Randy Shilts (August 8, 1951 – February 17, 1994) was a gay American journalist and author. He worked as a reporter for both The Advocate and the San Francisco Chronicle. His book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, published in 1987, won the Stonewall Book Award. And the Band Played On is a sweeping and extensively researched journalistic account of the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It details a variety of overlapping story lines including the torpid response to the epidemic by the scientific research establishment, and the later controversy over competing proprietary claims to discovery of the virus, now known as HIV, that causes AIDS made by a research group at the NIH of the United States led by Robert Gallo, and by a research group at the Pasteur Institute of France led by Luc Montagnier.

One thread in And the Band Played On is based in part on an early AIDS study by Dr. William Darrow of the Centers for Disease Control. The study stated that a gay Canadian airline steward named Gaetan Dugas is Patient Zero, the original carrier of the transmittable cause of AIDS (later found to be HIV) who is responsible either directly or indirectly for many early cases of AIDS in San Francisco. It should also be noted that Shilts prided himself on being an objective journalist. He waited until he wrote the last page of his book before he himself went out to get tested for HIV. His test returned positive.

Four years after the publication of Shilts' book, Dr. Darrow repudiated his study, admitting its methods were flawed and that Shilts had totally misrepresented its conclusions.

The book was made into a 1993 HBO film.

Shilts also wrote a biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street (1982). His last book, Gays and Lesbians in the US Military, was published shortly before his death from AIDS at the age of 42.

Selected books

• Conduct Unbecoming (ISBN 0312342640)
• And the Band Played On (ISBN 0613298721)
• Mayor of Castro Street (ISBN 0312523319)

American journalists | American biographers | American non-fiction writers | Gay and lesbian historians | Gay writers | AIDS-related deaths | 1951 births | 1994 deaths