Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic
Page 26
too insecure to attempt.”42 A month later, he refl ected with some con-
fi dence: “Certainly I’ve been getting big,” and “I’m fi nally edging into
those big markets I’ve always wanted to break.”43 With new opportuni-
ties in hand, Shilts resigned from the Advocate, leaving the publication
40. Tony Ledwell, Associated Press newswire, March 3, 1977, Nexis UK.
41. Ken Maley, interview with author, San Francisco, July 28, 2007, recording C1491/13,
tape 1, side A, BLSA; emphasis on recording. See also Weiss, “Randy Shilts,” D1.
42. “March 31, 1978,” “Green” journal, Alband Collection; “too insecure” written as
“to insecure” in original.
43. “April 19, 1978,” “Green” journal, Alband Collection.
“Humanizing This Disease” 153
in March 1978. He had been dissatisfi ed for some time about his pros-
pects there but was fi nally disgusted when David Goodstein, the maga-
zine’s publisher, undertook political fund- raising through the magazine.
This action, an outraged Shilts told a regional gay newsletter, “under-
mines my professional standing as a reporter to be part of a political
group.”44 The projects he subsequently pursued included magazine ar-
ticles for New West (a stinging critique of a self- realization course run
by the Advocate) and Village Voice, work for an ultimately unpublished
Rolling Stone magazine article, and a book he intended to write about
the Castro Street neighborhood, as well as his ongoing TV reporting.45
He maintained himself as a freelance writer, helped along, Maley con-
tends, by constantly asking himself the question: “How do I roll this ex-
perience over into the next experience?”46
Through Ken Maley, Shilts was beginning to gain access to the circles
to which he had long aspired. However, there is evidence that Shilts felt
some competition with the other, more famous gay San Franciscan media
star in Maley’s group of friends: Armistead Maupin. Maley had helped
launch Maupin’s local celebrity and the author’s subsequent career, and
Maupin’s success was what Shilts yearned for while working for the Ad-
vocate. Recalled Daniel Detorie, Maley’s partner from 1977 to 1987:
He and Armistead were both kind of gay icons at the time and Ken was
friends with both of them but they were totally rivals with each other, because
Armistead had other jobs other than writing and Randy was very cocky, and
his thing was that he’d never ever had a job out of college other than writ-
44. Jim Marko, “‘Advocate’ Employee Claims EST Training Refusal Led to Firing,”
Arizona Gay News, April 21, 1978, 1.
45. Shilts wrote to Sasha Gregory- Lewis and Robert McQueen on January 1, 1976, with
a story submission about Castro Street, and provided suggestions for an editorial note: “I
think I’m going to be writing my fi rst book on Castro Street and . . . this story and the
quotes are gleened [ sic] from the research I am doing on a book. (Mentioning this will
make the article look all the more impressive and show that the Advocate hires serious
writers that do serious things like write books)” [emphasis in original]. By this point, Shilts had undertaken two months of research for the article, which was eventually published
in February 9, 1977, issue of the Advocate. The experience likely presented him with his
earliest encounters with Harvey Milk, the local politician whose political career and as-
sassination Shilts would later fuse with his neighborhood history of the Castro in his fi rst
book. See Randy Shilts to Sasha [Gregory- Lewis] and/or Robert, January 1, 1976, folder:
Castro St., Mecca or Ghetto, Adv. 77, Alband Collection.
46. Maley, recording C1491/13, tape 1, side A.
154
chapter 3
ing. . . . So we spent a lot of time together, we smoked a lot of pot together,
drank a lot of wine, and then he got the job at the Chronicle which was pretty
much a fi rst. 47
Shilts confi ded to a journal (given to him as a Christmas gift by Deto-
rie in 1977) that he was working hard on his writing skills, which could
help “make me famous and successful like Armistead.”48 This profes-
sional rivalry inevitably led to tensions, with Maley remembering that
“Armistead was afraid that Randy could not resist his journalistic temp-
tations to maybe report on stuff that Armistead did not want reported
on. So there were certain parties or events that we had that Randy was
welcome to, and others that Randy was not.”49 This approach may have
been wise, as Shilts wrote in his journal in October 1978, after Maupin
had been in the media spotlight in relation to the city’s mysterious Zo-
diac killer: “Armistead believed in nothing but publicity, unaware that
his story was entirely within the realm of journalistic investigation. But
[he] didn’t know what journalism was, so didn’t know how to defend.
Destroyed by craving for publicity, though the reality of situation [ sic]
was far different than imaginary scenario. A tremendous lesson about
the double edges of fame.”50
Reviewing his journal in 1986, while he was hard at work on Band,
Shilts remarked on some notable absences from his personal chronicle:
“Jesus, what a trip to read all these entries. It seems all I ever thought
about was career and sex. Here I’ve got all those entries on 76 + 77 and
I never talk about Harvey Milk or all that idealism— just whether I’ll be
a success or not— now that I have achieved so much of that success I have
a hard time recall[ing] the times when I was so driven— Was that really
me?”51 Indeed, Shilts rarely mentioned Milk in his journals, despite the
powerful impact the gay politician had in shaping the young journal-
ist’s idealistic dreams of driving social change. The politician’s assassina-
tion on November 27, 1978, was a devastating blow for Shilts but served
47. Daniel Detorie, interview with author, San Francisco, July 12, 2007, recording
C1491/04, tape 1, side A, BLSA; emphasis on recording.
48. “April 19, 1978,” and “December 25, 12:30 AM— 1979,” “Green” journal, Alband
Collection.
49. Maley, recording C1491/13, tape 1, side B.
50. “SF, October 7, [1978],” “Green” journal, Alband Collection.
51. “April 6, 1986, SF,” “Green” journal, Alband Collection; emphasis in original, ca-
reer written as “carreer.”
“Humanizing This Disease” 155
to galvanize his energies. As he wrote early on Christmas Day in 1979,
looking back on a decade of Christmases since leaving home, “Xmas
1978— at home again— Miserable about Harvey’s assassination. Miser-
able. Working on Harvey story.”52
The “Harvey story” would provide the impetus Shilts needed to
help him reach his ultimate goal of working as a reporter at a main-
stream newspaper. Immediately after the assassination, the New York–
based publishers of Christopher Street magazine, Michael Denneny and
Charles Ortleb, decided that they ought to publish a biography of Milk
and that Shilts, with whom Denneny had become acquainted through
Maupin, was the best person to write it. Denneny recalle
d that the maga-
zine “put up four thousand bucks for Randy to write a twenty- thousand-
word piece for Christopher Street that I could then use as a book pro-
posal to try and get a biography signed up at St. Martin’s [Press, where
Denneny worked as an editor]. Which is what we did. It was very useful
to have a magazine and a newspaper if you were a book publisher.”53 The
book proposal eventually proved to be successful, and Shilts found him-
self with a contract for his fi rst book.
Shilts had taken on a second TV reporting job in 1979, working for
the commercial TV station KTVU as a correspondent for the nightly
news broadcast to cover city hall politics. This position, however, did not
prove to be suffi cient for his earnings when KQED canceled his main
show in 1980. Shilts was subsequently told by other stations he con-
tacted that viewers would not respond well to a gay anchor. Unable to
fi nd work, he went on unemployment insurance and then into debt to
write a book about Harvey Milk’s life and death, incorporating many of
the stories he had covered over the previous fi ve years.54 Shilts admitted
that he was highly infl uenced by James Michener, having read Hawaii
around this time. “That gave me the concept of doing books where you
take people and have them represent sort of different forces in history
and different social groups. I realized that is how I could do The Mayor
52. “December 25, 12:30 AM— 1979,” “Green” journal, Alband Collection.
53. Michael Denneny, interview with author, New York, April 8, 2008, recording
C1491/22, tape 1, side B, BLSA. Ortleb and Denneny would go on to publish the New York
Native newspaper beginning in December 1980; Denneny, recording C1491/22, tape 2, side
B; Rodger Streitmatter, Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America
(Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), 248.
54. Laurie Udesky, “Randy Shilts,” Progressive 55, no. 5 (1991): 30– 34. See also Da-
vid J. Thomas, “An Interview with Randy Shilts,” Christopher Street 6, no. 1 (1982), 28– 35.
156
chapter 3
of Castro Street, with a cast of characters who represented different el-
ements of the community, and then just weave their stories together the
way that Michener does.”55 Shilts would develop what became his signa-
ture style of book writing on this project, blending his accumulation of
details from hundreds of interviews into reconstructed scenes and the
imagined thoughts of his characters. When he was not able to use an
on- the- record interview to support his factual claims, he noted that he
would rely on a “standard rule of reporting” and “corroborat[e] possible
points of contention with at least three unnamed sources.”56
His book received moderately positive reviews in the gay and straight
press, with Shilts proudly noting that “the straight press is saying that
this is the fi rst gay book that straight people can read. That’s what I was
hoping to do.”57 Amid the publicity for his book, which went into publi-
cation in the summer of 1981, Shilts was offered a job as a general assign-
ment reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle’s City Desk. He started
his dream job in early August 1981, as stories of “gay pneumonia” were
beginning to catch his attention.
“I Was Convinced They Were Going to Let Us All Die”
In June 1989, Shilts was in Montreal, Canada, to deliver a plenary ad-
dress at the Fifth International Conference on AIDS. The journalist be-
gan his speech with a reminiscence: “It was eight years ago this week
that I was at a cocktail party in San Francisco and somebody said that
the Centers for Disease Control claimed there was a gay pneumonia. I
remember saying it wasn’t bad enough that they were trying to blame gay
people for the deterioration of the American family; now we were caus-
ing pneumonia too. It seemed patently absurd. Needless to say, a lot has
happened since then.”58
55. Garry Wills, “Randy Shilts: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, Septem-
ber 30, 1993, 49.
56. Shilts, Mayor of Castro Street, xiii.
57. Thomas, “Interview with Randy Shilts,” 33.
58. See Shilts’s RSVP message, April 19, 1989, and printed speaking script: “Beyond
Compassion: Remarks by Randy Shilts,” June 9, 1989, p. 1, folder: Int’l AIDS Conference,
1989, Alband Collection; pneumonia typed as “pneymonia” in original. Acknowledging
his divisive public reputation, Shilts warned the conference organizers that his invitation
might spark controversy in many quarters: “There are people who feel my book was not
“Humanizing This Disease” 157
Though AIDS was originally a story given to David Perlman, the
Chronicle’s science writer, Shilts soon reached out to the contacts he
had forged while writing about gay health issues for the Advocate in
the 1970s. On August 18, 1981, he wrote to Dr. Marcus Conant, a lo-
cal dermatologist who was organizing a multidisciplinary clinic to in-
vestigate Kaposi’s sarcoma and opportunistic infections, and who had
sent Shilts some information about KS.59 The journalist suggested that
he hold off writing a “local angle story” until Conant had managed to
put together the necessary public education materials regarding the
then rare skin condition. “That way,” he wrote, “we’ll be alertin[g] peo-
ple in the medical community and the general public won’t be banging
down the public health department’s doors with questions that can’t be
answered.” Shilts closed cheerily with a reference to his new job at the
Chronicle: “I’m gainfully employed at last.”60
Despite these early intentions, Shilts would not produce an AIDS ar-
ticle for the Chronicle until May 1982, when he penned “The Strange,
Deadly Diseases That Strike Gay Men.”61 The piece, a single article out
of the 120 he wrote between August 20, 1981, and June 30, 1982, profi led
the KS clinic at the University of California– San Francisco (UCSF) and
the weekly support group for gay related immune defi ciency (GRID) pa-
tients.62 Interviews with Dritz and Dr. Harold Jaffe from the CDC pro-
vided a factual basis for the article, to which Shilts added a political fl a-
vor, highlighting Congressman Henry Waxman’s criticisms of the slow
pro- gay enough while some scientists feel the book was not kind enough to certain re-
searchers; conservatives felt the book was too liberal while some liberals felt the book was
not liberal enough.” Nonetheless, he gratefully accepted the offer. As he explained, “the
pursuit of truth is not always applauded from all quarters.”
59. For an overview of the history of the San Francisco KS Clinic, see Sally Smith
Hughes, “The Kaposi’s Sarcoma Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco:
An Early Response to the AIDS Epidemic,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71, no. 4
(1997): 651– 88.
60. Randy Shilts to Marcus Conant, 21 August 1981, folder 3, box 1, K- S Notebook—
Chronological Files, Conant Papers.
61. Randy Shilts, “The Strange, Deadly Diseases That Target Gay Men,” San Fran-
<
br /> cisco Chronicle, May 13, 1982, 6– 7. Shilts had left the Chronicle for a six- month period, during which he promoted his book; this delay was compounded by an initial reluctance on
the part of the Chronicle’s editors to cover the disease; see Kinsella, Covering the Plague, 166– 67.
62. This count is based on the clippings of Shilts’s articles in the bylines folders of the
SFPL collection. See folders 18 and 19: Shilts, Randy Bylines, box 23, Shilts Papers.
158
chapter 3
federal response. It demonstrated Shilts’s willingness to go to multiple
sources for his facts and that by 1982 he had already established useful
contacts at both the CDC and the San Francisco Department of Public
Health, on whom he would rely over the next fi ve years. Of the 37 sto-
ries that Shilts fi led during the rest of 1982, only one additional piece
dealt with AIDS, a short article outlining avenues of support for AIDS
patients.
It was in 1983 that Shilts was fi rst able to make his mark in AIDS cov-
erage, spurred on by the January diagnosis of Gary Walsh, a psychother-
apist friend whom he had dated in the 1970s and whose experience he
portrays in Band. It is instructive to note the way in which Shilts later
described what made AIDS real to him. “Suddenly I saw that someone
like me— a middle- class professional— could get this disease,” Shilts ex-
plained, apparently unaware of what this remark conveyed about his
class- based assumptions about sexual activity. “The image had been that
it was just someone who had 2,000 sexual contacts.”63 Again, we see Shilts
constructing an oppositional image between himself and the character of
Dugas in Band, drawing the sort of imaginary line between “good” and
“bad” sex that one of his San Francisco contemporaries, the activist and
writer Gayle Rubin, was critically articulating at exactly that time.64
With the disease striking close to home, Shilts pushed harder for in-
creased coverage of AIDS at the Chronicle. He was permitted to de-
vote more time to covering the disease, and of the eighty stories he
wrote for the Chronicle in 1983, twenty- four dealt with AIDS.65 Shilts
upset several community workers with an article in which he ques-
tioned their response to a UCSF study which suggested that the num-