Earlier, I commented about the experience of writing nearly 30 biographical sketches for American National Biography. Some of them were, for one reason or another, pretty pedestrian, but the one I wrote on the gay journalist, Randy Shilts (1951-1994), was among the more interesting. St. Martin's Griffin has just brought out a new edition of his Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the U. S. Military. Here's what I wrote about him: [more ...]

SHILTS, Randy Martin (8 August 1951-17 February 1994), journalist, was born in Davenport, Iowa, the son of Bud and Norma Shilts. Neither of his parents, a prefabricated housing salesman and a housewife, graduated from high school. They raised four sons in a politically conservative Methodist family. Young Randy Shilts grew up in Aurora, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where he organized a local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom and graduated from a public high school. Shilts entered the University of Oregon in 1969. Two years later, he openly acknowledged his homosexuality and became a leader in Eugene, Oregon's Gay People's Alliance. In his senior year, Shilts ran unsuccessfully for student body president on the slogan"Come Out for Shilts." After completing requirements for graduation with honors in English literature, Shilts decided that he"didn't know how to write." Changing his major to journalism, he learned that he could write well, won several journalism awards and served as managing editor of the campus newspaper. In 1975 Shilts graduated at the top of his class with a B.S. in journalism.

Unable to find work in mainstream journalism because of his open homosexuality, Shilts became the northwest correspondent for the Advocate, a national lesbian and gay periodical then based in San Mateo, California. Six months later, he moved there and worked as an Advocate staff journalist for three years. In February 1977, as large numbers of gay and lesbian people moved into the Bay area, San Francisco radio station KQED hired Shilts to cover gay community news. As he expanded his mandate to city politics and urban affairs, Shilts got to know San Francisco's new gay city commissioner, Harvey Milk, and learned that they both came from backgrounds in the libertarian strand of conservative Republican politics. When former city commissioner Dan White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and commissioner Milk on 27 November 1978, it was Randy Shilts's story. In 1979, after riotous reactions to the murders, Oakland's independent television station KTVU hired him to cover city hall and the gay community for its evening news.

Shilts used the money that he earned in television to launch a career in free-lance journalism, publishing articles in Christopher Street, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Village Voice and the Washington Post. His Christopher Street article on the death of Harvey Milk led to a book contract on the subject. It would take three years."I couldn't deal with it emotionally," he recalled."I'd never known anybody before who'd gotten killed." Writing under the influence of John Irving, James Michener and Mike Royko, Shilts produced his first book, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life & Times of Harvey Milk (1982). The biography of the nation's leading gay officeholder became a major work of investigative journalism in big city politics and a vehicle for telling the story of the gay liberation movement. Yet, that story would be altered dramatically within six months of the book's publication and Randy Shilts would have to learn to"deal with it emotionally."

When he joined the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle in 1981, Shilts was the first openly gay reporter on a major American newspaper. Yet, because of his television exposure, he was more widely known than most print journalists. By 1983, Shilts persuaded the Chronicle's editors to let him work full time covering the new plague, AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), that had begun to decimate San Francisco's gay community. By exposing the role of bathhouses as centers for anonymous sex, he risked the hostility of many gay men. Shilts's reports re-enforced homophobia, they charged and called him a"gay Uncle Tom." Clarifying his position, he called for eliminating certain sexual practices in bathhouses, which were high risks for spreading the disease. Having patronized them himself, Shilts was tested for the AIDS-causing HIV virus in 1986. He delayed learning the results of the test until he finished his second book manuscript, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987), however, lest the information influence his reporting. Shilts's history of the AIDS plague severely criticized the Reagan administration, the news media, the scientific establishment and some segments of the gay community for their slow, contorted response to the crisis. On 16 March 1987 Shilts learned that he tested positive for the AIDS-causing HIV virus. His book was widely praised and was a finalist for a National Book Award in nonfiction. He was named the outstanding author of 1988 by the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Sustained by AZT, the drug that inhibited HIV, and with a fine journalist's sense of news agenda and a near $1 million advance, Shilts turned from the AIDS crisis to a study of homophobia in the armed forces. He secured 15,000 pages of documents through the Freedom of Information Act and conducted over 1,100 interviews with veterans. As AZT began to loose its inhibiting effect, Shilts's health deteriorated. He developed pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, an AIDS-related infection, in August 1992 and his HIV-positive status became full-blown AIDS. When Democratic presidential candidate, Bill Clinton, announced that if elected he would end the ban on gays and lesbians in the military, Shilts's publisher was anxious to put Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military (1993) into the national debate. On 24 December 1992, Shilts's left lung collapsed and he worked from a hospital bed with an editor to finish the book.

When Shilts publicly acknowledge his HIV-status in February 1993, he summarized the thesis of Conduct Unbecoming for Newsweek (1 February 1993):"From the first days of the Defense Department's antigay regulations in the early 1940s, the government was willing to waive the for-heterosexuals-only requirement for military service if barring gays interfered with manpower exigencies." Shilts found a pattern of relative toleration in wartime but of coercive homophobia in peacetime. Conduct Unbecoming won generally positive reviews. Some gay activists criticized Shilts for refusing to reveal the homosexuality of prominent figures, including two four star generals. Former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman spoke for much of the military establishment in dismissing Shilts as exemplifying the"schizophrenia of the radical gay movement" in his"loathing of the military" and"genuine ignorance of its ways." Yet, another critic said that Conduct Unbecoming bore the same relation to gay liberation that Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Rachael Carson's The Silent Spring bore to the modern feminist and environmental movements. On 31 May 1993 Randy Shilts and his companion, Barry Barbieri, a film student, held a commitment ceremony. Shilts died of complications related to AIDS at his home in Guerneville, California.

Bibliography
Randy Shilts published no autobiographical work, but his papers are in the Gay and Lesbian Archives at the San Francisco Public Library. For an obituary, see: New York Times, 18 February 1994. The best secondary sources include: Contemporary Authors, Vol. 127, 400-405; Current Biography Yearbook, 1993, pp. 525-529; Sharon Malinowski and Christa Brelin, eds., The Gay and Lesbian Literary Companion (1995), pp. 459-473, 574-575; and Claude J. Summers, ed., The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage (1995), pp. 659-660.
Ralph E. Luker

It wasn't easy deciding to tell Randy Shilts's story. I've been married for nearly 40 years to the same woman and father of two daughters for over 25. Yet, through the identity-politics plagued recent decades, I'd been denied tenure twice. [Allegheny College, 1976; Antioch College, 1993] Both times, my former history department colleagues amused themselves by tying speculations about my sexuality into the denials of tenure. My wife and I even twice discussed the possibility of getting a divorce in order to insulate her and the children from the painful effects of my former colleagues' amusements. I didn't think that I had to be gay in order to tell his story, but writing about him might raise painful questions anew. After all, people who'd never met me, but knew the subject of my work, sometimes thought I was an African American. But I could always tell the identity-politics speculators that I wrote about Randy Shilts because he was a fellow Methodist. Really, I told his story because I'm a historian and he had a story that needed to be told.

The piece of the story that interested me the most was the roots of Harvey Milk and Randy Shilts in the libertarian strand of American conservatism in the 1960s. I still think that that's a part of the story on gay liberation in 20th century America that hasn't been sufficiently explored. I suspect that Milk and Shilts were not alone among gay activists who found their liberation via libertarianism and that JasonKuznicki agrees with me.