I’d recommend “And The Band Played On” for a thoughtful and well-researched narrative of the early AIDS crisis. There was plenty of blame to go around, including for the CDC and the gay communities.
You can argue that that culture was very vulnerable to a disease like AIDS, and that's fair. You can argue that, had that culture changed faster and more comprehensively, it may have mitigated the crisis somewhat, and that's fair too - although I'd argue the effect would likely not have been very significant.
But to cast blame on the same communities which were repeatedly decimated in large part as a result of those authorities' lack of concern over whether they so much as lived or died - a lack of concern which, as Shilts' own work which you cite makes clear, was so persistent and profound as not to be shifted until gay people themselves fought their way into positions of sufficient power as to have meaningful impact on policy, and not until one of Ronald Reagan's personal friends died of the disease and thus forced him finally to recognize the essential humanity of others likewise afflicted? The kindest thing I can find to call such a position is insultingly absurd.
Liberationism and bathhouse culture were closely intertwined, and bathhouse culture had been a bête noire of the assimilationist faction for some time before AIDS showed up. Demands to "stop having sex", or at least to stop having sex in this particular style, were a longstanding feature of that internal conflict, and it wasn't unreasonable early on for folks on the liberationist side to regard this newest call as essentially just more of the same. As the scope and gravity of the problem became obvious, people did gradually change their behavior, but the relatively long asymptomatic period and relatively high transmissibility of the virus meant that, by the time that happened, it was too late to do all that much good.
Sure, an early and assertive response within the community might have had a real effect on the outcome. But this is well within the territory of expecting people to act on the basis of perfect information which, at the time for action, neither they nor anyone else actually had - or, put more succinctly, of presentism in the historiographical sense. I don't blame Shilts for that; he wrote in 1987, when the crisis was still in a very real sense ongoing. We, by contrast, have the benefit of a quarter century's distance and study from which to look back on those days now. We can do better, and should.
I'm not even going to address the suggestion that gay bathhouse culture in the 1980s is somehow to blame for COVID anti-maskers in the 2020s.
Power differences are the single most important fact of society, and too many people assume symmetries exist in situations that are actually asymmetric.