SOURCE: "Randy Shilts," in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 221, No. 12, March 19, 1982, pp. 6-7.

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...