World AIDS Day 2002:
Today is World AIDS Day, a worldwide day of remembrance and education for the millions of lives who have been touched by this disease and moreover, for those of us still here to bear witness and tell the stories of those who are not.
I feel strange participating in this effort as I have never known anyone directly who has contracted HIV nor even anyone who has lost a loved one to AIDS. My relation to it is that of one person to a news story, a social phenomenon or a weblog meme to jump aboard. Do I have something geniune to say about the AIDS/HIV pandemic? I have only what I experienced, which is not much, to what I’ve felt, which seems, in the face of it, insignificant.
Nonetheless, ever since I got to know my friend Brad and the Link and Think project, I try, on this day, to clear a shelf in my heart for the memory of Randy Shilts. Mr. Shilts was a national correspondant for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of the book And the Band Played On, widely credited for catapulting AIDS into the consciousness of mainstream America. Shilts won several awards for the depth and wisdom of his reporting. He was finishing his third book, Conduct Uncoming, a study of gays in the military, when he succumbed to AIDS in February of 1994. He was 42 years old.
Although Shilts was largely a shy, private man, he made several foes in both the gay press and activist community. He chastised his fellow gay journalists for cheerleading instead of reporting and insisted on calling himself “a reporter who happens to be gay” instead of the other way around. Critics also mocked his defensive stance on the validity of his research, claiming rightly that Randy Shilts was human and made mistakes too, something Shilts himself had a difficult time admiting. Most incindiary of all, Shilts came out in favor of the city of San Francisco shutting down gay bath houses in the 1980’s as a public health measure to stop the spread of AIDS and he himself kept his own infection quiet. Gay activists accused him of shaming his own. Their anger makes sense to me.
Legitimate complaints aside, I have nothing but respect for Mr. Shilts. And The Band Played On is arguably the greatest work of journalism of the 20th century, a book so wise, so meticulously researched that still brims with passion and fury. It’s as readable as a spy novel and yet I effortlessly learned about imminobiology, public health policy and the history of gay neighborhoods in urban America.
It’s also the reason I have the love for reading and books I do today. In the fall of 1989, a college friend gave me ATBPO and asked me to read it. I begged off, saying I hadn’t read a book for fun in years, that reading was for school and real life was calling. She insisted, saying I could read one or two pages before bed every night and that it didn’t matter how long it took me to finish. I agreed, mostly to shut her up.
Within a week, Mr. Shilts’s vivid, intelligent prose had sucked me in. I marveled at the wisdom and truth a journalist could uncover. I learned about this thing called AIDS that I had heard of plenty but really didn’t understand. And when I finished reading nearly 3 months later, I said to myself “This is what I’ve been missing” and stunned myself into silence. I haven’t stopped reading since.
Now, as I begin a career of writing books of my own, I have Randy Shilts and his couragous work to thank. I wasn’t lucky enough to be in San Francisco when he was alive and working here but I don’t think I would have been embarrased to tell him what I just told you. He’s one of my heroes and what I give to World AIDS Day is a salute to him.