BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
320 Pages, 6 x 9
Formats: Cloth, EPUB, PDF
Cloth, $30.00 (US $30.00) (CA $40.00)
Publication Date: October 2024
ISBN 9780914090304
Rights: WOR
Chicago Review Press (Oct 2024)
eBook Editions Available
Will it work on my eReader?Randy Shilts was the preeminent LGBTQ+ reporter of his generation.
He was the first openly gay reporter assigned to a gay beat at a mainstream paper and one of the nation’s most influential chroniclers of gay history, politics, and culture. Shilts wrote three seminal works on the community: The Mayor of Castro Street, on the life, assassination, and legacy of Harvey Milk; And the Band Played On, detailing the failure of politics as usual during the early AIDS epidemic; and Conduct Unbecoming, a history of the US military’s mistreatment of LGBTQ servicemembers.
Yet the intimate life story of Randy Shilts has been left unwritten. When the Band Played On tells that story, recognizing his legacy as a trailblazing figure in gay activism, journalism, and public policy.
Author Michael G. Lee conducted interviews with Shilts’s family, friends, college professors, colleagues, informants, lovers, and critics. The resulting narrative tells the tale of a singularly gifted voice, a talented yet insecure young man whose coming of age became intricately linked to the historic peaks and devastating perils of modern gay liberation.
When the Band Played On is the authoritative account of Randy Shilts’s trailblazing life, as well as his legacy of shaping the history-making events he covered.
"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, author of Stonewall Strong