Timing can mean everything to a reporter. To be the first to see what's coming next is a sure path to professional distinction. His uncanny grasp of history's trajectory was a hallmark of the career of Randy Shilts, author of "And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic," who died of AIDS himself 10 years ago today.

Although he was only 42 when he died, Shilts' three books -- his first was a biography of the late Harvey Milk, his last an epic about the secret lives of gays and lesbians in the military -- rewrote history. In doing so, he saved a segment of history from extinction.

The historian Gary Wills, assessing "And the Band Played On," wrote: "This book will be to gay liberation what Betty Friedan was to early feminism and Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' was to environmentalism."

Shilts' sense of purpose was passionate and he never backed down from his own most controversial beliefs. And Shilts' own success manifestly delighted him. Being both feisty and cocky, naturally, he made enemies. The late Bob Ross, editor and publisher of the Bay Area Reporter, described Shilts as a traitor to his own kind. In part that was because in stories he wrote for The Chronicle, where in 1981 he became the first openly gay employee, he advocated the closing of gay bathhouses as a means of containing the spread of AIDS. Asking people to forsake a sexual freedom that was so new and enthralling led to Shilts' being spat upon on Castro Street

"One of the big criticisms leveled at Randy," says his longtime friend and assistant, Linda Alband, "is that he was an assimilationist. But he chose to write about gay issues for the mainstream precisely because he wanted other people to know what it was like to be gay. If they didn't know, how were things going to change?"

Shilts was many things to many people: an author, an activist, a pioneer, a turncoat. But to himself he was first and foremost a reporter; he moved through the world around him, his world, filing reports. "I think of him as a classic journalist," says Michael Denneny, who edited his last two books and is his literary executor. "Somebody who took the almost romantic notion of being a journalist, totally believed it, and lived it out."

At his memorial service at Glide Memorial Church -- with characteristic immodesty, Shilts had hoped to lie in state at City Hall -- Alband placed his press card on his casket.

"The personal, the professional, and the political all merge at some point," says Tim Wilson, an archivist for the San Francisco Public Library, who is cataloging 170 cartons of papers Shilts bequeathed to the local history collection. "Where do you draw the line?"

Shilts was one of those exceptional individuals who managed to turn being a scorned and hated minority to an advantage. It was not that he did not experience the pain of bigotry -- he did. But by living fully and openly --

and as a younger man, sybaritically -- he went places and learned things that his heterosexual competitors knew nothing about.

He wrote well, but he was not a fine stylist. His strongest effects were savage irony; disgust with indifference, political cowardice, and selfishness; and passionate anger at injustice. His work is heartfelt, consistently reasoned. His greatest strength was his research: It was thorough, tireless, penetrating and eventually revealing.

In his first book, "The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk," Shilts drew upon his friendship with Milk and his own experiences in the Castro. He had been there, had been a witness and a participant when thousands of gay men and lesbians chose to come out, and created a neighborhood for themselves. It is no exaggeration to say that this had never occurred anywhere before. Shilts wrote a book that described what had happened rather than either attacking or defending it.

As late professor John Boswell wrote in the author's note: "No traces of moral outrage against homosexuality are to be found in these pages. … What will strike some readers as partisan … is chiefly the absence of negative attitudes … after a long, loud noise, a sudden silence may seem deafening."

But it was in "And the Band Played On," published in 1987, that Shilts hit his stride. At The Chronicle, he had reported on the early stages of the AIDS epidemic. "With a passion I have rarely seen equaled," wrote his colleague Susan Sward, "Randy pushed, wheedled and cajoled until his AIDS stories made their way from the back pages … to the front page."

When he tried to sell a book about AIDS, recalls Denneny, it was turned down until St. Martin's made its offer reluctantly, paying Shilts an advance of only $16,000. The book would sell more than 100,000 hardcover copies, and some 600,000 paperbacks. It was chosen by Chronicle readers as one of the 100 best books by California authors of the last century. "And the Band Played On" is still in print (as is the Milk biography), although sales are limited primarily to journalism schools.

"He worked four years on that book," Denneny says. "He went into debt. At one point, literally to pay his rent, he had to empty this huge water jug full of pennies, nickels and dimes."

Shilts' friend Frank Robinson, also an author and journalist, calls "And the Band Played On," "a seminal book. My god, it was the loudest cry of protest from a gay man at what the national government was doing to its own citizens. For somebody to point the finger at the government and say they were partners in a disease/genocide took a hell of a lot of courage."

The book skewered not only a callous government but bickering and envious scientists and self-indulgent gays. It is also a great read. Its many characters and subplots span continents, and those subplots are woven together seamlessly as a sense of urgency builds. It is a product of superb reporting that is also a compulsively readable medical thriller.

Not only was it a best-seller, but HBO made it into a movie. Suddenly Shilts was famous and rich. It was what he had always wanted. His private writings reveal a young man hungering for worldly success. "I undoubtedly will go very far and eventually have money and fame," he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1977. And the following year saw this diary entry: "I want fame, I want love … being able to walk into a gay bar and have people recognize me so they would want me, if not for myself, for my fame."

By 1987 he had all of that. He also had AIDS.

Yet he threw himself into researching "Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military." He knew that working at his usual feverish pace would cost him months, or years, of his life. He kept his illness a secret until after the book was published.

The book came out in 1993, a few months after the newly inaugurated President Bill Clinton announced that gays and lesbians would be allowed to serve openly in the armed forces. By then Shilts was hospitalized, drifting in and out of consciousness. Denneny, and several others, in effect wrote the last quarter of the 784-page work from Shilts' notes and rough drafts.

"Randy wanted the coverage to be about gays and lesbians in the military, " Denneny says. "He thought if his AIDS got out, the story would become about him having AIDS. It would totally obscure the book."

For a third and final time, Shilts had looked far ahead and timed a book to perfection. An issue that most of the country had not even known was an issue -- the suffering and humiliation of men and women who were their nation's heroes, and the often tragic consequences -- was front-page news.

Shilts died eight months later, on Feb. 17, 1994. He was buried in Guerneville, where he owned a home.

Randy Shilts was the third of six boys born to Bud and Norma Shilts, of Aurora, Ill. His mother was an alcoholic, and he had "a childhood in which I was beaten and emotionally abused," he later wrote. Yet he loved his parents and reconciled with them, dedicating his first book to them. He came out of the closet while he was an undergraduate at the University or Oregon, moved to San Francisco in 1975, worked for a gay alternative newspaper and for KQED television, and yearned to be a mainstream journalist. "Randy badly wanted to be normal," says Jennifer Finlay, one of his research assistants. "Being accepted was important to him. He was human."

When he was hired by The Chronicle in 1981, he was as likely as a red light on a freeway.

"With his striped shirts, flowered ties and suspenders, Randy stood out," wrote Susan Sward in this paper when he died. She described a man who laughed frequently and had a halo of curly blond-brown hair -- AIDS later turned it straight. The other males in the newsroom, Sward wrote, dressed, and thought, more conservatively. "In such a mileu, commitment or passionate devotion to any sort of belief system was … worthy of derision. At best, Randy made many in the city room nervous."

Although he had numerous friends at the paper, even they describe him as being difficult at times, and no more egotistical than Donald Trump. But Shilts was usually disarmingly funny about his own ego, and his commitment. In a television interview when he was dying, he said he had at last put aside vanity. "But I wish I had less character," he added, "and more T-cells."

The trouble with a good character is that it is prone to a bad conscience. In his diary he confided his deepest secret. "I have no big regrets," he wrote in 1978, "except for the giant mistake I made ten years ago. A mistake that will haunt me for all my life because it left a living legacy." When he had been a teenager and angry at his parents, he had punctured one of his dad's condoms. Nine months later the youngest of the Shilts brothers, David, was born, "an autistic child," Shilts confided in his diary. "His life is a nightmare I caused." David was institutionalized from an early age. Randy Shilts went to his grave still trying to make amends: the first bequest in his will was to David.

His older brother Gary was close to Randy, and he performed the commitment ceremony that joined Randy to Barry Barbieri - a man 20 years his junior, and the primary beneficiary of his estate -- in the last year of Randy's life. Gary had not known of Randy's secret guilt until I told him about it during a telephone interview.

After a pause of several seconds, Gary Shilts said: "It's terrible. What a shame he felt that way because, frankly, as much as my parents loved to get tipsy and make love, I doubt they remembered to put a rubber on anyway. I'll tell you another secret. We always say David is autistic, but it's not autism. It's really fetal alcohol syndrome."

Perhaps because Shilts remains controversial among some gays, there is no monument to him. Nor is there a street named for him, as there are for other San Francisco writers such as Jack Kerouac and Dashiell Hammett. "He's one of our community's heroes," says author Frank Robinson. "In my opinion he had as much effect on the gay community as Harvey Milk did. Both were immensely important. Where's the street or building named after Randy?"

Shilts' only monument is his work. He remains the most prescient chronicler of 20th century American gay history. Before he died, he talked often to Denneny about what he hoped would be his next book.

"Give him five or six years to research and write it," Denneny says, "and it would have come out around 2001. It was going to be on homosexuality in the Catholic Church."