In a new book, Minnesota author spotlights unsung hero from the HIV/AIDS crisis

NINA MOINI: This is Minnesota Now. World AIDS Day is coming up on December 1, and leaders in the HIV/AIDS field are taking this time to reflect on the enormous progress the medical community has made to reduce the spread and improve the lives of people living with HIV. That progress was made in no small part from the shift in public narratives around the disease.

A little known leader from those early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis was Randy Shilts. A Minnesotan is exploring the life of Randy Shilts, a pioneering journalist from San Francisco who worked to change the narratives and reporting around the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s this was. Michael G. Li is a professor at Saint Mary's University here in Minnesota and the author of a new book about Randy's life, it's called When the Band Played on. Michael, thanks for taking the time to talk about your book, we really appreciate you.

MICHAEL G. LEE: Thank you for having me, Nina.

NINA MOINI: So, Michael, I'm curious. It's a big commitment to write a book on somebody, what was your connection, if any to Randy Shilts? Why did you want to write about him?

MICHAEL G. LEE: Well, I had worked for several years in the HIV services sector, and beginning about a little over 20 years ago when I came to Minneapolis to work for what was then the Minnesota AIDS Project and went back for my PhD at the University of Minnesota in 2010 with a really strong interest in the history and the culture of HIV/AIDS service organizations, having worked in them for several years. I just found it really interesting that they were known to have come out of the gay activist tradition of the 1970s.

And I had a chance to do some historical research in my doctoral program that I used to look at what were the health and social service concerns happening in urban gay communities in the 1970s that would have informed the creation of AIDS organizations in the 1980s.

And I was well aware of Randy Shilts having read two of his three books before coming to my doctoral work and was intrigued to find, as I was doing this historical research that by the mid-1970s Randy was authoring as a freelance journalist for the advocate, which was the gay national newspaper of record in the mid-70s.

Randy was authoring all these pieces by about 1975, 1976, of all of the pandemic level conditions that were affecting urban gay communities that we later came to know of as be the comorbidities and more of the social disease of HIV and AIDS. So he was writing about pandemic levels of alcoholism, drug abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, social isolation, loneliness, all of the clusters that would later in the '80s and '90s be associated with the AIDS epidemic.

And I was just astounded that he was so clairvoyant that a half decade before the CDC started reporting on these mysterious illnesses killing gay men, he was Randy identifying everything going on around it and sounding these very urgent alarms in the pages of the advocate. And it made me take an interest in his life story, and especially when I found there had not been a published biography by that point.

I did the unorthodox thing of having the inspiration to start my next project before I'd finished my dissertation. And so I went immediately from finishing one major project into the next, and that's been the last 10 years of my life.

NINA MOINI: Wow, amazing. For those who maybe don't remember, Michael, how the AIDS crisis unfolded back in the '80s and the early media coverage around it, can you talk about what that looked like and Randy helped that to evolve?

MICHAEL G. LEE: Initially this was very much segmented as a medical story that science journalists were following, but not a whole lot of anyone else. And Randy, starting in about 1982 as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, detailing started covering AIDS as part of his regular beat with the Chronicle.

And he immediately brought into the mainstream what a few gay publications were doing at the time in places like San Francisco and New York, which was telling both the human interest side as well as the political side of the American AIDS response, which was a lot of delaying, ignoring, underfunding, claiming that there was enough funding to do the research needed to identify the virus.

And Randy was the first to really try to keep that on the pages of a daily newspaper on an ongoing basis so that people were not just seeing some of these more clinical images of doctors in white lab coats and some very ill patients. But getting into the lived experiences as well as the political frustrations that were happening, especially among public health officials who were saying that they needed far more resources to be able to respond to this new threat than were being allotted by the federal government.

So Randy was really pioneering in terms of getting that coverage into the mainstream news at a time when a lot of papers and outlets were content to keep it shelved as this very niche medical issue that was not of great concern to the mainstream.

NINA MOINI: Well, it sounds like Randy was pretty courageous to be covering what he was covering and also the first openly gay journalist in the US. It sounds like, based on your reporting. So what was it like for him at that time?

MICHAEL G. LEE: So Randy was the first openly gay journalist to have a beat covering the gay community in a mainstream paper, that was, again, for the San Francisco Chronicle. And it took a toll on him as it became difficult for him to experience on a day to day basis these crises that were affecting his friends and his loved ones.

And he was spending extensive time not just trying to interview and get the story from public health officials, but also talking to activists, talking to patients on Ward 5B, which at San Francisco General Hospital was the first dedicated AIDS Ward in the United States. He was losing close friends and loved ones, people who had been friends and lovers of his.

And for people who maybe today don't realize that there was a point in time where people in San Francisco, New York, and other large cities were experiencing on average about a funeral a day, sometimes more. And so that personal toll absolutely had an effect on his journalism, which in turn had an effect on his private life that my book tried to detail with more intimacy to people really understand what he took on experiencing those traumas firsthand.

NINA MOINI: That's so fascinating. And also that how media covers issues is also a part of history, our shared history and how that evolves is all very fascinating. Michael, as we're coming up on World AIDS Day, we mentioned at the top here of our segment on December 1, how are you looking back on Randy's life and work after so many years of medical developments and advancements for HIV and here in the US?

MICHAEL G. LEE: Well, first of all, his gratitude. He comes from a generation of gay men that sadly bore the brunt of that horrible pandemic. And I think the younger generations who have come up since then maybe have benefited in ways that they don't recognize, given that he passed away from AIDS 30 years ago himself.

He has a fraught, a very complicated legacy. He was vilified by some segments of San Francisco's gay community for his very critical reporting on the gay bathhouses. And the band played on included a controversial story about a French Canadian flight attendant named Gaetan Dugas, who was labeled patient zero in a very localized early case control study from the CDC.

And Randy used some literary embellishment to, I would say, present him as more influential than he was, which created a great deal of controversy when the book came out. So it's not a straightforward legacy that people can always look at and say, was he a hero or was he a villain? I think there's a lot of insight and nuance and details in between that give his legacy more complication than we get from a simple straightforward portrayal.

I think it's also important to note his final book, Conduct Unbecoming, detailed the history of the US military's persecution of gay and lesbian service members from World War II until the early '90s. And he did a great service to those folks. Many of them had been drafted in Vietnam or had gone into the military because of their own socioeconomic circumstances and experienced a great deal of private interrogation and prosecution for their identities.

And that overlapped with the AIDS epidemic as well, especially in the 1980s. Randy gave light to those stories in a way that otherwise would not have been done. And it was important for those stories to be told.

NINA MOINI: Michael, thank you so much. Sounds like a fascinating read and a nuanced individual as we all are looking forward to this. Thank you, Michael.

MICHAEL G. LEE: I appreciate it, Nina. Thank you for having me on.

NINA MOINI: That was Michael G. Lee, the author of the new book, When the Band Played On, The Life of Randy Shilts, America's trailblazing gay journalist.