  President Reagan's actions regarding HIV/AIDS are among his least understood. ACT UP founder Larry Kramer is urlLink preparing a piece called "Adolf Reagan" for an upcoming issue of urlLink The Advocate . This title alone is a perfect example of the absolute hysteria that ruins much of the discussion, rather than a reasoned, measured judgment one might also find urlLink in their pages. If you can be called Hitlerian for alleged negligence, what does that make unprotected sexual activity? Would Kramer or someone sharing his opinion of Reagan dare to call that Nazi-like as well? Yet that phenomenon is directly responsible for disease transmission, far more culpable than a urlLink "closet tolerant" presidential administration that was slow to care publicly.
Are you comfortable thinking of it as the sexual revolution's "radical holocaust" or "autogenocide by promiscuity"? (We'll get to more details of Reagan's record shortly. ) In high school, I was an early member and later co-leader of a small student group that promoted, among other things, condom distribution, a frank sex education curriculum, women's rights and queer rights. Despite my rightward lurch, I still support these things, although my confidence in the efficacy of preventive education has slipped. You can imagine my horror as a true believer when I later discovered that many of my peers (even in similarly chartered activist groups) at prestigious safe(r)-sex-aware colleges and in cosmopolitan cities, well, did not buy what they sold.
No need to name names or infections, but my demographic does not have the excuse that the age of AIDS caught us off guard. Reagan is not to blame for post-1982 self-destructiveness, which can undermine the most ostensibly prepared and educated in a generation that has been watching the fallout for its entire maturing life. Will "The Advocate" and ACT UP be stamping the swastika upon swingers with bad judgment any time soon?
Would your sense of proportion feel ill if they did? Would you at least want to qualify it as mass killing by mass self-neglect, like the late San Francisco Chronicle reporter, "And the Band Played On" author and gay AIDS patient Randy Shilts and his ex-Marxist fellow writers urlLink Peter Collier and urlLink David Horowitz did? Several websites have observed the disgusting callousness of Reagan administration press secretary Larry Speakes regarding HIV/AIDS, concluding that at best, counteracting a lethal disease that at first afflicted mostly gays was a low presidential priority, and at worst, that a bemused and homophobic leadership was glad to see gay men die in large numbers. Look at urlLink the three press conference excerpts in question, with questions by an unidentified journalist named "Lester," possibly Baltimore radio's only Washington correspondent, Lester Kinsolving. (Thanks to cryptically-named "537 Votes" at this americablog posting's comment section for the possible identification. ) First off, the persistent questions from the reporter were not out of concern for the gay community but paranoia, fearing that the infected men might soon contaminate the larger population very easily. (Not quite what happened: serious bodily fluids, not just proximity, are required. ) In the first conference, "Les" worried that the Reagan himself may have contracted "gay plague. " The third and final selection, from 1984, demonstrates the reporter's assumption that HIV is transmitted by saliva, as repellent a myth as ever circulated about the AIDS crisis. Speakes was not just tuning out the plight of the gay community, but also the histrionics of germophobia-cum-homophobia, a multiplication of ignorance on the part of a veteran member of the credentialed national press. Secondly, in the 1982 press conference especially, it is clear that the whole room is laughing at the expense of gay HIV/AIDS patients. At one point, even the terrified "Lester" cracks a poor taste joke addressed to Larry Speakes: "Because I love you, Larry, that's why," to which Speakes responded "Oh, I see.
Just don't put it in those terms, Lester. " In the second conference, from 1983, "Les" wondered if a message from the president would have discouraged "cruising," a word whose mention drew laughter so loud that it drowned out the room. Speakes answered with a jerk's mixture of chuckles and platitudes about government research on the disease, before the reporter closed with a dreadful pun on "fairy tales. " The illiberal attitude toward homosexuality appears to be the common opinion of the age in these excerpts, and attitudes toward gay suffering effectively barbaric.
In my June 5 Reagan obituary, I provided a link to a Deroy Murdock urlLink article that pointed out in the same dismal year of 1982 the administration spent $8 million on AIDS research, $44 million in 1983, over $100 million in 1984, eventually spending over $1.6 billion and $2.3 billion during Reagan's final two years as president, and a total of $5.7 billion since the disease was identified in '82. Andrew Sullivan, who is a gay, HIV positive Reaganite, also cited this horrifying Speakes' transcript, but alternates between credit and blame for the administration's mixed record through urlLink several posts this week. Among Sullivan's many insights: activists like ACT UP's Kramer blame the Reagan administration for not developing a cure. A new virus that repeals immunity was a formidable challenge. Cancer has not been cured either. Remedies do not just fall from the sky, to be kept at UFO facilities by a hostile and secretive presidency. The dollar figures are a testament to prompt research, to the tune of millions the year the disease was definitively classified in 1982 when only a few thousand were infected, and a 450% increase in research funds during the first year after that, and so on.
After twenty-two years, we still lack a cure. Is that Clinton's fault or nobody's? Another Andrew, blogless comrade A. Fisher, has protested to me that the administration was derelict in funding AIDS treatment. Prior to AZT, which was experimental until the end of the decade, what treatments were there? None. (In the interests of full disclosure, Andrew Fisher is the son of one of Rhode Island's earliest and foremost HIV/AIDS physicians. I am the child of less prestigious doctors who also spent the 1980s knee-deep in the hopeless treatment of HIV/AIDS cases. His distinguished father recommends the work of Reagan's principled Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop.
Neither Andrew F. nor I have read it yet. ) Back to Sullivan: the only useful thing the administration could have done was AIDS prevention education. Let's be honest with ourselves: would a seventy-something conservative president's entreaties for protected sex have been followed by the target audience at risk? (Sure, ex-governor Reagan had campaigned against a failed homophobic 1978 California ballot initiative, but what had the wrinkled Goldwaterite done for the gay community lately in '82? ) Based on what I have seen among today's young sexual cognoscentti (straights typically worse than gays), many at risk have not learned a damned thing in the decades since, to their own detriment. One ignorant myth believed by many Educated Acquaintances of Mine is that Reagan either never mentioned AIDS, never mentioned it until his last year in office, and/or kept the federal government from fighting it. Reagan mentioned AIDS several times in his 1986 state of the union address. The latest he first mentioned it was September, 1985: perhaps unforgivably late, but empirically true. Look it up if you don't believe Sullivan, Murdock and myself. Now that you know the "no mention! " tale is a lie, it is Your Responsibility to correct it whenever it comes up around you. Should you neglect this duty, you have Neither Mental Nor Political Integrity. If the intelligentsia cannot look after its own ideas' credibility, it devalues itself completely.
HIV/AIDS caught everyone by surprise, from bathhouses that resisted inspection or shutdown to a White House (and Washington press corps) that looked on the gay community as alien, contemptible and laughable; to a medical community that did not screen hemophiliacs' transfusions until tragedy struck far too many. As the administration increasingly discussed and funded the fight against HIV-AIDS during the '80s, they never apologized for their snide public attitude toward citizens they would at first help only quietly and reluctantly. The paradox, that the federal government would have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research before its chief executive leadership would discuss it, is rather telling.
It speaks volumes about the gap between political style and rhetoric, on the one hand, and the astonishingly large number of activities and sums of money that an otherwise hostile administration might sign into law. It reminds us that none of our elected governments can remain an intractable monolith. A sincere apology for cruel attitudes by some still-living figure from the administration would be in order.
Sullivan nominates Larry Speakes, and I second the motion. Elder George Bush, as far as I can tell, did his penance by funding research and education as the next president of the AIDS age; these were my sixth through tenth grade years, and the times had clearly begun to change. Koop was an honorable man who did what he could, then added a Cabinet-level mea culpa on the public record, according to Dr. Fisher. Reagan's foreign policy staff was probably not involved in this health discussion; now the younger George Bush lists halting the ruinous advance of HIV/AIDS in the developing world as a pressing priority, even as he rattles the saber of a heterosexual marriage amendment (that much of his own party opposes). We have come a long way, even if we have farther to go. We don't need to misunderstand the past in order to make ourselves feel more enlightened, either: quite the opposite. 
