Randy Shilts

Randy Shilts was the first newspaper reporter to cover the gay community full time. He persuaded the San Francisco Chronicle to allow him to focus primarily on the AIDS crisis. In 1987, Shiltz published And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic. This seminal work was turned into a docudrama on HBO. His second book, Conduct Unbecoming, focused on the discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military.

Prior to the San Francisco Chronicle, Shilts worked as a correspondent for The Advocate. In 1993, Shilts won the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. Cleve Jones, founder of the Names Project, said about Shilts, "[his writings are] without question the most important works of literature affecting gay people."