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and stopped thinking of sex as something akin to rape and plunder, the sensual pleasure has become dominant, and my bed adventures have lost that edgy strain of competition . One man is not the victor and the other the victim. Some confused males are still stuck with their boyhood models: the spartan athlete, the fast-drawing gunslinger, the omnipotent billy-clubbed policeman, the blood-andguts soldier, the computerized fast-talking executive, the remote intellectual, the awesome scientist, the unapproachable President of the United States. Life is still the great challenge for men to beat. All pleasures are to be withheld for future security. Men are enemies and women booty. If they ever shed their hard, masculine mechanisms, society and its life-denying institutions would cave in, from government to private enterprise, from the military to public education. But imagine for a moment what could replace it. Men and women wouldn’t have to Wt into slots. They could slide and explore and grow. —Richard Gollance is a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles and Studio City, California. An Interview with Randy Shilts, Author of And the Band Played On Laurie Udesky may 1991 q: You were one of the Wrst openly gay reporters on a mainstream publication. In And the Band Played On, you talk about how gay and lesbian reporters are stigmatized; what has been your experience? randy shilts: I have always been out, all my adult life. What was unique about me is that I was hired and everybody knew I was gay. So when I went to work at the Chronicle, everybody tried to outdo each other to be nice. I think that’s the strength one has when one is open. You tend to get the slights and the stigma when you’re in the closet. And for good reason: When you’re in the closet, when you’re hiding it, you’re acquiescing in a morality that says there’s something to be ashamed of about being gay. Whenever you acquiesce in that way, you give the bigots the upper hand. Once you say, “Well, I’m gay and I’m not going to hide it,” it forces bigots to assert their prejudice, and they rarely have the courage to do that. Most bigots are just bullies. Once you make them assert their prejudice, they won’t do it. q: When you began writing about the AIDS epidemic, there was opposition in the media. How was that for you? Udesky / Interview with Randy Shilts 133 shilts: The biggest problems for me arose when my reporting put me in conXict with the gay community itself. That was the most psychologically trying. At the beginning, when I started writing about the epidemic, there were people who said, “Don’t write about this, it’s bad public relations.” And, to me, it was so obviously a story. I had to write about it. I was accused of all kinds of horrible things—of being a self-hating gay person who had internalized homophobia. I was accused of trying to sensationalize this “rather minor” health story in order to sell papers for the San Francisco Chronicle. And that increased over the years, particularly as we got toward the bathhouse controversy. In my mind, it was always a business issue. Here were greedy businessmen who would kill anybody to make twenty-Wve cents. But the gay community did not interpret it as a business issue. It interpreted it as a civil rights issue. My reporting was aggressive, sometimes overly so. So there was this perception that I was out to subvert gay rights and that I didn’t care about civil liberties and civil rights. To me, the overriding issue was that civil rights wouldn’t do us any good if we were all dead from this disease. At that point, there was a lot of denial. It was a national story, but San Francisco is a very small town. I had been on television ; people knew what I looked like. So I would walk down the street and people would scream at me. I had friends who refused to go to restaurants with me anymore , because waiters would come and insult me. There are people today who still despise me; if I go to a gay bar, there are still people who will insult me. That’s the hardest thing. q: At the Chronicle, did you have to Wght to get a certain viewpoint across in your reporting...

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