Born August 8: Randy Shilts

In 1981, Randy Shilts became the first journalist at a major newspaper to cover the gay community full-time. In 1999, five years after Shilts died from aids, the NYU Department of Journalism ranked his reporting on the pandemic for the San Francisco Chronicle 44th of the top hundred works of journalism in the twentieth century. His exhaustive, meticulous book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is regarded as a modern classic. Gary Wills said Shilts’ book “will be to gay liberation what Betty Friedan was to early feminism and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was to environmentalism." It covers what were then believed to be the origins of the disease in Africa in the 1970s to 1985, when Rock Hudson’s announcement that he had aids finally captured mass culture’s attention. Shilts examines the years between, detailing the ignorance, denial, hostility, and indifference of medical, health, and government officials as the unknown “gay cancer” ravaged America, as well as profiling the pioneering doctors and gay activists who fought for funding, research, and public awareness as tens of thousands died around them. HBO’s 1993 adaptation And the Band Played On was nominated for twenty awards and won nine, including the Emmy for best made-for-tv movie. Conduct Unbecoming, his next book, again as monumental, examined through thousands of interviews the U.S. military’s treatment of its lesbian and gay servicemembers. At the time of his death in 1994 he was planning a book on homosexuality in the Catholic Church. Shilts's first book, a biography of Harvey Milk called The Mayor of Castro Street was to become a film by Bryan Singer but was beaten out by Gus van Sant's Milk.