Reagan AIDSgate poster via ACT UP New York
America is gushing Sunday over former President Ronald Reagan in recognition of what would have been his 100th birthday. Produced by Reagan groupies, the long-weekend celebrations at the newly primped Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley are glitzy and reverent evocations of an imagined man.
In this white-washed version of history, Reagan, not Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev (remember “glasnost,” “perestroika,” and the impact of Levis, Coke and “Dynasty”?) is credited with “tearing down” the Berlin Wall; the trillion dollars in debt Reagan wracked up during his “conservative” presidency is ignored; “supply-side” or “trickle-down” economics” still works, even though theory-originator David Stockman says it doesn’t; the Reagan-approved secret Iran-Contra scandal was patriotic, not subversive; and he is still the “Great Communicator” – who conned working-class “Reagan Democrats” while catering to the rich, creating a huge surge in homelessness, reveling in unchecked deregulation and extolling union-busting with the mass firing of the over-worked, striking PATCO flight controllers – even before there were trained replacements.
After the depraved Vietnam War, the perennial dark and disgraced Richard Nixon, the short-term Gerry Ford and the confusing Jimmy Carter (who orchestrated the Middle East Peace talks but couldn’t free the Iran hostages or prevent long gas lines) – Reagan, the “ah-shucks” bad B-movie actor (Bedtime for Bonzo), huckstered his scripted “vision” of “Morning in America” viewed from some exceptional shiny city on the hill. Reagan was the imaged Mount Rushmore president, the right wing conservatives’ longed-for King Arthur who would crush the Democratic Dream of FDR and the Kennedys and anyone who believed in social and economic justice promised by the “counter-culture”1960s. He’d already proven his anti-Communist bona fides appearing in 1947 as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
For LGBT people, Ronald Reagan’s presidency was the far different “mourning in America.” And unlike Nixon who was forced to resign for covering up the political Watergate scandal, Reagan didn’t even bother covering up his cold disdain, his deliberate neglect, his abject refusal to help gay men stricken in 1981 by a strange new communicable disease that turned out to be AIDS. But there was no “AIDSgate” for Reagan; the White House agreed with the Religious Right that gays deserved what they got – they deserved to die.
Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, said, “AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals.” Patrick Buchanan, Reagan’s Press Secretary, said AIDS was “nature’s revenge on gay men.” Antigay Gary Bauer, Reagan’s domestic policy advisor, kept Surgeon General C. Everett Koop (selected because he was an anti-abortion Christian fundamentalist) away from Reagan:
”[In 1986] President Reagan asked the surgeon general to prepare a report on AIDS as the United States confirmed its ten-thousandth case. Leaders of the evangelical movement did not want Koop to write the report, nor did senior White House staffers who shared Koop’s evangelical convictions. As Dr. Koop related to me, “Gary Bauer [Reagan's chief advisor on domestic policy] … was my nemesis in Washington because he kept me from the president. He kept me from the cabinet and he set up a wall of enmity between me and most of the people that surrounded Reagan because he believed that anybody who had AIDS ought to die with it. That was God’s punishment for them.”
In his extraordinary book And The Band Played On about the early history of the AIDS epidemic, gay journalist Randy Shilts, who later died of AIDS, wrote that two events dramatically changed the course of AIDS in America. The first was the announcement that closeted gay movie star Rock Hudson had AIDS and the second was the report by Koop.
In an interview with me for the 25 anniversary of the June 5, 1981 CDC report of six gay men with what turned out
Rock Hudson - publicity photo
to be AIDS, Hudson’s publicist Dale Olson said Reagan called his longtime friend in July 1985 when Hudson was in a Paris hospital desperately looking for a cure for AIDS. Nonetheless, the “Great Communicator” remained silent. It’s not as if Reagan was unaware of AIDS by then: on April 23, 1984, the CDC had reported 4,177 case and 1,807 deaths – something that came to the attention of the National Democratic Convention when a candlelight vigil of more than 100,000 people marched from the Castro to Moscone Center.
California Rep. Henry Waxman, who held the first congressional hearing on the disease at the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Los Angeles in 1983, wrote Washington Post in late 1985:
“It is surprising that the president could remain silent as 6,000 Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic’s existence. Perhaps his staff felt he had to, since many of his New Right supporters have raised money by campaigning against homosexuals.”
Reagan finally mentioned the word “AIDS” in October 1986 and was virtually forced to deliver his first major speech on AIDS on May 31, 1987 on the eve of the Third International Conference on AIDS in Washington. He was the invited by Elizabeth Taylor to speak at a fundraiser for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, which Hudson helped start with a $250,000 grant given to Taylor. (Here’s a link to Reagan’s entire speech.) Outside the tented-event were protesters and yet another candlelight vigil.
Shilts wrote about Reagan’s 20-minute speech:
“Reagan’s program, of course, would do very little to actually stop the spread of AIDS. Though testing heterosexuals at marriage license bureaus created the illusion of action, very few of thse people were infected with the virus and very few lives would be saved. But then saving lives had never been a priority of the Reagan administration. Reagan’s speech was not meant to serve the public health; it was a political solution to a political problem. The words created a stance that was politically comfortable for the president and his adherents; it was also a stance that killed people. Already, some said that Ronald Reagan would be remembered in history books for one thing beyond all else: He was the man who had let AIDS rage through America, the leader of the government that when challenged to action had placed politics above the health of the American people.”
And not once did Ronald Reagan utter the word “gay.”
Shilts:
“By the time President Reagan had delivered his first speech on the epidemic, of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease; 20, 849 had died.”
Photo from WebMD's history of AIDS - www.webmd.com/hiv-aids/slideshow-aids-retrospective
On the USAID website, the statistics read:
“In 2009, 33.3 million people around the world were living with HIV/AIDS. More than 60 million people have been infected with HIV since the pandemic began. AIDS is the leading cause of death in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the fourth leading cause of death globally…..Almost 5,000 people die every day due to AIDS. AIDS caused 1.8 million deaths in 2009. An estimated 25 million people have died from HIV-related causes since the beginning of the pandemic….There were 2.6 million new HIV infections in 2009, or almost 7,200 people per day.”
The terrible irony for LGBT people is that in the very beginning of the epidemic there was hope that Ronald Reagan would DO something. There was precedent for the government acting quickly to stem a public health crisis. In 1976, just five years earlier, the government rushed to stop an outbreak of Legionnaires disease at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia.
(Corrected) And perhaps even more importantly, in 1978, as former governor of California, Reagan publicly opposed the Briggs Initiative – the antigay measure proposed by associates of Rev. Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant. Opposition by the hugely popular governor helped significantly in the measure’s defeat. As a result, Reagan received gay support in his presidential bid against Jimmy Carter in 1980, as well as the more effective Religious Right.
But once in office, Reagan turned his back on the gay friends and staff he and his wife Nancy had known for years.
Most historians and political pundits will look at the ripple effect Reagan’s two terms in office – from 1981-1989 – continues to have on American politics. But for many LGBTs, myself included, I cannot hear the man’s name without thinking of so many other names now effectively wiped from the collective memory – names like Michael Callen and Paul Monette and Connie Norman and Wayne Karr. So many names – and with each name, memories of joy and rage and a kind of spirituality in confronting death with dignity – in spite of the government’s disgusting deliberate neglect.
Names Project AIDS Quilt - via WebMD -www.webmd.com/hiv-aids/slideshow-aids-retrospective
Former President Ronald Reagan died on June 5, 2004 – 23 years to the day when the CDC’s first report on AIDS appeared. Reagan had apparently been living in seclusion with Alzheimer’s Disease — the progressive disease that causes loss of memory and mental abilities. People gushed for a week remembering the “Great Communicator” who was entombed at his grand presidential library and museum like a political Elvis: Simi Valley as the political Graceland. There his groupies gather again, while those of us who remember his legacy of horror, neglect and death still struggle with an un-ending heartbreak of what might have been had our government cared and our friends not died.
Paul Monette Photo book publicity still
In Last Watch of the Night, my friend Paul Monette wrote in an essay about the 25h anniversary of Stonewall:
“[A] Victor, my last best friend, is wont to observe: ‘They don’t understand. I don’t just want a cure. I want a cure and all my friends back.’….As for my own losses, the pile of bodies is harly countable anymore except in the heart – because the dead outnumber the living now. Personally, that is…..
Meanwhile, let the Stonewall celebrants save me a piece of cake from the party, a rainbow flag and a rousing chorus of ‘We shall overcome.’ Understand that I am far too busy tracking the enemy within. But I’m with you. Brother and sister, and will be always, even after I’m carried from the battle and planted on the final hill. You must never forget: There’s no turning us back now. No more closets and nor more loveless years in solitary. From now on, we have each other. Freedom is on our side.
And there is no America without us.”
{ 1 trackback }
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
TEAR DOWN THIS MYTH!!!! Thank you, Karen, for also reminding/informing that it wasn’t JUST his virtual passive genocide by AIDS that makes the Reagan hagiography, and the statues and the streets and the buildings and the airports, so dishonest, so sickening. In early November 1984, I travelled to East Berlin to smuggle some “Western currency” to friends trapped all their lives behind the Berlin Wall because, thanks to Gorbachev’s refusal to back the East German oligarchs or force Soviet-controlled Hungary and Czechoslovakia to interfere with East Germans now escaping through the proverbial back and side doors, they had a chance to escape. I actually met East Berliners in West Berlin who’d done exactly that—fled across thousands of miles just to get into the other half of their divided city. When I got off the plane back in San Francisco, I found out the Wall had “fallen” sometime while I was flying over the Atlantic, and my five-year old Godson would soon be seeing Freedom for the first time from the shoulders of his Father along with hundreds of thousands of others streaming through now open checkpoints and holes literally knocked through the Wall.
This article fails to point out that Reagan, while not proposing increased federal government spending on AIDS, did sign spending bills, proposed by Democrats, to research AIDS. I lost a close friend to AIDS, in 1998, he had first been diagnosed in 1987, but blaming Reagan is highly questionable. His view was that the private sector would find treatments for this horrible disease, based upon the profit motive. Given the progress that has occurred, that you can live with HIV indefinitely without automatically contracting full blown AIDS, Reagan was not far from the truth.
I have read articles by other AIDS activists who, while not favoring Reagan, do not believe he was at all culpable for this tragedy.
@ Jim P: and there are people in Russia who think Stalin was misunderstood. Direct genocide or passive genocide—its victims, like your “close friend,” are equally dead no matter how breathing but poisoned with gay Repug revisionism you remain.
Even were your ludicrous and, yes, DISGUSTING “private sector” excuse were true, the Reagan Administration did not just rely on it for OTHER illnesses. As documented by Randy Shilts in “And the Band Played On,” the FDA immediately assinged 1,100 employees to work on the 1982 Tylenol scare, spending, along with the CDC, MILLIONS of government dollars when only 7 people died from the tainted Tylenol versus the 260 already having died by then of AIDS, and nearly 400 more diagnosed.
“[A Congressional Research Service] report found that in 1982 the National Institutes of Health’s research on toxic shock syndrome, a mystery that by then had been solved, amounted to $36,100 per death. NIH Legionnaire’s [Disease] spending in the most recent fiscal year amounted to $34,841 per death. By contrast, the health institute had spent about $3,225 per AIDS death in fiscal 1981 and $8,991 in fiscal 1982. By NIH budget calculations, the life of a gay man was worth about one-quarter that of a member of the American Legion.” – Shilts
IF he was so wonderful, IF he thought the “private sector” was the solution, then WHY didn’t he use the proverbial “bully pulpit” for that instead of remaining ENTIRELY publicly silent on AIDS for the first five years?
“The Reagan administration has done its best to avoid making even a single helpful AIDS decision in the eight years of the Reagan presidency.” – Congressman Henry Waxman
After Reagan wrote with crocodile tears about the death from AIDS of teenage hemophiliac Ryan White, NGLTF’s Robert Bray responded:
“We urge our leaders to take action while they hold positions of power, not after they reach the safety of retirement and are outside the spotlight of public scrutiny. Some will salute Mr. Reagan for his post-presidential words on AIDS. But for all the children alienated from their schools because they had HIV, and all the families bombed out of their homes by hysterical neighbors, and all the IV drug users, Black, Hispanic and Asian people with AIDS, and all the gay men who died alone in some anonymous hospital room, for all these people there was no editorial. There was no PSA. There was no Great Communicator offering compassion or action. There was only presidential negligence and a legacy of shame.”
It had NOTHING to do with sincere diffference of opinions about the best way to attack AIDS….even AIDS prevention education….but homophobic indifference that’s documented from the first time AIDS was brought up in an Administration press briefing with Assistant to the President Reagan Principal Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes a year after the first cases were reported:
“Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?
MR. SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?
Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as ‘gay plague’. (Laughter in room.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter in room.)
Q: No, I don’t.
MR. SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question.
Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President …
MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter in room.)
Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.
Q: Does the President, does anyone in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any …
Q: Nobody knows? …”
TO THIS:
Nine months AFTER the death from AIDS of their Hollywood acquaintance Rock Hudson, the Reagans attended a nationally televised rededication of the cleaned-up Statue of Liberty in July 1986. A part of the evening’s “entertainment” was Repug comedian Bob Hope who “joked”—
“I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or from the Staten Island Ferry.” “As the television camera panned the audience, special guests French President & Mdm. Mitterand] looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing.” – Michael Bronski.
@ Jim P: and there are people in Russia who think Stalin was misunderstood. Direct genocide or passive genocide—its victims, like your “close friend,” are equally dead no matter how breathing but poisoned with gay Repug revisionism you remain.
Even were your ludicrous and, yes, DISGUSTING “private sector” excuse were true, the Reagan Administration did not just rely on it for OTHER illnesses. As documented by Randy Shilts in “And the Band Played On,” the FDA immediately assinged 1,100 employees to work on the 1982 Tylenol scare, spending, along with the CDC, MILLIONS of government dollars when only 7 people died from the tainted Tylenol versus the 260 already having died by then of AIDS, and nearly 400 more diagnosed.
“[A Congressional Research Service] report found that in 1982 the National Institutes of Health’s research on toxic shock syndrome, a mystery that by then had been solved, amounted to $36,100 per death. NIH Legionnaire’s [Disease] spending in the most recent fiscal year amounted to $34,841 per death. By contrast, the health institute had spent about $3,225 per AIDS death in fiscal 1981 and $8,991 in fiscal 1982. By NIH budget calculations, the life of a gay man was worth about one-quarter that of a member of the American Legion.” – Shilts
IF he was so wonderful, IF he thought the “private sector” was the solution, then WHY didn’t he use the proverbial “bully pulpit” for that instead of remaining ENTIRELY publicly silent on AIDS for the first five years?
“The Reagan administration has done its best to avoid making even a single helpful AIDS decision in the eight years of the Reagan presidency.” – Congressman Henry Waxman
After Reagan wrote with crocodile tears about the death from AIDS of teenage hemophiliac Ryan White, NGLTF’s Robert Bray responded:
“We urge our leaders to take action while they hold positions of power, not after they reach the safety of retirement and are outside the spotlight of public scrutiny. Some will salute Mr. Reagan for his post-presidential words on AIDS. But for all the children alienated from their schools because they had HIV, and all the families bombed out of their homes by hysterical neighbors, and all the IV drug users, Black, Hispanic and Asian people with AIDS, and all the gay men who died alone in some anonymous hospital room, for all these people there was no editorial. There was no PSA. There was no Great Communicator offering compassion or action. There was only presidential negligence and a legacy of shame.”
It had NOTHING to do with sincere diffference of opinions about the best way to attack AIDS….even AIDS prevention education….but homophobic indifference that’s documented from the first time AIDS was brought up in an Administration press briefing with Assistant to the President Reagan Principal Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes a year after the first cases were reported:
“Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?
MR. SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?
Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as ‘gay plague’. (Laughter in room.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter in room.)
Q: No, I don’t.
MR. SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question.
Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President …
MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter in room.)
Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.
Q: Does the President, does anyone in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any …
Q: Nobody knows? …”
TO THIS:
Nine months AFTER the death from AIDS of their Hollywood acquaintance Rock Hudson, the Reagans attended a nationally televised rededication of the cleaned-up Statue of Liberty in July 1986. A part of the evening’s “entertainment” was Repug comedian Bob Hope who “joked”—
“I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or from the Staten Island Ferry.” “As the television camera panned the audience, special guests French President & Mdm. Mitterand] looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing.” – Michael Bronski.
Nothing quite like an intolerant tirade to my factually correct post. Putting the term “close friend” in quotes is basically implying that I am lying about it. This is exactly the type of thing that happened so often in the 80′s, intolerance by many AIDS activists to viewpoints that do not exactly mirror their opinions. Not a good way to change peoples’ minds.
Here is an article that presents a different point of view, which does not fit into the same view of the AIDS tragedy in the eighties.
Reagan and AIDS: A Reassessment
by Dale Carpenter on June 24, 2004
First published on June 24, 2004, in the Bay Area Reporter.
For gay Americans, any evaluation of Ronald Reagan’s legacy begins and ends with his record on AIDS. According to the conventional view, Reagan was responsible for the deaths of thousands of gay men.
On the official day of national mourning for Reagan, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) closed its office to mourn those who have died of AIDS. NGLTF’s executive director, Matt Foreman, issued an open letter blasting Reagan for “years of White House silence and inaction.” Eric Rofes, a gay author, complained that Reagan “said nothing and did nothing” about AIDS.
But Foreman and some other critics have gone even further, suggesting that criminal malevolence and anti-gay bigotry drove Reagan administration policies on AIDS. “I wouldn’t feel so angry if the Reagan administration’s failing was due to ignorance or bureaucratic ineptitude,” Foreman wrote in his open letter. “No, … we knew then it was deliberate.”
According to Wayne Besen, a former spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, “we were considered expendable and forsaken by the President.” Larry Kramer wrote in The Advocate that Reagan was a “murderer,” worse even than Adolf Hitler.
Though exaggerated and somewhat misplaced, the negligence theory is arguable. The malice theory is a calumny.
First, it’s untrue that the Reagan administration “said nothing” in response to the disease. In June 1983, a year before the virus that causes AIDS had even been publicly identified, Reagan’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, announced at the U.S. Conference of Mayors that the department “considers AIDS its number-one health priority.” She specifically praised “the excellent work done by gay networks around the nation” that had spread information about the disease.
Despite the oft-repeated claim that Reagan himself didn’t mention AIDS publicly until 1987, he actually first discussed it at a press conference in September 1985. Responding to a reporter’s question about the need for more funding, Reagan accurately noted that the federal government had already spent more than half a billion dollars on AIDS up to that point. “So, this is a top priority with us,” said Reagan. “Yes, there’s no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer.”
Still, Reagan could have said more. He could have offered sympathy for the dying. He could have inveighed against discrimination. He could have urged prevention education. A master at using the bully pulpit for causes he believed in, Reagan manifestly failed to use it on the subject of AIDS.
In this, it must be noted, he was hardly alone. Most politicians of the age either failed to grasp the seriousness of AIDS or, grasping it, were reluctant to discuss openly a disease spread primarily through anal sex and dirty needles. For years, New York City Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat presiding over the epicenter of the disease, refused even to meet with AIDS groups. AIDS was not mentioned from the podium of either national party convention in 1984. “Silence” about AIDS was a national failing, not one peculiar to Reagan.
Second, it’s untrue that the Reagan administration “did nothing” in response to the disease. Deroy Murdock, a gay-friendly conservative columnist, has reviewed federal spending on AIDS programs during the Reagan years. According to Murdock, annual spending rose from eight million dollars in 1982 to more than $2.3 billion in 1989. In all, the federal government spent almost six billion dollars on AIDS during Reagan’s tenure.
It’s true that Congress repeatedly added to low-ball Reagan budget requests for AIDS. But that is a familiar dynamic between any White House and any Congress: the White House proposes minimal funding for a program knowing that Congress will add to any proposal. In the 1990′s, for example, the Republican Congress added to Bill Clinton’s budget requests for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program.
Reagan’s stinginess on AIDS funding, if that’s what it was, was not due to anti-gay malevolence but was an extension of his stinginess on funding other domestic programs.
In this, too, Reagan was not alone. In his book And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts notes that in 1983 New York Governor Mario Cuomo, a hero to liberals, nixed (on fiscal grounds) the Republican-dominated state senate’s bid to spend $5.2 million on AIDS research and prevention programs. Cuomo’s state health commissioner responded to criticism by saying that hypertension was a more important health issue for the state.
Yes, we could have spent more, but that can always be said of federal spending. And it’s unclear that additional funding would have accomplished much. “You could have poured half the national budget into AIDS in 1983, and it would have gone down a rat hole,” says Michael Fumento, an author specializing in health and science issues. We simply didn’t know enough about the disease early on to spend huge sums wisely.
Gay journalist Bob Roehr, who has closely followed AIDS developments for 20 years, concurs. “I have little reason to believe that a different course of action by Reagan would have significantly altered the scientific state of knowledge” toward a “cure” or vaccine, he says.
Aside from spending, it was Reagan’s surgeon general who sent the first-ever bulletin to all American homes warning explicitly about AIDS transmission. Reagan created the first presidential commission dealing with AIDS. And, in 1988, Reagan barred discrimination against federal employees with HIV.
As for Reagan being a murderer, we should remember that he didn’t give anybody AIDS. We ourselves bear the lion’s share of responsibility for that.
.
More nonsense from the rapper currently entitled “Jim P.”
First of all, your incessant attacks against “AIDS activists” is quite unseemly (not to mention puny and utterly contemptible) in that they proved themselves willing and able to put themselves on the line (while using their full names), get arrested and close down the FDA so that they and ther rest of us could continue to live, while those the likes of, say, Merv Griffin went vamping and lunching at the Polo Lounge (“patio section of course”) with the first lady as if nothing was awry.
Then you pull out an old column by Dale Carpenter, a Republican activist, so we know everything he has to say about Reagan will be accompanied by a high pitched, chattering spin of a very political nature.
Carpenter concedes that Reagan could have done more, that he could have “inveighed against discrimination.” What he skips over is Reagan sending his Justice Department to the Supreme Court in the Arline case to mount a bigoted and mean spirited argument that communicable diseases like HIV/AIDS were not covered by laws protecting Americans against discrimination in the workplace. Happily they lost that one, but we must never forget.
I’ve never said Reagan “did nothing” about AIDS. What he did do was next to nothing in comparison to the deadly threat it proved to be to the public health. Like many Republicans, Carpenter mistakes statements, appearances, perceptions and other “pseudo-events” for reality. So when he quotes the Gipper making a ritualistic, but empty statement that AIDS was serious and we need to find answers he wants us to believe that they acted on those statements. But we all know that didn’t happen.
Then Carpenter changes the subject to Ed Koch, who because he was apparently terrified of being “perceived” as a homosexual, did as little about AIDS in the Big Apple as the Gipper did nationwide. Fine, Koch obviously has some explaining to do for New York City. But Reagan was Chief Executive of the Nation, so nationally, the buck stopped with him, didn’t it?
Carpenter/Jim P. then cite a six billion dollar figure of spending on AIDS during the Reagan era, but that likely includes treatment of all the desperately ill via Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security Disability and other pre-existing programs, rather than getting a handle on the cause, and even that was a paltry sum. Too little too late from those who simply hated us. Don’t forget either that when the Supreme Court held in 1986 that we could be classified as criminals for no reason at all apart from a narrow minded view of “morality” to be imposed on others with the threat of arrest and imprisonment, Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese hailed this incredibly bigoted decision as a great win for the Gipper.
Strangely (but maybe not, since Carpenter/Jim P. seem desparate for support of their political positions) Carpenter relies on the infamous Michael Fumento for the proposition that additional funding early on “would have gone down a rat hole.” No proof at all here, and Fumento is remembered for devoting a large part of his career to minimizing AIDS anyway, like you seem to be doing here.
Carpenter concludes by noting that Surgeon General Koop sent AIDS information to “all Americans.” But he did this in spite of Reagan and his henchment, not because of him. In the end, not even the Surgeon General could get even a few minutes with the Gip to discuss it.
Thank you Jim, for offering a different viewpoint. I do think the America’s Gay Community has responded to this crisis w/heroism, vigilance & dignity. While all of us involved with friends/loved ones who were dying of AIDS, wished that the “cure” had come sooner, it is stunning how quickly the scrooge of AIDS has been brought under control.
Reagan was a very Conservative man through and through. He always preached that the business/private sector was far better at resolving problems than big gov’t. The Gay community, without much help from gov’t, should be saluted for the manner in which their input into medical research, their fundraising and community organizing is responsible for the improvement in the way AIDS is now being treated. I never thought I would live to see the day, when this terrible disease was treatable as a chronic illness, the lifetimes of AIDS patients considerably extended. I see President Reagan smiling gently beyond the grave, with, an “I told you so, aside, in the most positive sense. Reagan would have told his gay friends (and he had many of them); that if they took their Hollywood salaries & focused on AIDS, they would have a much better chance of seeing a cure in their lifetimes. He would have told his gay friends that govt funds & research would have slowed everything down, with lots of waste to boot.n
Author William Mann, who writes on gay entertainment figures, wrote quite a piece on Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s association w/Gay Hollywood in his book, Wisecracker: The story of
William Haines. Ronald Reagan probably knew more gay than any other president. He was never perceived as hostile to gays, quite the contrary, Nancy and Ron were comfortable w/their gay collegues in Hollywood . If you read the Reagan Diary, there is plenty of notation of the times Reagan and his Hollywood decorator friend (whose name eludes me, Ted Gibson?) had dinner together. This decorator, of course counseled Mrs. Regan, but he and the President had a very close rapport. Wm Mann discusses how sympathetic Reagan was to the problems of his gay friends in Pre-AIDS 40′s & 50′s, “the love that dare not speak it’s name”. In those days, Gays suffered w/many sad issues, but one of the most serious was the difficulty of the gay man having a monogamous relationship w/another man. Just as today, they craved love and companionship. When gay men were fortunate enough to have a strong relationship, they were very suseptical to heartbreak when the relationship ended, either through death or mutual consent. Never, ever making fun of his friends villifying them Reagan often served as a confidente. It’s a shame that Ronald Reagan and most of his friends are gone by now. Had they read this article, I like to think they would have contributed to a better understanding of Reagan and the times he lived in.
Blah, blah, blah. We’ve heard it before, over and over ad nausuem. Ronnie and Nancy had lots of closeted, well-to-do gay “friends,” most of them as reactionary, delusional and clueless as they about how most people live (and died and died and died as it turned out), all of whom suck up shamelessly to the rich and famous, as we see here.
“Fortunate enough to have a strong relationship?” Give me a break. Reagan and his very public fellow homophobic henchmen set that back a generation with their petty, contemptable, revolting, self serving hatred of their fellow Americans.
As we all know, when gov’t funds and research came online after we had to close the FDA to get it, life saving medications soon followed, no thanks at all to the Gipper, quite the opposite in fact.
Reagan was not Governor of California in 1978. Whether he opposed the Briggs initiative or not, Jerry Brown was Governor in 1978.
You’re right. Corrected. Thank you.
As an Aussie who remembers these days, thank you.
Here are a couple of other articles on his HIV/AIDS legacy:
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/14/larry.kramer.aids/
http://www.forward.com/articles/7046/
Excellent and necessary piece. But expect the mega-corporate media to report it beyond a line or two hidden in the sappy shilling, though, because it’s bigoted indifference and non-coverage allowed Reagan to get away with it then, as now.
Excellent and necessary piece. But don’t expect the mega-corporate media or the current media moguls (who bloated themselves to bursting with Gipper tax cuts for the rich and famous) to even give it a mention, though, beyond a stray line or two in all its current shrill, shrieking, shameless, shilling, since it too proved its cold, murderous indifference with its non-coverage of AIDS back in the day, which allowed Reagan to get away with it then, as now.
Karen, This is the piece I’ve been waiting to read. I’ll post it and re-post it on FACEBOOK. It is of urgent importance that the sainthood of Ronald Regan be looked as yet another American scam. I love you for many reasons and your clarity is one of them.
Ditto here, already posted on my faceless facebook page as well. Americablog Gay also did a post of it’s own but Karen’s here (along with some of the comments) really tells us what all the fuss is about and is the best I’ve seen.
Here this woman goes through the trouble of chronicling our legacy during the Reagan years and gay folks just wanna wave it in the faces of Republicans——as if they give a damn. Instead how bout use this post as inspiration to get off your asses and engage in authentic civil rights battle.
That’s what should be of urgent importance. Instead of playing tit for tat with effing republicans like that’s gonna forward things.
Well . . . as Texas Demo activist Billie Carr once said (long before she gave Bill Clinton an infamous, profane, in-person tongue lashing over Monica): “Don’t default the bastards.” This is not tit for tat, but a noble and admirable effort to set history “straight” so this kind of public health crime won’t be repeated soon. And it’s not just the “effing republicans” but the “love me I’m a liberal” types in the so-called liberal media who were also “silent” about the epidemic for years and let Reagan get away with it then . . . . and now by similarly ignoring the Gipper’s true legacy of terrible suffering and death in favor of yet another empty, vacuous, but “saleable” profile in shame. “If you seek his monument, look around.” Those monuments are at cemetaries from coast to coast and too damn many of us have no choice but to take a look, a real hard look . . .
@Jim P: SHAME ON YOU, YOU HISTORY REVISING BIGOT. YOU ARE A MORON AND DO NOT KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. REAGAN HAS THE BLOOD OF THOUSANDS, NO, MILLIONS UPON HIS DEAD HANDS. DEBATING THIS WITH THE LIKES OF YOU IS NO DIFFERENT THAN ATTEMPTING TO REASON WITH A HOLOCAUST DENIER AND DESERVING OF THE SAME LEVEL OF OUTRAGE AND CONTEMPT IN RESPONSE. WE WHO LIVED THROUGH THIS PLAGUE SAW FIRST HAND WHAT HAPPENED – GAYS WERE REVILED AND REAGAN DID NOTHING TO HELP US. PEOPLE, GOOD, GREAT PEOPLE DIED BECAUSE OF HIS REPREHENSIBLE NEGLECT AND BIGOTRY. PERIOD, AMEN END OF STORY. YOUR DEFENSE OF THE INDEFENSIBLE IS IMMORAL.