Books
In addition to his extensive journalism, Shilts wrote three best-selling, widely acclaimed books. His first, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, is a biography of the first openly gay San Francisco politician, his friend Harvey Milk, who was assassinated by a political rival, Dan White, in 1978. The book broke new ground, being written at a time when "the very idea of a gay political biography was brand-new."
Shilts's second book, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1980–85), published in 1987, won the Stonewall Book Award and brought him nationwide literary fame. And the Band Played On is an extensively researched account of the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. The book was translated into seven languages, and in 1993 was made into an HBO film with many big-name actors in starring or supporting roles, including Matthew Modine, Richard Gere, Anjelica Huston, Phil Collins, Lily Tomlin, Ian McKellen, Steve Martin, and Alan Alda, among others. The film earned 20 nominations and 9 awards, including the 1994 Emmy Award for Outstanding Made for Television Movie.
His last book, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, which examined discrimination against lesbians and gays in the military, was published in 1993. Shilts and his assistants conducted over a thousand interviews while researching the book, the last chapter of which Shilts dictated from his hospital bed.
Shilts's writing was admired for its powerful narrative drive, interweaving personal stories with political and social reporting. Shilts saw himself as a literary journalist in the tradition of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. Undaunted by a lack of enthusiasm for his initial proposal for the Harvey Milk biography, Shilts reworked the concept, as he later said, after further reflection:
I read Hawaii by James Michener. That gave me the concept for the book, the idea of taking people and using them as vehicles, symbols for different ideas. I would take the life-and-times approach and tell the whole story of the gay movement in this way, using Harvey as the major vehicle.
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