Shilts covered politics for the San Francisco Chronicle.  We met in the late '70s as he covered a Board of Supervisors race. In 1989, I started the first HIV-awareness program in Alaska, while directing the Mat-Su Council on the Prevention of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse since there had been a lot of IV drug abuse in Mat-Su during the mid-80s, thanks to the oil boom. I got myself tested so that I could see what the process was, to let our clients know what to expect. I also passed out copies of "And the Band Played On," to those in a position to raise awareness of the disease. I met Shilts again when he presented at an 1989 HIV conference in S.F. and told him his was one of the best two books I'd read in a decade. He asked, "What was the other?" I'd been sent a day early, along with eight women, by the State Office on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, to attend a "parenting as prevention" conference on youth substance abuse in Burlingame. They went to Nordstroms and I crashed the HIV conference.