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Shilts joins The San Francisco Chronicle as its first openly gay reporter on the newsroom staff. Hired to cover the “gay beat” in San Francisco, Shilts also is given general assignment stories. Shilts coordinates Chronicle coverage of the deadly October 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Newsroom colleagues overcome suspicions of the new “gay reporter” as Shilts lobbies publishers for non-discrimination policies and domestic partner benefits. Shilts picks up on rumors of a “gay cancer” affecting gay men in the Castro district. Reporting includes very first stories attempting to link exotic immune system related diseases with homosexual men in San Francisco and elsewhere. Shilts is becomes convinced the AIDS story is a major story and devotes himself nearly full-time to the subject.

This chapter focuses on how California is integrating newcomers and in turn how they reshape the state. Drawing on seven years of reporting, the chapter looks at the history, causes, and context for immigration as well as its consequences. It argues that journalists are supposed to raise questions about the social impacts of immigration and the nation's struggle to integrate immigrant families and, at the same time, to examine the way immigrants and their children assert themselves and transform their new environs. One way to do that is through telling the human stories that help readers understand other people in their communities as individuals. The chapter draws on examples of previous reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle at a time of industrywide changes within journalism.

One of Shilts’s last interviews, with Steve Kroft from CBS’ 60 Minutes, considers his breakthrough role as a gay journalist. Shilts’s future plans for a book about alleged sexual abuse inside the Catholic Church, and his desire for a national column are revealed. Shilts’s last interviews and written words reflect the fleeting nature of his life as he attempts to promote his final book, Conduct Unbecoming. Shilts’s health continues to deteriorate until he dies at his Guerneville, California home on February 17, 1994. Shilts’s death wins nationwide notice and his funeral becomes the first-ever picketed by members of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church. Shilts’s friends, colleagues and his partner, Barry Barbieri, offer insight into his last months of life.

Shilts is elevated as the closing speaker for the Fifth International AIDS Conference in Montreal, Canada in June 1989. Despite the esteem of the speech invitation, members of ACT-UP and others interrupt his remarks with heckles. The contrast of the prestigious speaking engagement contrasted to the simmering feelings of resentment and anger toward Shilts and his writing on/about HIV and AIDS is on full display. This conflict is symbolic of Shilts’s entire career where great honor and respect often resided alongside great scorn and vitriol. The complexity of Shilts’s attempt to be an openly gay reporter writing for a mainstream newspaper about gay subjects presents a need to more fully consider Shilts’s understanding of the societal or cultural role of the journalist.

Timing played a key role in all of Shilts’s success, and failures. His reporting and books on cutting-edge issues in the emerging gay liberation movement withstood strong push back on his work while establishing himself as an openly gay reporter in mainstream journalism. Shilts unapologetically approached his reporting as he had approached his earlier life – that information granted power and understanding and journalists played a key role in conveying that information. Important questions remain about whether Shilts helped or hindered the understanding of AIDS in the context of the gay community, with serious reservations raised about his use of the “Patient Zero” posit. He was praised, however, for advocacy for gay rights via Conduct Unbecoming.