Catholic pro-celibacy blogger and Courage participant David Morrison remembers gay journalist Randy Shilts, who died ten years ago this month.
Shilts was among the first journalists, and surely the most thorough, to track government and corporate callousness, and intransigence among activists (both gay and antigay), in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
Every year in February, oddly enough, though I have never known the date of Shilts’s death until just now, I read Band again. I re-read it for myself and for my friends who have died. I read it so that, whatever might have happened in the rest of my life since I read it last, I might not forget the hubris, prejudice, brilliance, fear, arrogance, compassion, glory and tragedy that so dramatically changed all our lives and ended some of them.
Morrison also pauses to remember radical Catholic activist Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker movement.
Too few Christians, especially those affiliated with the religious right, know what the CW movement is. Here is a summary from the movement’s home page:
Today over 185 Catholic Worker communities remain committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry, and foresaken. Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war, racism, and violence of all forms.
The CW movement upholds authentic Christian values — not culture wars.
Dorothy Day & Peter Maurin are heroes of mine. The liberation theology movement in Central America that helped resist oppressive dictators (and got some church workers killed) arose from Day’s philosophies, too.