Mainstream media. Books in indy reads books in indianapolis hosted the event. Good evening and welcome to indy reads books. For those that are not familiar, we are a nonprofit independent bookstore and a direct source of revenue for the Nonprofit Organization indy reads. Our mission is to improve the literacy and english Language Proficiency of adults in central indiana. We sell used and new books for all ages, special orders for customers, and host multiple events per week. We are largely volunteerrun and our inventory is largely made up of book donations. If you would like to support us, consider making a purchase tonight, a donation or volunteering time as a bookstore volunteer or literacy tutor. Tonight we have the pleasure of hosting dr. Andrew stoner, who will be discussing his latest book the journalist of castro , street, the life of randy shilts. Dr. Stoner is an indiana native and a associate professor of Communication Studies at California State University sacramento. His books include notorious 92, indianas most heinous murders, among other titles. Tonight, his book can be purchased at the front register and proceeds will benefit indy reads books as well as the author. Please join me in welcoming dr. Andrew stoner to the stage. [applause] thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be back in indianapolis among familiar faces to talk about a subject ive spent nine or 10 years working on. Im going to talk about randy shilts tonight. It was originally my doctoral dissertation at Colorado State university. And through the help of some editors and a lot of hard work, we have got it into a readable fashion for a broader audience and so far it has been well received. I am excited for its potential to, what i call, reconsider randy shilts, who was americas ultimately america who was ultimately americas aids chronicler but also a very important figure in journalism and gay and lesbian liberation. I have a regular presentation that i do about randy shilts. To give you background. It also helps walk you through the book. But i often get asked about why was interested in writing about this, so i thought i might share a little bit of the preface, to give you a sense of why this topic was interesting to me in my degree pursuits, getting my phd in journalism and technical communication. For ahought i would read few minutes from there and then go into my more formal remarks. I remember the winter morning in 1994 when i heard about the death of journalist and author my tiny graduate student apartment in muncie, indiana getting ready for a cold walk to the bus stop. I sat down on the bed and listened to the discussion of work. And his andk had the the band played on was a strong impression on me. His writing style and journalistic commitment to detail impressed me. The day of the announcement, the man who wrote the most about aides who died of aids, i decided to go look for my paperback copy of the mayor of castro street, because i was eager to read more about the words of his about the life and times of gay icon and martyr, harvey milk. At the time of shilts death, aids seemed like a troubling and vexing issue that remained far away. I had never known anyone who had hiv or aids, and people with aids were still distant ghosts on television or in magazine articles in faraway places like San Francisco or new york city. I had a rude awakening ahead of me, as his death from aids served as a forerunner to a more personal loss. Among my own circle of friends. Shilts represented so much of what i thought i might someday be. A proud, openly gay man, which who offered the worlds words that could move people and things in positive ways. Shilts was the writer i most wanted to be. It would be many more years before i could take up randy any meaningfulin way, but they remained in my mind. Aat he accomplished, becoming sought after expert on once hidden subjects, shining a light on a dark place, that is what i felt it truly meant to be a journalist, and a truly liberated person as a gay person. The words on the pages that follow needed to offer more than just acclamation, and a critical review of shilts. The necessity to take that more critical view grew not only from the requirements of writing a dissertation but to add meaning to the consideration of his work. And finally because nothing short of a piercing, honest look at randy shilts would do, because that is the kind of journalist randy shilts had been. While shilts was always a man who was thinskinned and easily hurt and felt slighted that any criticism he received, he was sometimes equally determined to give back as good as he got. He knew some of the things he wrote would incite anger, but he wrote them anyways. He also gladly soaked up praise and pay for a controversial story that exposed portions of the stillemerging Gay Liberation movement that others would have preferred remain unexamined. He learned in his life that a wounded heart sometimes stands right next to the determined soul. He discover the balm for the pain that the world can inflict can sometimes be found in immersing yourself in your work and your commitment to tell the truth and a desire to drive change and change the world. From an early age, he learned to take whippings and verbal abuse at home, ten then dry his tears during the daily walk to school where he presented himself as an engaged student who it overcome more than anyone could imagine. He remained determined to succeed. His rock ribbed intensity and his drive to succeed carried a sense of urgency. And as we know now, it was because the reality of aids was forcing him to work fast and furious, and he went after his work with a strong commitment to fairness and freedom and bullishly pushing forward always. Ive attempted to explore these issues while being true to a critical examination of his work and the impact behind not only his words but also his bulldozer approach to life. Hes been with me throughout this writing, especially so when i spent a week or more in january of 2011 with his archives. As one scholar mentioned, it was with thed company, subject looking over my shoulder helping to illuminate corners of yellowed papers and wrinkled audio and videotapes left over from his full yet interrupted life. With that preface, i wanted to go ahead and tell you something about randy shilts. Some things you may already know and other things you may not. Hes been gone 25 years this year. Every year, fewer and fewer people know who we are talking about. I hope i can illuminate some information on that. This is the title of the book. The journalist of castro street the life of randy shilts. The title was selected because it plays off his book about the mayor of castro street, the life and times of harvey milk. It comes from the university of illinois press. A little bit about randys life. He lived between 1951 and 1994. Was born in davenport, iowa. But raised his entire life after that in auora, illinois, which is a suburb of chicago in kane county. After graduating high school in june of 1969 on the one year of robert f. Kennedys assassination, he fled to oregon because he heard that there were hippies there and People Living free and open lifestyles. He wanted to escape some of the more rigid life he had known in illinois. He was one of five sons in the a 25s family born over year period, so they are broadly spread out, but they were all very active boys. All of them fled aurora at the first opportunity they could. When he got finally to the university of oregon after one year at Portland Community college he decided to run for student body president in his first year on campus. He did so as an openly gay candidate under the theme of come out for shilts. He did not win. When i say that to my students now, they are like so what . ,but in 1970 or 1971, to be an openly gay student at college was a big thing. It made you stand out and randy was well known on campus for being outspoken, and eventually switch to a journalism major. Hed given up on politics as being able to change anything, and this reflects, he early in life had been a Barry Goldwater republican and he slowly moved left and became more progressive. Journalism seemed to hold a great draw and a great interest to him in its ability to change the world. Randy had a somewhat of a naive view at times. He thought that if people just had more information, if they just understood more, they would accept more. People would be more willing to bring gay people into the fullness of life and include gay people in everyday life. He thought as a journalist that was part of his role to bring that information to people. I think that he found that was often a struggle, because it wasnt quite so simple. He left college and his professors told me it is one of the most talented majors in the department in journalism. He was in a class with ann curry from nbc news. But left unemployed. Worked as a freelance writer, struggling to find fulltime works because he wanted to do it on his terms as an openly gay person. At that time newsrooms did not , have openly gay journalists. He resisted suggestions that he get out of the floppies and quit wearing flowered shirts and assume the role of newsroom journalist, and he would not compromise on those things. Eventually he was hired by the advocate. He wrote for them for years. Also contribute it to the bay area reporter. Was hired by kqed for a Public Television show called newsroom. This is a screenshot. He lost his relationship with the advocate in a battle with the publisher at the time, david goodstein, and was banished from the pages of the advocate for many years until he sold the magazine to someone else. Grant fromst their the ford foundation, so he opened the 1980s unemployed again and looking for fulltime work. Interestingly, at the same time the San Francisco chronicle decided they needed a fulltime or more regular coverage of the Gay Community, it had become a powerful political and economic and social force in San Francisco and randy got hired as the first openly gay reporter on a mainstream daily newspaper, the San Francisco chronicle. His career really took off. He was with the chronicle up until the time he died. He was with the chronicle at a key period. He had been at kqed in a key theod as well, covering assassination of harvey milk and mayor moscone, and that enabled him to write the biography of harvey milk that was then made into the 2009 film milk. By gus van sant. Beat, sosigned city during the loma prieta earthquake in 1989 he coordinated all of the coverage in San Francisco and oakland. During this period, living in the castro, he began learning the other gay men were starting to get ill and beginning to die from very exotic sorts of causes. In some cases, karposis sarcoma or a virulent strain of pneumonia. Normally people had good resistance to that from their immune system. There still was no name for what was going on. Just this reality that people, in new york and San Francisco and los angeles gay men were showing up ill. Eventually the spread to other groups, particularly intravenous drug users, female sex workers and haitian immigrants. Combined, not a very powerful group in the reagan 1980s. So shilts became frustrated by the slower reaction to the number of people who are being impacted by this disease on a regular basis. And began writing about it. He didnt write the first chronicles article about aids, but he wrote the second one in 1982, on page six of all places, so still not a front page story for San Francisco. It would become so as tens of thousands of people died. And randy covered all of this even before there was even a name for this disease. When it first started out it was known as gay cancer. Then it was gayrelated immune deficiency or grid. Once the human immunodeficiency virus was isolated, hiv, that caused aids, the name evolved towards that. That is when randy decided to take up in 1985, the idea of a book about aids and how america had responded. And he found very little support among publishers for that. But Saint Martins press finally aheadto go ahaed a and pick up this topic for him, mostts still the first, comprehensive coverage of the issue of aids, even though a lot of the clinical and medical information and Scientific Research thats included has been overcome by time and new information. The issues related to how society reacted, how communities reacted is still viewed as essential reading for understanding this period of American History. There were some key points that shilts used to drive band in addition to the fact that there was a growing infection and death rate that continued to climb. One is the World Health Organization and the u. S. Government and the cdc were slow to respond to this disease because of who was impacting. There may have been political problems with the victims of this disease, and so, there wasnt as a great concern if had started to spread it other communities. He noted that the concern did grow when hemophiliacs began to be affected by hiv infection. He also took on the news media in terms of their inability or unwillingness to cover anything related to gay people. You talked about hiv and aids, you had to talk about its transmission, which included gay sex. So, newspapers were not used to that coverage, they were not used to writing about such things. The news media were a little slow to follow up on exactly what was going on. And the chronicle led the way. Randy pushed and pulled the San Francisco chronicle into a leadership role on this issue well beyond what he saw at the new york times, the washington post, or elsewhere. He also noted that loathsome gayings and hatred toward people were quickly attached to people with aids, whether they were gay or not, and there was a lot of hysterical talk about quarantining people with aids and curtailing them in society so that they could be controlled, that their risk was even greater than before. And as you know, the narrative on gay people has often been they are a threat to society or to family. And this furthered that narrative. Shiltss Research Also led to criticism of the Gay Community and how it responded to the issue. This is where some of the most lingering criticism for shilts remains, in that he shined a lig ht on aspects of the Gay Liberation movement to that point which made people uncomfortable. In reality, the the Gay Liberation movement had been a sexual liberation, a group of people whose sexual expression had been illegal prior to the mid 1980s in most states. 1970s, it still was something that if you engage in homosexual contact, you could still be arrested or put in jail or lose your job or have other social penalties to pay. So its not coincidental that there was a lot of expression of sexual freedom in the early days of the Gay Liberation movement. Shilts is one of the first to begin raising important questions about, is that all there is . Now, there are many social, economic, cultural issues, things like employment rights, marriage rights, things like adoption and parent, parental rights for gay people have all flowed since that time, and most of them have very little to do than notality other having a system that discriminates against people on the basis of Sexual Orientation. But by shining a light on that area and writing about std rates among gay people for example, in the years leading up to aids, that brought criticism to shilts and it continues. The biggest problem rising from the was the creation or reporting on a character who was based on an actual person, called patient zero. An importantbeing figure to considering randy shilts, although he was not necessarily in important figure in shiltss mind, he was one of the figures that helped solve and the band played on. Who was patient zero . Gaetan dugas, a Canadian Airline 1953rd, who lived between and 1984, and he died three years before shiltss book came out. He was a very cooperative person at the centers for Disease Control and other investigators trying to figure out what the disease was. He turned over his black book. In those days when people didnt have phones with all the numbers. He turned over his black book. He submitted to blood testing, participated in extensive interviews, and was at the center of a cluster study done whoos angeles, of 248 men tested positive for whatever was to become hiv. And he was connected to 40 of those 248 people, so he was coded in the study as oh, outside los angeles because he o, butcanada, as that quickly began to be interpreted as patient zero, instead of oh. Mistake as that well, so he is essentially transformed into this typhoid mary character of the 1980s. You have the New York Post with this headline the man who brought us aids. Star magazine calling him a monster. These headlines, in october of dugas died,s after of at the time of release shiltss book. When his book is being released, most reviewers are not interested in reviewing it. Aids is an incomplete story, we dont know where it goes, how big it is going to be. There was not that much interest in it. His editor shares the book, the manuscript with a publicist who creates a press kit that centers on the issue of patient zero. They decided the story starts and ends on that hook, that people would be interested if we could understand, where did aids come from . So it created this patient zero, this monsterlike character who brought aids to america. It was very problematic. Shilts spent a lot of time trying to tamp that down and get back to the major themes of the book that he thought were more important in terms of the governments response, the Gay Communitys response, the medias response and less on this idea of patient zero. He viewed it as a storytelling element, but it did explode. He did allow for that publicity to go forward. He never lived to correct the issue. By 2016, researchers at the university of arizona conducted gaetan dugas