Randy Shilts: Gay San Francisco Chronicle journalist paved way for others to be out publicly

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Randy Shilts made America conscious of AIDS. He brought the disease to the attention of those who thought it was something just confined to a few members of the gay community.

Shilts was a journalist. Though he died at 42 years old, he lived his life with purpose.

“When I wrote my first story about it, there were 330 cases in the United States. When I write my stories this week about it. There are 132,000 cases of this disease,” Shilts once said.

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He did his best work against the backdrop of human suffering and decided that he was not going to go back into the closet to get a job professionally. When the San Francisco Chronicle hired him in 1981, the mainstream questioned his ability to report gay issues without bias.

He gained notoriety for writing about San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk in his book, The Mayor of Castro Street, but made a name for himself tracing the origins of the AIDS epidemic when he wrote And The Band Played On about the earliest days of the AIDS Epidemic. He described the story as, “actually the focus of it as a sort of a medical mystery story, and I brought the first five years of the epidemic.”

“He committed to being an openly gay journalist at a time when there were no openly gay journalists who were publicly gay to a general audience,” said Michael G. Lee, author of When The Band Played On: The Life of Randy Shilts, America’s Trailblazing Gay Journalist.

For those with AIDS, Shilts served as an interpreter.

“His colleagues in the newsroom told me about how he would come to work and say, ‘This just feels like a completely different world from mine. I feel like I’m going through a war when I’m not at work. And when I’m here, people are oblivious to it,'” said Lee.

That is, until actor and heartthrob Rock Hudson announced his diagnosis, AIDS was thrust into the national spotlight.

“Newspapers very rarely wrote about AIDS outside of San Francisco. Television didn’t cover it. Nobody paid attention. No celebrity would go near it. Rock Hudson gets diagnosed with AIDS. Bang. Then all of a sudden, it’s on the front page of every newspaper in the world,” said Shilts.

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In the course of his work, Shilts took on AIDS researchers, accusing them of looking for credit first and a cure. Second, he blasted the blood bank owners for thinking of profits instead of safety. And yes, Shilts also took on the gay community in the early 1980s. They criticized him for advocating for the closure of bathhouses.

Later, when the gay community turned to search for a cure, his was a voice of reason. “The challenge for AIDS activist is to make their point but not scare away their audience,” he wrote.

“You know, I write a book that assails the president, that takes on the most eminent researchers of our time and essentially accuses the blood bankers of murder. And to do all that, and then to not write about the failures within the gay community, to do that would have been dishonest,” said Shilts.

He did his best work against the backdrop of human suffering. Schilts wrote The Band Played On, knowing he might have HIV himself.

“He asked his doctor to not provide the results to him until he was ready to receive that, which came in early 1987, after he’d finished the full draft of and the band played on. So he wrote that book knowing there was a chance he may have contracted HIV, but he did not know the results until after he had submitted the manuscript,” said Lee.

That’s when he learned he too had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. While battling for his life, he wrote Conduct Unbecoming. With the help of his publisher, Randy fought to finish his last book from the hospital. Fighting the effects of a collapsed lung.

Schultz would never find out if his book made a difference. He died of an AIDS-related illness in 1994 at the age of 42,

At Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. More than 2,000 people paid their respects to the man who paved the way for other LGBTQ+ journalists and gave a voice to those who didn’t have one.

“I mean, the fact that we have such visibility in news media right now across all levels of it, it really is a testament to him because he did have to break a glass ceiling in order to get there,” said Lee.