Among Ronald Reagan’s many enemies, the organized gay community may have been the most virulent. Not long after the former president died, veteran AIDS activist Larry Kramer wrote an article for the Advocate, a gay news magazine, entitled “Adolph Reagan.” His argument, as its title would imply, made the 40th president out to be worse than the Fuhrer. Talk to many gays today who lived through the 1980’s and they’ll tell you that Reagan was a homophobe responsible for the AIDS virus itself.
Not so fast. Reagan was far from being a homophobe. Nor were he and his administration the only ones to blame for the spread of AIDS in the 1980’s. The gay community itself shares much of the responsibility for the acceleration of the epidemic.
Debates over social issues dominated much of the political discourse during Reagan’s presidency. Reagan was elected with the crucial help of Christian Evangelicals, whose primary concern was protecting and preserving a “pro-family” agenda. This ideology prioritized controversial topics like abortion and school prayer, and the voters who helped Reagan in the 1980 election saw to it that his administration reflected and propagated the values of Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority.” Through the appointments of Gary Bauer as chief Domestic Policy Adviser and William Bennett as the Secretary of Education, the movement became enshrined in the Reagan administration itself.
Much of the politically conservative commentary concerning the AIDS crisis followed a religious logic that presumed AIDS to be God’s way of punishing the immorality and unnaturalness of homosexual sex. Yet there were are also secular conservative arguments concerning the spread of AIDS that had less to do with homosexuality itself than with the alleged excesses of male homosexuals. Comprehending the various and distinct facets of conservative political thought on the issue of AIDS is crucial to understanding modern AIDS policy and gay politics.
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