Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 115

Randy Shilts
Was Not Afraid
The pioneering gay journalist was stubbornly
committed to truth telling-no matter the cost.
By James Kirchick

andy Shilts was the most significant gay journalist of the twentieth century. The first
openly gay reporter to cover gay issues for a mainstream outlet, he authored the first
biography of a gay American politician and a mammoth, definitive book on the AIDS epidemic. Given all that he accomplished in his relatively short career, it is daunting to consider what Shilts might have achieved had he not died of the disease he devoted so much
of his life to covering, in 1994, at the age of forty-two.
Shilts was diagnosed with HIV on the very day he completed the manuscript of what
would become his magisterial tome about the plague, And the Band Played On. This was
not a coincidence: he had actually been tested for HIV antibodies years earlier, but consciously chose not to learn the result until after he completed his book. Keeping himself
in the dark about his HIV status, Shilts took the risk because he believed the alternative
"would affect what I wrote. . . . If I knew I was [HIV] positive I might be angrier and not be
as rational in my analysis." So committed was Shilts to his sense of journalistic integrity
that he was willing to potentially sacrifice his own health in its exercise.
A stubborn commitment to truth telling-his reputation within the gay community and even his physical welfare be damned-is the character trait that shines through
strongest in The Journalist of Castro Street, a new biography by Andrew E. Stoner. An assistant professor of communication studies at California State University, Sacramento, Stoner uses Shilts's diaries and personal papers, as well as interviews with some of
the late writer's friends, colleagues, lovers, and critics, to tell the story of a singular figure whose life, from liberation to tragic coda, in many ways paralleled that of the postStonewall gay experience.
Shilts grew up in Aurora, Illinois, the third of six sons. Like his future biographical subject Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco city supervisor who would be assassinated in 1978, the young Shilts was a libertarian-conservative admirer of Barry Goldwater.
(This was a political orientation not uncommon among gay men at the time, but one both
Shilts and Milk would abandon as they grew older.) After studying journalism at the University of Oregon, where he came out of the closet and wrote for the student newspaper,
Shilts got a job as a towel boy at a San Francisco gay bathhouse, a bit of happenstance that
would take on deeper significance given the role those establishments would play in the
coming AIDS epidemic.
From the very start of his career, everyone advised Shilts to avoid the label of "gay journalist." A journalism professor told him that his job prospects would be limited if he became known for specializing in a realm of life decent people thought best not discussed at
all. Before getting hired by the San Francisco Chronicle (just a few weeks after the Centers
for Disease Control released a barely noticed item detailing the spread of a rare cancer afflicting homosexual men), Shilts was fired from a freelance local television reporting gig
after a magazine named him one of the city's ten most eligible gay bachelors, so discomfited was the station's management by the prospect of an openly homosexual contributor. Years later, after Shilts had established himself at the Chronicle as a respected voice on

The Journalist of Castro Street:
The Life of Randy Shilts
by Andrew E. Stoner
University of Illinois Press, 288 pp.

Washington Monthly

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