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And thank you so much.

I'm Eric Marcus and this is Making Gay History. Randy Schultz got bitten by the bug his senior

year of college. He wanted to be a journalist, but not just any journalist. He wanted to

be a big time big city newspaper journalist. There was only one problem. Randy was gay

and out, and in the early 1970s there was no such thing as an out gay journalist at a mainstream

big city newspaper. But Randy was determined and fierce. By the time I met him in 1989,

he was the leading journalist in the US covering the AIDS crisis, and he had two books under

his belt. The mayor of Castro Street, about Harvey Milk, the assassinated San Francisco

city supervisor, and the award-winning bestseller and the band played on, a gripping history of

the early years of the AIDS epidemic. But in his adopted hometown of San Francisco, Randy's

unflinching coverage of the AIDS crisis earned him a lot of critics. Early on in the epidemic,

the city's gay leadership bristled at the unwelcome attention they feared would derail the

community's political progress. And when Randy called for the closing of the city's gay bathhouses

as a way to slow the spread of HIV, he was vilified by those who weren't about to give up their

hard-won sexual freedom. Randy was accosted on the streets and shouted at in restaurants.

...