[In the following excerpt, Holt provides Shilts's comments on The Mayor of Castro Street and on events that preceded the book's publication.]

The day after San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk were murdered in their offices at City Hall, reporter Randy Shilts received a long-distance telephone call from Michael Denneny, editor at St. Martin's Press and an editor of the gay magazine, Christopher Street.

Still in his 20s, Shilts had already contributed articles to Christopher Street, the Washington Post, New West, the Village Voice, the Advocate, Columbia Journalism Review, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. He was known to Northern California residents for his television coverage of the gay migration into the Bay Area during the late 1970s; the Anita Bryant controversy; and Proposition Six, an initiative on the state ballot calling for the firing of homosexual teachers in public schools. And Shilts's rise as the first openly gay establishment journalist in California was widely observed to have coincided with the rise of Harvey Milk as the first openly gay establishment politician.

Thus when Denneny asked Shilts to write a cover story for Christopher Street on the life and death of Harvey Milk—and then to expand that article into a full-length biography for St. Martin's—Shilts eagerly consented. Because of that November 1978 phone call Randy Shilts came to write The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, but it was a convoluted route to publication….

Even though the book has already been hailed by straight and gay critics alike, to Randy Shilts the distance between that first phone call and a completed manuscript was "as wide as a lifetime." The bearded but boyish-looking 30-year-old Shilts, now a full-time staff reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, still winces at the memory of getting into his first book. "I finished the story for Christopher Street in about six weeks," he recalls. "It was something I needed to do—the only thing I could do at the time, in fact. I had never seen someone I respected stuffed into a body bag and carried away on a stretcher, and in a way that, I guess, is typical of reporters, I turned to the immediacy of the story to handle my own grief."

Turning to the long-range significance of a book was another matter. "I had been working in television for two years and hadn't read a book all the way through for a long, long time," Shilts says. "Still, books meant something to me. They did have relevance, especially this one, which I wanted to be a contemporary gay history as well as a biography of a gay politician who had said you could change the world—and did. Well, I sat on it for a long time."

A year passed, in fact, during which Shilts worked for an independent television station as a freelancer and proved he could report on other things—politics, education, frisbies, fires and farming—than gay news.

"That was a period of high visibility for me," Shilts says. "I made better money than I ever had before, and I began to act and think like a professional reporter. But after a while I knew this was all fleeting stuff, and that if I didn't get back to the Milk biography and do it properly, I might as well quit the business for good."

Shilts says he was influenced by three very different authors: Mike Royko, whose biography of Richard Daly, Boss, weaves the history and politics of Chicago into an account of the long-term administration of its mayor; John Irving, whose last pages in The World According to Garp provided a narrative model for Shilts's epilogue; and James Michener who, Shilts believes, "has a way of making each character represent a force in society and of taking the story of that character all the way back to its social origins. The story of Harvey Milk, I felt, was to a large extent the story of the gay movement in San Francisco and, ultimately, the nation. His death came at one of those rare times when the forces of social change collide with human events, and that's what I wanted to write about."

By this time, however, St. Martin's was losing faith in the project, and Shilts, still in a quandary, consulted San Francisco literary agents Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen. "They told me I was simply going to have to start all over again," says Shilts. But soon enough he produced a 65-page proposal that was sent out to 20 publishers, St. Martin's included, as a "new" prospectus.

All but one declined the project, he recalls: "They said it was either 'too gay' or 'too regional' or 'too …'—well, there were some gay editors who said their chairmen of the board would flip if they published a book 'like that.'" In the end Denneny won St. Martin's support again, and Shilts was on his way.

Still, the difficulties and ironies of Shilts's position remained. "I'm part of a new generation of gay reporters who are open about those very things that old-line newspapers discreetly hushed up. On the one hand, it meant everything to me that I could prove myself as an objective reporter in the eyes of professional colleagues, straight or gay. But on the other hand, I was a controversial figure in the gay community because I refused to promote gay activism in the midst of covering hard news."

So among the 140 people interviewed for the book, many, Shilts remembers, "resisted being quoted for publication because they were afraid I would portray Milk objectively in a 'warts and all' biography. But I used to say that what I didn't need—what none of us needed—was an 'authorized biography' of Milk." Eventually just about everyone agreed with Shilts.

The result is his uncompromised portrayal of the camera shop owner who used to call himself "the mayor of Castro Street" long before that neighborhood became a focal point of gay presence in the 1970s. Although Shilts believes Milk to have been "a brilliant politician who mobilized not only gays but all the people who were supposed to hate gays—truck drivers, union organizers, fire fighters, police—" he also shows Milk to be clownish, immature, obstinate, argumentative, petty, shallow and driven.

What does he suppose a combined biography and history of the gay movement will accomplish? Shilts turns to a photograph reproduced on the endpapers of his book. White-shirted, exuberant gays are marching in the first of San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day parades with signs held high that read "PRESERVE OUR RIGHTS." In front of them is a single marcher bearing an enormous American flag that waves above them all.

"This is what Harvey Milk stood for," Shilts says. "Freedom of expression and speech and lifestyle, and an old-fashioned political promise: You get out there and register voters, and then you let people vote their conscience. Don't you see? What Harvey Milk really stood for was the American way."