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As a national correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, Shilts was the first newspaper reporter to cover the AIDS epidemic full time.

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When the Band Played On: The Life of Randy Shilts, America's Trailblazing Gay Journalist (Hardcover)

"Shilts’ work, well described and documented here, helped draw public attention to a disease that all too many—not least in the Reagan administration—plainly wished to ignore."—Kirkus Reviews

“Randy Shilts was one of the most significant and controversial journalists of the late twentieth century, especially for his coverage of the AIDS pandemic in America. Michael Lee has done a stupendous job of navigating Shilts’s triumphs, and his flaws and mistakes. This book is an essential supplement to the historical record on gay liberation, HIV/AIDS, and LGBTQ combatants in the US military.” —Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of The Coming Plague

“Michael Lee has skillfully captured the consuming ambition, loosey-goosey relationship with facts, humor, and tender humanity of Randy Shilts in this engaging, hard-to-put-down biography.” —John-Manuel Andriote,

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Randy Shilts ’77

1998 Hall of Achievement Inductee

Randy Shilts refused to be boxed in by the limits that society offered him. As an out gay man, he carved a place in journalism that was not simply groundbreaking but internationally influential in changing the way the news media covered AIDS.

As a national correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, Shilts was the first newspaper reporter to cover the AIDS epidemic full time. In his book And the Band Played On—AIDS: The First Five Years (1980-1985), he took almost everyone to task on how the first years of the epidemic were handled. In the process, he produced a critically acclaimed book that was translated into seven languages and became a docudrama broadcast on HBO.

He wrote two other books, The Mayor of Castro Street, and Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military, which was on The New York Times Bestseller List. Shilts was also a staff writer for The Advocate and a reporter for Bay Area television stations.

Shilts list of distinctions include the 1993 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Lesb

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Randy Shilts

American journalist and writer (1951–1994)

Randy Shilts (August 8, 1951 – February 17, 1994) was an American journalist and author. After studying journalism at the University of Oregon, Shilts began working as a reporter for both The Advocate and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as for San Francisco Bay Area television stations. In the 1980s, he was noted for being the first openly gay reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.^[1]

His first book, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, was a biography of LGBT activist Harvey Milk. His second book, And the Band Played On, chronicled the history of the AIDS epidemic. Despite some controversy surrounding the book in the LGBT community, Shilts was praised for his meticulous documentation of an epidemic that was little-understood at the time. It was later made into an HBO film of the same name in 1993. His final book, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, examined discrimination against lesbians and g