![]() But he chose to write about gay issues for the mainstream precisely because he wanted other people to know what it was like to be gay. "One of the big criticisms leveled at Randy," says his longtime friend and assistant, Linda Alband, "is that he was an assimilationist. Asking people to forsake a sexual freedom that was so new and enthralling led to Shilts' being spat upon on Castro Street. In part that was because in stories he wrote for The Chronicle, where in 1981 he became the first openly gay employee, he advocated the closing of gay bathhouses as a means of containing the spread of AIDS. The late Bob Ross, editor and publisher of the Bay Area Reporter, described Shilts as a traitor to his own kind. Being both feisty and cocky, naturally, he made enemies. ![]() And Shilts' own success manifestly delighted him. Shilts' sense of purpose was passionate and he never backed down from his own most controversial beliefs. The historian Gary Wills, assessing "And the Band Played On," wrote: "This book will be to gay liberation what Betty Friedan was to early feminism and Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' was to environmentalism." ![]()
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