Although he had only written three books when he died in 1994 at age forty- two, Randy Shilts had already helped "set the standard" by which gay journalism is judged, according to Robert B. Marks Ridinger in Gay and Lesbian Literature. When Shilts joined the reporting staff of the San Francisco Chronicle in 1981, he was the first openly gay journalist at a major American daily newspaper. Over the next thirteen years, Shilts reported on the spread of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)--the disease that killed him--with a tenacity that won respect from friends and foes alike. "I'm part of a new generation of gay reporters who are open about those very things that old-line newspapers discreetly hushed up," Shilts told Patricia Holt of Publishers Weekly in a 1982 interview. "On the one hand, it meant everything to me that I could prove myself as an objective report in the...