Making history while reporting it: a legendary journalist’s crusade against AIDS

Book cover: “When the Band Played On” by Michael G. Lee

I clipped Randy Shilts’s obituary from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and carefully placed it inside my copy of And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic – his most famous, most successful book. At 42 and at the peak of his intellectual, creative, and cultural power, Shilts had died of the disease he chronicled. It was February 1994.

I didn’t read Band when it came out because I wasn’t out myself in 1987. When I read it in 1991, I became frustrated and scared to discover the missed opportunities, government inaction, and scientific infighting that defined the early history of the AIDS epidemic. The book also convinced me that everyone had to do something in the war against HIV, so in part because of Shilts, I volunteered in 1992 for an AIDS vaccine clinical trial at Saint Louis University.

Shilts’s last book was a…

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