It doesn’t seem an exaggeration to call Randy Shilts (1951-1994) the most important gay journalist, at least in the past several decades of American history. His book on the AIDS crisis, And the Band Played On (1987), although controversial then and now (not least for launching the ‘Patient Zero’ myth—and suggesting, horrors, that uninhibited bathhouse libertinage might have been a bad idea), and of course flawed, remains unavoidable as a reference to what was happening and how people perceived it, and a turning-point in straight America’s sense that there even was a crisis. His earlier, pre-AIDS work on Harvey Milk and later work on gays in the military likewise helped define the idea of a national gay politics organized around civil-rights-type struggles (rather than, say, an extension of sexual liberation or the dismantling of capitalist hetero-patriarchy). Shilts is about to have a moment, with fellow gay (and long-time AIDS-beat) journalist David Tuller about to release a biography.
I imagine it will be reasonable and comprehensive, and consider fairly all the angles especially around And the Band—a book Michael Denneny published at St Martin’s—indeed it was supposedly Denneny who pushed the publisher to center (and wrote the press release that centered) attention on the Patient Zero story, which takes up a relatively small number of And the Band’s several hundred pages. Queers with ‘good’ politics today have much to say and seethe about how Gaetan Dugas—and bathhouse sex more generally—was represented by Shilts. Richard McKay, for instance, has a nasty book that portrays Shilts as a self-hating, ambitious, alcoholic sex-phobe who made the handsome fun Dugas into his own counter-image in order to cash in on straight audiences’ loathing of gay sexuality; Nighboat recently published one of the worst books of poetry I’ve ever read—a cycle of elegies to Dugas.
I’m not particularly interested in defenses of writers’ characters—I am myself thin-skinned, belligerent, and sometimes a bad drunk (but only after 5pm—working hours belong to kratom)—which surely has some relation to my work (along with, of course, whatever graces get the better of my bad nature) but I should hope not enough to be the most interesting thing about the latter. But what I am interested in—although I have no way to really address a broader gay-male intellectual public about it beyond the readership of this Substack (because Peter Thiel still hasn’t given me the big check to start up a new gay magazine/TV-station/social-media-network, no matter how alluringly I dangle myself out of my balcony)—and what I hope Tuller will somehow hit on in his book—is how much Shilts was a political thinker, and how much we might benefit from returning, in a spirit of critical engagement, to his political thought.
The gay writers, thinkers, and activists of the 70s-80s appear increasingly to me—as they do to Mark Merlis in his beautiful novel An Arrow’s Flight (1997—also published by Denneny at St. Martin’s), which combines that era with the Philoctetes myth and the end of the Trojan War (this sounds like some corny Song of Achilles YA loser shit but it absolutely works/rocks)—as our classics, in the sense that, for example, Arendt or Foucault takes the speeches of Pericles (in The Human Condition and the lectures on parrhesia, respectively)—that is, not as models to follow, and certainly not as ‘successes’ whom we ought to ‘learn’ from, but—as Pericles wished himself and his addressees to appear to future generations—“examples” that magnify our character in their greatness and disasters, who inspire us to attempt at least to live up to their creativity, power, heroism, and confront us with what may be the same questions that we must, however, answer otherwise.
Well, in that spirit, maybe, here’s some thoughts on and extracts from Shilts’ writings, starting with a profile of Cleve Jones for Christopher Street in 1980—two years after Harvey Milk’s death and one year before Shilts’ book on Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, a moment when the handsome Jones (remember, by the way, when Owen Jones was the fresh-faced mouth-to-fuck of a rising British socialism? To be young was very heaven!) seemed maybe poised to take Milk’s spot as SF’s leading political homo—and maybe even to make that spot a national one… except that Jones had allowed himself to be made a fool of in a 1980 CBS special Gay Power, Gay Politics, that made SF’s homos look like a bunch of crazies only interested in the right to public sex. Much was made in the gay media of the failure of the attempt by mainstream liberal gay politicos like Jones to use the national straight media to the community’s advantage, with much debate about what the lessons of that failure might be:
Crucially, Shilts didn’t just pile on Jones. He blamed, of course, the straight media for offering a lurid, sensationalist, negative portrait of gay male life in SF—and blamed gay radicals for their own sensationalist posturing—and blamed the city’s gay political establishment for its timid, cozy relationship (dependence on) the Democratic party, backroom deals and unimaginative electoralism. Jones had fumbled tactically, he argued, but had the right strategic vision—gay politics had to pass through national (straight) media, not just become an extension of traditional left-wing agitation or centrist-liberal ward-healing. In that respect, Shilts was already thinking about what would become both the media-spectacle tactics of ACT UP and the dangers/affordances of writing meant to shock straight people into caring about AIDS.
These two points—the importance of image-making in the media, and the need to avoid about a radical left and an establishment center to create an autonomous gay political sensibility nevertheless capable of speaking to non-gay audiences—shape Shilts’ account of Harvey Milk published the following year. I have no clue how accurate The Mayor of Castro Street is—Milk seems himself like rather a small man, hardly the gay-historical spirit on horseback—but Shilts works hard to make something useful out of him, and of his supposed journey from being a powerless frightened homosexual to an empowered gay man—a journey that, as for Larry Kramer (and in his own, gentile way, via his mentors Arendt and Harold Rosenberg, for Michael Denneny) was in large modelled on what was taken to be the meaning of modern Jewish history:
The sense of oneself as part of a vulnerable minority that has been persecuted in the past, and could be in the present—could be destroyed utterly in the present—that depends on but cannot trust the goodwill of the majority—that could too easily and has too long lived in fear of them—is central to Shilts’ vision of Milk, and to his sense that Milk correctly refused (as Arendt, and Denneny, likewise refused) the apparent choice between ‘liberation’ in alliance with a universalist, radical Left (for which one’s own group might be, one moment, a useful instrument—but the particularity of which might at any time and must eventually be sacrificed) or mere compromise with the existing order.
It’s worth noting here that Milk, famously, did bring the gays into support of the Coors strike—with gay bars boycotting the beer—provided that the union put itself on the side of anti-discrimination campaigns. ‘Gay Power’ was something that gay leaders and institutions should build and wield for the benefit of gays. Gay Power is not obligated to help every oppressed group under the sun—although if gays individually want to stop buying grapes or put a watermelon in their Scruff profile, more, uh, power to them—but should flex itself whenever there’s a real opportunity for a productive, self-interested alliance with other groups. This is really the most basic sort of political sensibility—something that of course gays had never been able to exercise collectively before, and which we still to a great extent lack, giving ourselves over, now as then, to the rival temptations either of membership in a vast radical coalition of historical losers and their sweeping revolutionary demands or of co-optation by an elite that promises to hang more and ever-uglier rainbow flags.
Finally, the importance of media and myth. Milk often told a story about a kid in Iowa, Pennsylvania, or some other fly-over state who called him or wrote him or something to say he’d been about to kill himself, things at home were so bad, but seeing Milk in the news had given him hope—the big keyword of Milk’s campaigns. That this was made up is not at all for Shilts a problem or a matter of cynicism—it’s a good story, one that expresses something true. And it’s a better story than the more recent It Gets Better campaign, because it’s not saying that you’ll get out of your Nutbush-esque little town shithole and become a fabulous UX designer in the big city or whatever, but rather that gays here in that city have to take political power and make the headlines in order to make life bearable for those kids.
Well by 1987 everything obviously looked a lot bleaker, and it was an open question whether gay life (as opposed to just some homosexuals) let alone Gay Power would survive. And although it’s been read and remembered as a salacious story about Gaetan Dugas, or more accurately as an indictment of the US government’s handling of AIDS, And the Band is perhaps most importantly a book about the possible disappearance and desperate hope for the continuity of that life and power. It begins with Jones thinking about Milk:
And it ends, almost, with Cleve Jones again (who hasn’t yet made the AIDS Quilt), wondering what would remain:
But that’s the next-to-last scene, not the last one. Shilts ends with Bill Kraus—a gay activist who had been an important link between SF and national gay politics—dying an agonizing grotesque death that ends with what is maybe an awfully stupid flimsy insistence that death isn’t everything:
In 1987 that was perhaps as much as anyone could offer—what sounds like a denial that this is even happening, the pious thought that on some spiritual level it isn’t, but which might also be construed as Shilts, via the made-up nurse, holding out what ended up being the still to me totally bafflingly fulfilled hope that the life in which these men participated and for the preservation of which they worked to build political power would survive them.
Shilts himself would die of AIDS 7 years later. Here he is profiled, shortly before then, in an article for the new gay magazine OUT—subjected to some stupid criticism and comparisons, but, with whatever qualifications, considered a “hero”:
I think Shilts—and through his perceptions of them, Milk and Jones and others of those years—offers approaches to politics, eschewing the binaries of radical-vs-assimilationist, that still remain buried treasures of our history—and perhaps more importantly, he offers, looking back at the age of Gay Power as already tragically past, a guide to the proper sensibility for living on after the time of heroes. Although perhaps we are not, post-AIDS, so different from those of the heroic pre-AIDS generation who founded gay culture in America, living as they did, like Milk, with the awareness that a historical annihilation had already undone one gay liberation, living with a sense of history not as definitive and certainly not as moving inevitably towards emancipation, but as contingent, reversible, mobile, potentially tragic and only therefore an open space for action, speech and memory.