Talk:Randy Shilts

Deleted material

I've extensively rewritten this article, and I'm deleting all this material on And the Band Plays On; before today, the article said next to nothing about Shilts, it was all about this one book pretty much. But in case there's useful material here, I'm posting this on the talk page. There's already a pretty full wiki article on the book, but I don't feel like trying to integrate this material into it right now.

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 tepid 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.

Perhaps the best-known 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, unnamed in the study, and labeled "Patient O" (for 'Out of California', not Patient Zero) was at the center of a cluster of the earliest men in San Francisco identified with AIDS, and, thus inferentially was responsible either directly or indirectly for many early cases of AIDS there. Media reports mistakenly labelled this man "Patient Zero", (rather than "O", i.e. "oh"), which is a specific term in epidemiology, and the inaccurate designation was used to criticize this patient as the overall source of the epidemic.

Shilts used Darrow's study as the basis for his book's portrait of his "Patient Zero". He also named the patient as Gaëtan Dugas. Dugas had died in 1984 and was unavailable to provide, verify, or deny any of the details that Shilts used in his characterization of Dugas.

The basic premise of Darrow's study was that AIDS developed within one year of infection from a person with the disease. With this erroneous tool, a patient (who was Dugas) was identified as being at the center of the study cluster. By the time Shilts' book was published, it was already clear that the time between infection and the appearance of the disease was rarely less than two years and was on the average eight to ten years.

Further, a 1983 study of about half of the first five hundred cases among San Francisco men had produced the fact that about one-third of them had had sex in New York City in the late 1970s. Any one of them or many of them could have brought the disease to their city. This is contained in: A.R. Moss, et al. Risk factors for AIDS and HIV seropositivity in homosexual men (American Journal of Epidemiology, No. 125, 1987, pp. 1035–1047).

An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1986 reported that in 1980 over twenty percent of the Manhattan gays in a hepatitis B experiment were HIV-positive. This 20% infection rate was discovered after the HIV blood test became available in 1985 and after the stored blood at the New York Blood Center was retested for HIV antibodies.

It should also be noted that Shilts prided himself on being an objective journalist. He had noted that anyone he knew who was diagnosed HIV-positive became an activist. 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.

Gaetan Dugas, the "Patient Zero" as presented by Shilts in his book, was accepted as fact; and it raised a firestorm of homophobia on top of that which already existed. Neither Shilts nor his publisher corrected or repudiated his portrait, either for its epidemiological inaccuracy nor the fact that he made up conversations attributed to the deceased Dugas. (It was common journalistic practice to fabricate conversations that the journalist could not have heard or recorded: the issue here is the content of those conversations, not their presence.)

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

--Textorus 05:54, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

I think at least some of that material could be returned to the article, Tex. And The Band... was his Magnum Opus, and was the book which cemented his reputation throughout the world, and not only in the gay culture.

Good job, Textorus!

This article looks quite good to me. I would suggest adding either the writer or journalist infobox to it. I'm not sure which is more appropriate, so I'll just post the links for you to choose. --Aleta 09:26, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Glad you like. And thanks for pointing me to the 2 infoboxes; I had no idea we had those. I'm pooped tonight, but maybe in the near future I'll put one of those in.  :-) --Textorus 10:04, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Actually, Jeffpw already added the writer box.  :) Aleta 10:29, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

assessment

• I just assessed this article for both the LGBT and Biography projects, and gave it a "B". Some suggestions: I think the "Early life" and "Journalism" sections can be expanded. Surely there is more information out there, and he is a fascinating man. I would enjoy reading more about his development as a person and journalist.
• Reference section needs to be wikified. As it now stands, refs that are used more than once are listed separately; this should be fixed using the appropriate ref formats.
• External links needs a cleanup. Some of the ext links were used as refs. They should appear in one place or the other; not both.
• The film version of The Mayor Of Castro Street should be mentioned.
• His surviving family should be re-ordered. Typically in obits, the spouse is mentioned first.
• This is a very well done article. With a bit more effort this could easily be nominated for GA status. Jeffpw 09:37, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Before it gets to nominating for GA status, we need either to create articles for the red links or remove the links. From what I've seen, red links are considered bad to have. Aleta 10:07, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I am not suggesting it should immediately be nominated. There is still a lot of work to be done before that (especially the references). In any event, I have removed the wikilinks that deadend, so there are no more red links. If somebody wants to create a stub for them, they can be reinserted. Jeffpw 10:11, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I didn't think you meant immediately - sorry if it sounded like I was trying to jump the gun - it was just something that I'd noticed. :) Aleta 10:32, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks much for the "B" and the compliment, Jeff! To respond to your points:

• I agree, much more should be done with the first two sections.
• I have no idea what you mean about wikifying the ref section; I'm not at that level of wikiwizardry yet.  :-)

Wikifying the references means using the right templates or formatting, and if a ref is used more than once, giving it a "ref name=" listing, so that it is not listed more than once in the footnotes. The appropriate cite tags also show the name of the article, author, newspaper, and date of access for the purpose of referencing this article. It is a pain in the ass, but required if the article is to be promoted to GA or higher. I hate doing it, but will gladly help you if you want. I did it for the Chronicle reference. Check the editing to see how I did it. Once you learn, it's actually a lot faster.

• I personally think it's helpful to have the primary external links listed again in an easy-to-read and easy-to-find list (which ought to be alphabetical, too, just haven't done it). Are you saying it's wikipolicy not to list them again that way? Just asking--I don't know.

Yes, that is against Wiki policy for articles that go to GA or higher <sigh>. I hate being a rule queen, but learned this through bitter experience of my own.

• Yeah the Mayor movie ought to be mentioned. Just didn't get to that. I've sat here about 6 hours tonight getting this shaped up; one can only do so much at one sitting.
• You're right, spouse should come first; I put Barry at the end to connect with the parenthetical sentence about the commitment service. But I've re-ordered it now. See if it still works.

Appreciate the help. This is all I can do for tonight. But I'm glad to do something to help keep Shilts's memory alive; he deserves it. --Textorus 10:21, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Certainly agree with you there. He was a brilliant man and deserves the best article we can give him. Jeffpw 10:29, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I worked as one of Randy's assistants on Conduct Unbecoming and appreciate the improved entry about Randy. Unfortunately, because of the AIDS epidemic and the loss of community memory and the bitter political nature of San Francisco, there's not much more available on Randy. He was proud that he was an Eagle Scout from Aurora, IL, and he always found it amusing he was a young John Bircher. You can find more about his younger days in Eric Marcus' Making History

This article was selected for DYK!

++Larbot - run by User:Lar - t/c 17:38, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Not A "Reporter"

The article lists Randy Shilts as a "reporter" for the Advocate. Actually, Mr. Shilts was a "stringer" or "correspondant". True, Randy Shilts was a very valuable and prolific contributor, as well as one of the two most commonly used stringers for the Advocate (the other being Randy Wicker of New York), but he was never an in-house employee, as the word "reporter" implies. Fred "Rob" Cole, the News Editor of the Advocate, built up an excellent group of stringers from all over the world, mostly gay writers and editors from daily papers or editors of local gay publications. This group was discarded when attorney David Goodstein bought the publication, moved it from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and changed it from an advocacy journalism newspaper format to a harmless coffee table magazine format. - Martin St.John, former Staff Writer (Reporter) and Midwestern Stringer for the Advocate

I'm not convinced the word carries that baggage, but can you suggest another wording that would clarify it without vastly changing the lead para? Barnabypage (talk) 22:07, 7 March 2009 (UTC) (also a reporter, but not for The Advocate)

General readers might not recognize the word "stringer," but I've changed "reporter" to "freelance reporter" in the lede, with a wikilink to the stringer article. Will that do? Textorus (talk) 18:23, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Returning to this some years later! I happened to come across the New York Times obit of Shilts, which says that he was a staff writer for The Advocate and implies he was also on staff at the Chronicle. I'm going to change "freelance reporter" back to "reporter" (a cautious edit given that "freelance reporter" excludes the possibility of being a staffer, while "reporter" doesn't exclude the possibility of being a freelance). I appreciate Martin St. John, who posted above, had some personal knowledge of this period - but I also kind of doubt the Times would have been wrong about the status of a noted journalist, of all things. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/18/obituaries/randy-shilts-author-dies-at-42-one-of-first-to-write-about-aids.html

There are also other sources that mention him being a full-time staffer at The Advocate, for example https://dspace.library.colostate.edu/bitstream/handle/10217/80978/Stoner_colostate_0053A_12001.pdf?sequence=1 Barnabypage (talk) 00:32, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

The Andrew Stoner dissertation you gave the link to - thanks for that - says that Shilts's first free-lance article appeared in the Advocate in the July 30, 1975 issue; and furthermore, on page 40 of the dissertation, Stoner says:

In the March 23, 1977 edition, Advocate editors announced they had hired Shilts full-time to report on the gay community – “a first for the West coast ” (p. 10).

So that clinches it. He was indeed a full-fledged reporter for the mag. Good find. Textorus (talk) 23:31, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

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A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion

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• Randy Shilts NLM Portrait.jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 16:51, 26 April 2019 (UTC)