Living Out

Shilts’s sojourns from Oregon and later from California to his parents’ new home in Michigan were sometimes disquieting. Following a visit home in the summer of 1974, Randy wrote a diary entry about his mixed feelings of “the desire to go back and see the parents, know them, understand them” and his overriding desire to “quash the feeling for a while” to avoid a follow-up visit. His family could be tough on him—his mother and his brother Gary thought Randy was too vocal in his political opinions for a poor college student without a job and verbally “trimmed his