Making history while reporting it: a legendary journalist’s crusade against AIDS

I clipped Randy Shilts’s obituary from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and carefully placed it inside my copy of And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic – his most famous, most successful book. At 42 and at the peak of his intellectual, creative, and cultural power, Shilts had died of the disease he chronicled. It was February 1994.

I didn’t read Band when it came out because I wasn’t out myself in 1987. When I read it in 1991, I became frustrated and scared to discover the missed opportunities, government inaction, and scientific infighting that defined the early history of the AIDS epidemic. The book also convinced me that everyone had to do something in the war against HIV, so in part because of Shilts, I volunteered in 1992 for an AIDS vaccine clinical trial at Saint Louis University.

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Shilts’s last book was a treatment of another epidemic – the institutional homophobia that was cutting its way through the lives of everyday Americans and across the United States armed forces. He was in the dying stage of his short life when he wrote Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military. As in his previous two books, Shilts collected assorted threads and wove together a nearly 800-page record, this time about American homosexuals under arms, from the Revolutionary War to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

With these three books, Shilts was an important presence in my life in the 1990s, but I hadn’t thought much about him in the years since. With the publication of a new biography, When the Band Played On: The Life of Randy Shilts, America’s Trailblazing Journalist, he came rushing back – telling his story; arguing his case; making his points; enduring praise and criticism; and being analyzed, evaluated, exposed, and defined with a fresh, objective perspective that is only accessible three decades after one’s burial and after the heated arguments of one’s time have faded into cooled memories.

Born the third of six boys in 1951, Shilts was raised in a destabilized home in suburban Chicago with an alcoholic mother and a struggling working-class father. While living in Oregon at 21, he self-analyzed to an understanding that he was indeed a gay man. In the year he turned 30, he became the first openly gay reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, the perch from which he observed the world for the rest of his life, gaining national fame.

The biography is meticulously researched and well-sourced, containing dozens of interviews with Shilts’s family, friends, colleagues, ex-boyfriends, and flings. It also offers full access to Shilts’s journals, providing an intimate portrait (sometimes too intimate, perhaps) of his Shakespearean “strut” for an “hour upon the stage.”

The biography’s author, Minnesotan Michael G. Lee, is an adjunct professor, a steady-handed writer, and a Ph.D. in social work who has labored in HIV/AIDS, health causes, and community agencies for over twenty years. He’s a serious student who researched the life and times of Randy Shilts for over a decade before publishing this biography.

When the Band Played On recalls the arguments of Shilts’s wild, exceptional life and offers forgotten and new details about the lingering questions: What was the Patient Zero controversy? Why did some in Randy Shilts’s own community call him a “gay Uncle Tom”? Was he an arrogant prick? Did he ever find true love? What motivated him? What brought him to tears? Why was he so driven? How did he grab the national spotlight? How did he confront his own HIV status, progression to AIDS, and impending death?

Shilts was, as Lee writes, “making history at the same time he was reporting it,” and that truth makes When the Band Played On a perfect read to mark the 30^th anniversary of Shilts’s death, which happens to also mark the 30^th anniversary of the first LGBTQ+ History Month.

Rodney Wilson has been a teacher since 1990. He founded LGBTQ+ History Month in 1994. A documentary-short about his experiences, “Taboo Teaching,” is available here.

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