On Saturday, Nov. 16, the Coachella Valley Journalism Foundation will host a discussion featuring award-winning journalist Hank Plante interviewing Michael G. Lee, author of the recently released book When the Band Played On, a biography of Randy Shilts, one of the most respected gay journalists of the AIDS-epidemic era.
As the promotional flier for program explains, “Shilts, who worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, was the first openly gay reporter assigned to a gay beat at a mainstream paper and one of the nation’s most influential chroniclers of gay history, politics and culture. … Michael G. Lee conducted interviews with Shilts’ family, friends, college professors, colleagues, informants, lovers and critics. The resulting narrative tells the tale of a singularly gifted voice, a talented yet insecure young man whose coming of age became intricately linked to the historic peaks and devastating perils of modern gay liberation.”
“In total, I interviewed 73 people for this book,” Lee told the Independent. “The majority of those interviews, I did using an oral history style. That means that, before we would talk about Randy specifically, I would ask people to tell me a bit about themselves, and a bit about their lives, and walk me through their memories of where they were when they first encountered Randy, and what they remembered of those first encounters … It was really a transformational experience for me. Some of these interviews were as brief as 30 minutes, and over the phone or over Zoom, especially during the COVID lockdown. But during the initial phases, I would spend upwards of five or six hours at someone’s kitchen table, or travel halfway across the country to spend time and let them get to know me a bit, because I knew that Randy’s story had so much emotion to it.
“There were so many people who carry trauma from those early years of the AIDS epidemic, because that was 15 uninterrupted years when people were dying. I knew it would take a certain intentionality, and a certain display of compassion and a willingness to listen, to help people really tell the full story of how they came to know Randy.”
Lee discussed an interesting moment after he interviewed someone who was critical of Shilts.
“(The interviewee) said to me, ‘I think this is going to be a challenge for you to write, because you seem like you’re very devoted to him, and I don’t think you can be fully objective about him.’ So I took that as a personal challenge. … We work all the time with people who we are both devoted to and want to strangle—and Randy certainly had more than enough of those elements to his character. He was a complicated person. But it was a good challenge to have, because I wanted the book to not be fan fiction. I wanted it to be very true to the life that he led. … I wanted to acknowledge the criticisms of Randy that are out there, but I also wanted him to be seen as the whole person that he was.”
Early feedback indicates that mission was accomplished.
“I feel like I’ve succeeded, because at least in what I’m seeing from some of the initial responses, people who knew and were close to Randy are very much appreciative of this book, but so are his critics,” Lee said. “Some of the strongest coverage I got was when I was in San Francisco, from media organizations that had a somewhat negative or hostile view of Randy. They gave the book a very strong response in terms of calling it very thorough, very insightful and very well researched. … It’s always been a marvel to me that the further away I got from people who actually knew Randy, the stronger that animosity was. For people who had some sort of familiarity or connection with him, even if they weren’t friends, there was still a level of affection and regard for him.”
What attracted Lee to telling the story of Randy Shilts in the first place?
“This goes back a dozen years ago when I was a doctoral student here at the University of Minnesota,” Lee said. “I had worked for several years before going back for my Ph.D. in community-based HIV and AIDS services. … I (developed) a real fascination with the history and the culture of AIDS organizations. I was coming of age in the late 1990s as a young gay person myself. … I was taking a look at the experiences of gay and lesbian community services in the 1970s. Specifically, (I looked at) The Advocate, which at the time was considered the national gay newspaper of record, and Randy started freelancing for them in about 1975 or 1976. He caught my attention. I already knew who he was. I’d read The Mayor of Castro Street and And the Band Played On a couple of times before, and in the mid-’70s, here he was as a young freelancer, sounding the alarm on all of these pandemic-level conditions that urban gay communities were experiencing. He was doing stories on rampant alcoholism, drug abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, social isolation, loneliness—all the factors that we later came to recognize as being the comorbidities around AIDS in the 1980s and moving forward. Here he was, a half-decade before that first announcement from the (Centers for Disease Control), sounding the alarm on all of the conditions that make up the social disease of HIV and AIDS. I was astounded by his clairvoyance.”
Lee decided to see what Shilts’ biography said … and discovered there wasn’t one. “Now, that (biography) has been the last ten years of my life,” he said.
Shilts had a difficult childhood, raised by an alcoholic mother with a violent temper. He went to school after absorbing a belt-thrashing to his backside, only to face being teased by his classmates for being a sissy.
“When he came out at age 20 in Portland, Ore.,” Lee said, “he came out to his entire college classroom all at once. That’s a very bold thing for a young person to do in 1972. He then went to the University of Oregon and became one of the first openly gay elected student-government leaders in the country. From there, he parlayed that into becoming one of the most highly decorated and successful student journalists in the country, as an openly gay student writing stories about gay life. … After graduating from college in 1975 with the impressive resume that he had, he could not get hired in any mainstream newspaper’s newsroom. … He was so determined to make a career for himself as an openly gay journalist that I think today, the effects still reverberate in terms of the path that he cut for other people to follow.”
Lee has an intriguing life story himself.
“When I was an activist at Michigan State in the late ’90s, I started the university’s first LGBTQ publication,” he said. “It was based on the premise that people’s own stories were newsworthy. We created a really strong movement around that, and it helped to propel that campus forward. Eventually, that led me into HIV work, because I really strongly believe in community empowerment. It was the early 2000s before we had many of the innovations that we have today, with PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), for example, or people being able to be undetectable. So it wasn’t an easy time to do HIV-prevention work, even though the medications had come along that would save people’s lives. … Since I first started working in HIV, older staff would often say to newer employees, ‘If you want to understand why things are the way they are around here, you have to read And the Band Played On.’ There was always this recognition that our work, even though a lot of it was standard human service-type work, was imbued with a certain political edge because of the process it took to get funding for AIDS research and community-based services. It was still a partisan topic, even into the early 2000s, and we continually had to press against opponents in legislative bodies. … Depending on what happens with the climate of this country, we could be revisiting those fights sooner than we think.”
Lee said he’s never visited Palm Springs before, and he’s excited about the opportunity to visit—and is very much looking forward to the discussion with Hank Plante.
“I’m really looking forward to meeting Hank Plante for the first time, because he was a very gracious source for my book, and since he read an advanced copy this past spring, he’s been one of my loudest champions,” Lee said. “So to be able to share the stage with him and have a conversation about my book and his friendship with Randy, I think is going to be a joy.
“In addition to that, I live in Minnesota, and in mid-November, it’s dark, and it’s going to get colder here—so the thought of visiting the desert and the West Coast sounds really nice.”
Hank Plante’s discussion of When the Band Played On with author Michael G. Lee, presented by the Coachella Valley Journalism Foundation, will take place at 7 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 16, at the Palm Springs Cultural Center, 2300 E. Baristo Road, in Palm Springs. Tickets start at $27.27. Learn more at cvjf.org.