Living Out

Shilts comes “out” to his parents and family. Graduating from the University of Oregon, journalism jobs remained elusive for Shilts. Shilts begins work as a freelance writer for The Advocate, later hired as a full-time correspondent and relocates from Oregon to San Francisco. Shilts’s reporting covers some of the nation’s earliest gay rights efforts via state legislatures and courts, employment discrimination, parental rights, youth suicide, alcoholism/drug abuse, and social issues confronting LGBT individuals. Early stories on communicable and sexually transmitted diseases among gay men. Shilts clashes with David Goodstein, The Advocate’s publisher. Shilts meets his first lover, Daniel Yoder, while traveling the U.S. covering efforts to repeal non-discrimination laws in various cities, including Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” effort in Miami, Florida.