By Michael G. Lee–
On August 17, 1981, Randy walked into the [San Francisco Chronicle] newsroom at Fifth and Mission as a full-time reporter for a nationally respected newspaper, and the first openly gay journalist hired to cover a gay beat. He brought along a diary to document any hostile encounters, but instead, he recalled, “Everybody was great. Everybody went out of their way to be nice.”
Others, however, noticed a certain guardedness in the ranks. “There were a bunch of World War II veterans who sat in the back and smoked and played chess and balanced their checkbooks and sometimes did what they called shirt-sleevers,” remembered Katy Butler. “Which is, you sort of sashay out the back door and go to the bar that was in the alley around the block.”
“I would say they were sexually nervous—some of them,” commented colleague Susan Sward. Together with Katy, she and Randy formed a cluster near the city desk. His confidence was immediately apparent, Susan noted, but “I just remember looking at him across the room and thinking, Oh boy. Here comes the flowered tie and the big curly Afro … I thought, Ooh, I don’t know if the Chronicle is ready for this!”
Seeing Randy on the outside looking in, Susan took to him like a sympathetic older sister. Over tuna sandwiches at a nearby café, she asked why he’d settled in San Francisco, to which he mischievously answered, “It was a candy store!”
True to his general assignment mandate, Randy’s initial reporting stuck to mundane city matters like public drunkenness. Gay-related features began to noticeably increase, however, from human-interest pieces to reports of gay bashings and muggings that weren’t usually covered outside the gay press. At the Castro Street Fair that fall, Randy bumped into Anne Kronenberg during a break in the entertainment. As they stood talking, an activist took the stage and began warning of an unknown illness, but no one was listening. “People were there to party,” Anne recalled. “He didn’t get booed, but nobody paid any attention. Just, you know, ‘Stop being a downer. We don’t want to hear about this.’”
In early June the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had first raised concerns in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, an announcement that garnered a few ripples in the press. In the Chronicle, David Perlman quickly followed up with his own brief account, while the New York Times entered the fray in early July, after the MMWR reported that Kaposi sarcoma, a rare skin cancer, had been diagnosed in twenty-six gay men in New York and California.
After hearing about it from a friend, Steve came home and asked Randy if he knew anything about a gay cancer. “He took a deep breath,” Steve recalled. “Yeah,” Randy told him, “I have been looking at it.” But when the Chronicle revisited the strange outbreak in midfall, the byline went to one of its science correspondents.
Educator, author, and activist Michael G. Lee has had a passion for storytelling for more than two decades. “When the Band Played On: The Life of Randy Shilts” (Chicago Review Press, 2024) is his first book. https://bit.ly/3TSKiIG
Remembering Randy Shilts (1951 – 1994)
Published on October 3, 2024
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