SOURCE: An interview in Rolling Stone, Issue 666, September 30, 1993, pp. 46-9, 122-23.

[A well-known American novelist, historian, and critic, Wills is author of Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970), a study of Richard Nixon's political career. In the following interview, Shilts discusses his writing, personal life, and career.]

[Shilts]: I thought, going into it, there were two problems I was going to have with [Conduct Unbecoming]—one, that nobody cared about the issue, that people would view it as a subissue of a subissue, not something important enough to read a whole book about, and my second fear was getting people to talk to me. Actually, though, both of them proved rather groundless. On the latter problem, I guess I was operating on my own stereotypes of military people, that they wouldn't want to rock the boat, that they wouldn't want to be named, they were more conservative, even people who are out. But it was actually very easy.

What I did was put little blurbs in gay papers around the country asking for military personnel, people who had served from Vietnam to the present. I got like 300 responses from the ad, and from that I just used friendship networks. Once you met one, then they would say, "Oh, I have a friend in Camp Lejeune," and then they would have a friend someplace else, so it was mainly just using friendship networks and then being willing to spend time, because all the interviews, minimally, took two, two and a half hours. You have to interview so many people before you find the people you want to focus on, and so you spend a lot of time with them, and what I always do is walk through a person's entire life. I start when they are kids, find out what their mom and dad did, because I think it is important where people come from and where they went to high school. So, very often it will be a few hours before we even get to their military experience, because people don't just appear in the military.

[Wills]: The effect of the interweaving is that a lot of people in the book start out not knowing each other, and then they get acquainted through their trials, through their lawyers. Had you expected to end up with that effect?

People sometimes say, "Have you ever thought about writing fiction?" and I always say I could not be as imaginative as the world is. What you get, you couldn't make up. One example was Tom Dooley and Lenny Matlovich both having the same lover. [Dooley was a Catholic doctor famous in the 1950s for his humanitarian work in Indochina—his best-selling book helped involve the U.S. in Vietnam. Matlovich was one of the first Air Force personnel to challenge the ban on gays in the military.] There was this guy [Cliff Anchor] I had known for 15 years because he lived up at the Russian River, where I have another home. I knew that he had been very close to Matlovich, and then when I started doing the book, he pulled out all these files he had on Tom Dooley [who was secretly dismissed from the Navy for being gay]. I mean, he had everything substantiated—totally, perfectly. That stuff, it just happens. Part of that, though, is always asking extra questions—always, because there are two ways you can be a journalist: You can ask enough to get enough information for a story or try to do more than enough, because it is always the little connections that come out in side comments.

For example, with the Patient Zero story [the unnamed Air Canada steward who was identified as an early spreader of AIDS by the Centers for Disease Control], it was just a couple of people making side comments that let me piece it together [that Patient Zero was Gaetan Dugas]. I had known there was a guy [with AIDS] knowingly having sex in the bathhouses, and I did a Chronicle story on that in November of '82, and I also knew that there was this study that had linked a lot of the early cases, but I didn't know that the person in that study was also the person who was having sex in the bathhouses. And it was only through people dropping comments that I was able to piece that all together.

How did you learn his thoughts, reported in the book? Did you ever talk to him?

No, he was dead by the time I found out about him. But I was speaking in early '86 at an investigative reporters' conference at Vancouver, British Columbia, and on the panel on AIDS reporting, there was the head of the People with AIDS group in Vancouver, and when I mentioned to him that I was interested in finding friends of Gaetan's, this man's grief counselor was Gaetan's best friend. So the next day I was sitting with him, and he is the guy in the opening scene of Band, who was asked to dance with Gaetan. It was just luck that I had opened the book on that specific day, Gay Freedom Day 1980, and he remembered what they were doing. He had a great big photo album with all kinds of pictures, he had flown with Gaetan, he was a flight attendant, too, so it was just totally serendipitous.

Some Catholics wanted to canonize Tom Dooley, an anti-communist praised by Cardinal Spellman.

Cliff Anchor had contacted me and gotten a letter from Ted Werner, who was Dooley's best friend and his pilot and who always wanted the story out and was always frustrated that he couldn't get it out. Here is a guy who was so good that they wanted to make him a saint, who did so much. There has been sort of a revisionism around Dooley, because people blame him in part for involvement in Vietnam; but he undeniably did a lot of good things for a lot of people and could even be in the category of being considered to be a saint, and it still doesn't make any difference, you are still rendered valueless as a human being by the military [if you are gay].

Did you have a religious upbringing?

No. When you are a northern Methodist, it is a very generic, non-denominational religion, so it never had much impact. My father was very conservative, he was in the John Birch Society. And in Aurora [Ill.], up to that point, there had not been a Democrat elected in Kane County since, I believe, since John C. Fremont ran for president in 1856. Everybody was Republican. When I got involved in politics, working on congressional campaigns and stuff by the time I was 11 or 12, all we had were Republicans. I was very involved in the Young Americans for Freedom, and I formed a chapter in Aurora and was president of it and was Illinois' vice president. And then, like a lot of people when the war emerged—I graduated from high school in '69—I was right at the age where they would draft you, so that really shifted a lot of my political ideas. But I have always felt it was great having been exposed to conservatives. I think people on both ends of the political spectrum tend to dehumanize the people on the other end, and they think that they are evil, they are monsters. Having been on both sides, they let me see that people tend to be motivated by sincere beliefs.

After I graduated from high school, I went a semester to Aurora College, which was just four doors down from where I grew up, and I organized anti-war protests. Then I went to Oregon to be a hippie. We had much more conflicts in my family over being a hippie than over being gay.

What was the sequence of their finding out?

Well, the anti-war stuff I was doing by late '69, so I was living at home at the time. We were just always fighting about it, the way everybody was back then. And then I didn't come out as a gay person until 1972, when I was 20, and I told my brothers right away, and they were fine. My oldest brother, who is still a lawyer in Aurora, responded by saying, "Well, every family should have one to talk about at cocktail parties." I waited another year before telling my parents. It is always very frightening, telling your parents. Even if you have had conflicts with them, you never want to be alienated from Mom and Dad. But they were actually very good about it. My dad, when I told him, he just said that he had known I was different since I was 8. That was that. And my mom was a little more reticent about it. But I think the moment somebody said something bad about it, then she was my greatest defender.

A lot of your characters in both the books have trouble telling their mothers.

Oh, there is always this terror, largely unarticulated, that your parents will reject you, and very few parents really do reject their kids.

You have a line in your Harvey Milk book where a man says, "It will kill her," and someone responds, "There would be a lot fewer living mothers if that was the case."

It is a great fear you have, but it is relatively rarely borne out. Sometimes parents will take six months or a year to adjust to it, but they always come around, especially moms. Moms always come around on stuff like that.

You say you went to Oregon….

Yeah, I went to Portland Community College for the first two years, because that was so much cheaper, and I had never been that good a high-school student, because I was just sort of interested in my thing. I was reading John Locke when I was 16 but not doing well in history, so I got a lot of B's and C's, I didn't have great grades to get scholarships. But when I went to Portland Community, I just started getting straight A's all the time, doing very well, and I had to work [after school] all the time, too. When I was about 20, which would have been in '72, I was at a philosophy class, and a bunch of people from the Gay Liberation Front of Portland came in and talked, and all of a sudden, I could see that society's attitude is wrong, and I was just fine. It was very much an epiphany. Then I told everybody, all my friends within a week, that I was gay, and my brothers. And because I had always been political, I went to Eugene that fall of '72 and became involved in the Eugene Gay People's Alliance and was very active and ran for student-body president. At that time, that was the most any gay person had ever run for, was student-body president. And then it was gay politics for a while, while I was working on a degree in literature at the U of O. But I saw the limits of what you could do with political activism, because basically nobody trusts politicians.

By then I sort of came to the conclusion that most people are prejudiced, not because they are mean people, are evil people, but they lack information. By using information, you could do a lot more to advance understanding than just by being polemic and yelling at people in protest. I was on the verge of completing my English degree with honors, I had done thesis work on King Lear, but I couldn't write a sentence. I could not write a simple declarative sentence. I didn't know commas, I didn't know anything about grammar because they really don't teach that very well in English. So I took a journalism class to learn grammar, and it was like the lightning striking. I found my calling. I basically stopped taking any other courses but journalism, went to J school the next year and got my degree in journalism. As soon as I got into journalism. I stopped being an activist. I just felt you can't be agitating for something on one hand and still be a journalist. Your job is to tell both sides of the story.

The J school, they were very suspicious at first because I had been so high profile as a gay activist, but we ended up getting along very well. I won a lot of awards, it was just my calling. When I graduated in '75, I wanted to work in Oregon. I never wanted to work in a gay press, but because I had been so high profile as a gay person, I never got any job offers because people who had fewer awards and poorer grades were getting them. So I ended up coming to San Francisco at the end of '75 to work for The Advocate, the gay paper. And then in '77 my break came—KQED, the local PBS station, had a nightly news show, and they hired me to work one day a week covering gay issues. That was my first break. It was just sort of a regular free-lance thing, but I had always wanted to work in the mainstream media because that seemed to be the logical place to get information out. So I did that for three and a half years.

It was a wonderful time to be a reporter. The whole gay thing was just exploding on Castro Street. You had Harvey [Milk] getting elected, and then Harvey getting shot in this very dramatic way and the riots afterward. It was all unfolding in front of your eyes. And there was the excitement, too—seeing a lot of young gay people like myself, people who are open and who are committed to showing a new way to be alive, that you didn't have to live in fear and trepidation all the time. And so that was really exciting.

We had all this idealism left over from being hippies, very essential to it was the idea that we can change the world and make the world a more just place. For the hippies that sort of faded out, but the gay thing was a new cause we could apply that idealism to. In '80 the TV show got canceled, and nobody would hire me, because nobody had ever hired an openly gay reporter before, even in San Francisco. I couldn't get a job, so my last-ditch stand for being a reporter was doing the Milk book.

Right around that time—I don't know if I should admit this—I read Hawaii, by James Michener, and that gave me the concept of doing books where you take people and have them represent sort of different forces in history and different social groups. I realized that is how I could do The Mayor of Castro Street, with a cast of characters who represented different elements of the community, and then just weave their stories together the way that Michener does. I went on unemployment and wrote The Mayor of Castro Street, and then the Chronicle hired me right away.

I was hired in early August, Aug. 4, I think, of '81, which was about two months after the first notification that AIDS was starting to happen. It was after the first six cases had been announced, which was in June, the first week in June of '81. Marc Conant, who plays a role in Band, who discovered AIDS in San Francisco, actually had a letter I wrote two weeks later, Aug. 18, I think of '81, saying I was interested in writing about AIDS. I don't in the slightest remember writing this letter, but it was something that was there almost from the day that I entered the Chronicle. I didn't write that much about it at first. My first story was in April of '82, and at that point there were 330 cases in the whole country, and it was called GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. There were 330 cases nationally, I think maybe 30 or 40 cases in San Francisco, so I didn't really perceive what it was going to become at that point.

There was a lot of gay opposition to your writing about things like closing the bathhouses.

At first, I just felt it was something you had to write about. How can you write about this sort of fire going on and not write about the people who were throwing gas on it? I didn't think the bathhouses would be closed, but I felt it was something you had to write about in the context of this epidemic. But back then, the whole gay community stand was "Should we even discuss whether to close the bathhouses?" I never felt I had any latitude on that. That was my job, to write stories and discuss things, not not discuss things. And so I started writing stories about it, and even though I didn't have a firm opinion at that time, people would come up to me and assume that I wanted them closed just because I felt we should talk about it. They would give me all the arguments why they should be open, and all the arguments seemed utterly absurd to me. So that ended up pushing me into a position where I really came to believe they should be closed, and that was the whole horrible period.

It became an issue in San Francisco because we put it on the front page of the Chronicle, that is when I became the sexual fascist, the Uncle Tom. And then my drinking was accelerated because of all the criticism I got within the community, over the bathhouse thing. The day that [gay psychotherapist] Gary Walsh died, Feb. 21, 1984—he was the first person I knew well who died—I went out and had six double Jack Daniel's back-to-back during a dinner break, when I was working a swing shift. That just terrified me, because I realized that I had worked so hard, and it was a struggle to get to the point where I could be at the Chronicle, be at a major newspaper, and I was just going to throw it away for this cheap high. And so that is the last time I had a drink, which would have been nine years ago.

Did you do that on your own?

No, I did it with the help of support groups. I think it is very difficult to do on your own. Like a lot of people in the Beatles generation, I smoked a lot of marijuana, too, and I didn't drop that for another year after that. There is this sort of lie that marijuana is not addicting, and it is a terribly addicting drug, and it is not good for you. It clouds your perceptions. So I quit that in 1985, and my writing ability made a quantum leap forward. You just have so much more clarity when you are not using that drug. So now I don't use anything.

So then you went on to do the AIDS book [Band]?

That book was done out of frustration. Here I had been writing stories about the government problems, the blood banks, the government funding, since '83, and we would put it on Page 1 of the Chronicle, and nobody else in the country would come near it. The stories were stopping at the Chronicle, so the political aspects of this disease remained largely uncovered. I was so frustrated by '84—and '85 especially—I felt this information wasn't going to get out. Writing a book was the way to get over the heads of the New York Times and the other papers that weren't covering this issue, in terms of the political components of it. There was an epigraph I used at the end of it from Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East, that summed up exactly how I felt when I was doing this book—that I would have gone crazy if I had not done it. I had such a clear vision of what had gone wrong in the early years of the epidemic, one shared by hardly anyone, except the very people who were involved in it.

So many things went wrong.

And very few people were in a position to know it. People in virology knew what was going wrong in terms of virological reasons. People in the blood banks, who cared about the issue, could see what was going wrong, but nobody else was in a position of seeing all the different pieces together, because nobody else had covered it as much as I had.

Did you have trouble finding a publisher?

Oh, that was terrible. Nobody was interested at the beginning. Nobody thought a book about AIDS and politics would have any market. They felt that you would only get a book out of AIDS when you had a cure or if you had a doctor write it. My editor at St. Martin's, Michael Denneny, had done Mayor of Castro Street, and he was committed to doing this. He is gay, and he thought it important. But nobody else at St. Martin's was, and they turned it down at first. Well, every other publisher turned it down, too.

How many?

Oh, at least 15 or 16. But finally Denneny was able to persuade the president of the company to overrule himself, basically, and so I got a $15,000 advance, which really helped the phone bills.

How did you finance the travel?

The Chronicle was great. They created a sort of night shift, so I worked at night as city editor and sometimes as a night reporter and then would work in the mornings and afternoons on the book. Then I took all my vacation time to do trips. Knowing what I do now about what my health status probably was then, I think I lost quite a few T-cells doing that book.

Did you learn you were HIV positive after finishing the book?

Yes. The test became widely available for personal testing in '86, and I always felt it had medical use, so I wanted my doctor to have that information if he wanted it. But at that time I was right in the middle of writing Band. It was very depressing. I was interviewing lots of people who were going to die, people I liked. I didn't really expect I would be HIV positive, I was sort of surprised when that happened. I mean, within parameters: You're gay in San Francisco, you can't be terribly surprised to be HIV positive.

Were you surprised because you had practiced safe sex?

Yeah, since '82. I was one of the first persons I knew who changed. But I got my first infection in August of '92, and some studies have shown about 11.6 years [lag after incurring the virus], which would have indicated that I got the virus in '80,'81, which makes that a year or two before I changed. William F. Buckley wrote a snide column saying that the fact that I knew so much about AIDS and now have it indicates that I had compulsions that were alien to common sense. But people getting diagnosed today are still likely to have gotten the virus before anybody knew that AIDS was going to be a threat or even that it existed. Anyway, I felt my doctor should have this information, so I said, "You can test me if you want to, but only tell me if it is good news." Then I promptly forgot telling him that I had said this. This gets psychologically complicated, I think. So the day that I finished Band, which was, I think, March 16, 1987, I had finished writing the text of the book, not the epilogue, and I had a previously scheduled doctor's appointment, so I went in and said, "OK, now I am done, you can test me now." I had been afraid that if I knew I was positive that it would influence the book in a way that might make me unfair. I don't think now that would have been the case, but that was my fear. So I told him, "OK, you can test me now." And then he told me that he already had.

Then I made the decision to be private about it. I told the Chronicle right away, and they were great. I knew I would want a reduced shift. But when I told people I didn't know as well, who weren't my best friends, you always got this sort of very shocked, melodramatic response. It ended up being very depressing, because every time people see you, it would be, "Oh, how are you feeling?" All these questions that are basically "Have you died yet?" The other thing is, I didn't want to become an AIDS poster boy. I didn't want to be doing interviews on TV about substantive issues and then have it overwhelmed by personal questions about me. I still don't think I am that interesting, you know, as opposed to the information I have.

What made you finally announce?

Well, I almost died. It was clear Clinton was going to get elected by about October, and he had said ages ago, he said back in '91, that he would change the policy [on gays in the military], so we had to put a lot more deadline pressure on getting Conduct done. I was working 14, 16 hours a day. In August last year I got pneumonia but got over that very quickly—I think within three days I was pretty well recovered from it—so that wasn't a big deal. Then I got pneumonia again in December, and that was in the last two or three weeks of writing the book. I had written 81 of what was supposed to be 84 chapters. We ended up condensing some, but I was just right at the end. I was just pushing myself too hard, working these insane days, only took two days off when I got pneumonia and again appeared to be responding very quickly. Then my lung collapsed on Christmas Eve, when I was putting up our Christmas stockings. I was hospitalized and came very close to dying.

After I had been out of the hospital for about six, seven weeks, there were a lot of rumors, because a large number of the nurses are gay, so rumors got out very quickly. I thought, well, at this point, if it gets out, I should be the one to do a release, because I am not ashamed of it or anything, it just adds another element of complexity in terms of dealing with people. So I did an interview with the Chronicle, then wouldn't do any more interviews. I would have preferred to have done it after this book, the military book. It has been frustrating, being on TV and having a very limited amount of time and being asked questions about my health rather than about this book I spent four years on.

You are not traveling to promote the book?

My lung collapsed—they cut you open, staple it back together again, and then sort of glue it to the inside of your chest. And so my breathing problems now are almost entirely related to having had open-chest surgery. And so they are supposed to get better. They are worried that the other one might collapse, so this one is all glued into place.

What is your next project?

I don't know yet. I am going to do a column for the Chronicle on national affairs. I promised myself I would take the summer off. Basically, what I will be looking for is a social issue that needs to be covered. I have always tried to write about things that would not get written about if I didn't do it. We don't need a fifth Elizabeth Taylor biography. I am sure that something will emerge, the Lord provides these things. It certainly will not be anything on AIDS. To live it and to write about it is just too much. And probably not on gay issues, either.

How have you avoided being an advocate rather than a journalist?

I never had much of a problem. I don't think anybody is really objective, you know, and I can't claim to be objective, but I think you can be fair and tell both sides of the story, no matter who you are or what you are writing about. I feel strongly that gay people should be accepted, but I always felt it would be wrong to manipulate information or slant your stories in order to manipulate people. If you just stick to the facts, you are doing the right thing. I never wanted to march. You give up some prerogatives about being an activist when you become a journalist, because it is like public officials—you don't want to create the appearance of impropriety. I have never belonged to any gay groups or donated money to them.

What do you think of President Clinton's compromises on gays in the military?

What I despair about is that it is going to alienate people from the political process. You want people involved in the process, and I think when a president goes back on a black-and-white promise like this, that it will just keep pushing people out of the process.

Are you discouraged by that?

If you look at the short term, yes. But the gay issue has really less to do with discrimination, or even prejudice, than with a taboo, that we have had this taboo for centuries within our culture saying that this is wrong, and it is so wrong you can't even talk about it. The silence is what keeps taboos. What the gay movement is basically about is breaking this taboo. Every time you have a debate, it weakens the taboo. People are talking about it, and it is not this horrible and dark subject that decent people don't even discuss. And so I think that you have to look at this in terms of decades of social change rather than years. In the short term, things won't change, at times it is going to look like it is worse off, because now that you have an assertive gay community, you are having much more backlash.

I don't think it is creating new prejudices, it is just that people who have had prejudice for all these years, they always ran the show, so they never had to organize. Their attitudes were the attitudes of the mainstream culture. Now that there is more conflict, you are going to see them much more outspoken. They are going to win some of the fights. But I don't think it means that the gay side is losing so much as that it is important enough now to have a fight about.

I remember when I grew up, in Aurora, I never heard the word homosexual until I was 18 years old, in 1969 it was. My favorite sociology teacher, who I just adored, said one day something that was terribly liberal in that part of the country, that maybe homosexuals aren't criminal, maybe they are just sick. To have this teacher, who I just thought was the greatest thing, to have her say that was so crushing. And that was the only context I had ever heard homosexuality discussed in, other than locker-room talk about queers. Now kids are growing up who hear gay issues discussed every day, usually in the context of civil rights. That is going to have such a deep impact on their ability to accept themselves, to get involved in politics and change things. I have seen a tremendous change in those 20 years, and I think that we will see that more accelerated. But it is going to take a long time. The political institutions change last. I think, you know, that is where you will see the change last.

And the military?

In the 19th century, there were congressional hearings to pass a law to ban whipping in the Navy, and you had all the same cast of characters, the admirals and the secretary of the Navy went before the Senate and said: "No, this will destroy good order, discipline and morale. We have surveys of enlisted personnel saying that they favor public flogging." You know, the dire predictions—if they made it so you couldn't flog people, it would just destroy the Navy. Every time there has been a change, they have always resisted it. The military is an institution that is almost mystically bound up in the idea of tradition. And then they change, and everything is fine.