WHEN THE BAND PLAYED ON

Admiring but not uncritical life of the pioneering reporter on the AIDS outbreak in the early 1980s.

“AIDS did not just happen, AIDS was allowed to happen.” So insisted Shilts, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle who arrived to “straight” journalism by way of sometimes controversial advocacy pieces for the city’s gay press. One early source of division was his reporting on what was first called GRID, or gay-related immune deficiency, which, Shilts suggested, called for, among other things, self-policing among the gay community on issues of addiction and its risky sequelae. At the same time, he argued that the health establishment, having stigmatized that community, did too little to even try to understand the “gay plague” that frontline workers were even then calling a pandemic. The media was not much help; as biographer and LGBTQ+ activist Lee notes, “mainstream news organizations still produced the occasional medical story, but most of the coverage came from a handful of gay journalists…often against the wishes of their publishers and advertisers.” Shilts continued at times to find himself at odds with the community to which he himself belonged, to say nothing of the medical and epidemiological establishment, responsible for what Lee calls “a major systemic clusterfuck.” Shilts’ book And the Band Played On, later to become a TV movie, worked this theme heavily, earning both praise and criticism over thorny issues such as the quest for the so-called Patient Zero, a “loaded term…[that] hinted at more than the evidence could deliver.” For all that, 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.

A nuanced portrait of a journalist and activist who sacrificed all while sounding a pandemic alarm.