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

• Author: Kirchick, James
• Position: "The Journalist of Castro Street: The Life of Randy Shilts" by Andrew E. Stoner - Book review

Randy 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 post-Stonewall 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...