenkins, & Swoozie Kurtz, most of whom worked for scale to be part of the project.

His books read like finely crafted fiction; Shilt’s greatest achievement as a writer was that he brought novelistic skills to the practice of journalism. All 3 of his books have compelling narratives & vividly detailed characters.

He got the formal diagnosis that he had AIDS on the day he finished the manuscript for And Band Played On.. As Shilts wrote his last book, about gays in the military- Conduct Unbecoming, he dictated the final chapter of that book from a hospital bed & it was published in 1993 at almost the same time President Bill Clinton took aim at anti-gay discrimination in the armed services. Think of how he would have continued to chornicle the struggle of gay people & imagine his reporting of Prop 8 & the cause of Marriage Equality. Here’s to you Randy on your 58th birthday.