As a gay journalist living in San Francisco in the 1980s, Randy Shilts could have written a book on the AIDS crisis from a very subjective viewpoint, with himself as a central character and his reactions to the deaths of his young friends as the focus of his story.
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So when Shilts wrote And the Band Played On, he was startled to find that he had become what one friend at the World Health Organization dubbed “the world’s first AIDS celebrity.” The book, published in the fall of 1987, is the definitive account of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic–a stinging indictment of the American medical, political, and media establishments for allowing the epidemic to spread to devastating proportions. Working the radio and TV talk-show circuit to promote the book and, he hoped, get out the word about AIDS, Shilts found himself dogged by autograph seekers, cruised by star fuckers, and harassed by homophobes, all drawn by his overnight media fame.
In response, Shilts broke his own rule against first-person journalism and wrote “Talking AIDS to Death,” a moving personal essay that’s now the partial source of Shouts and Whispers, a program of one-act plays opening next week at Lifeline Theatre in Rogers Park.
And Shilts, who’s anticipating an HBO television film of And the Band Played On and is currently writing a history of homosexuals in the armed forces, confesses that “I’m sort of despairing over everything these days. Part of me is someone from Aurora, Illinois, who’s very midwestern and very optimistic. But I’ve begun to really seriously question how much people do care. It’s not just AIDS. When you look at homelessness, or our refusal to pay high school teachers a decent wage or provide health care–people are increasingly ready to step over the bodies on the sidewalk. When they vote, they vote for the guy who says he’ll cut their taxes without regard to the rest of society. I think there’s a lot of goodness out there that can be tapped. But I don’t know if it’s enough to solve the problems.”
