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Although conservatives generated several ideas on how to fight the spread of AIDS, it is important to note that President Reagan himself did not even address the epidemic until 1985, a full four years after the disease had been discovered. While it is true that conservatives outside of the administration began to offer very controversial policy proposals on this issue prior to any official White house announcement, they were only able to do so because they didn’t have to cater to an electorate. Religious conservatives like Falwell, Patrick Buchanan (who wrote of “the poor homosexuals – they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution”) and William F. Buckley Jr. (who suggested that HIV+ men be identified as such with tattoos on their buttocks) wrote about AIDS in such a castigatory manner because they were not beholden to voters. President Reagan, on the other hand, was a politician, and up until the mid 1980’s (when AIDS paranoia among non- gays was reaching a high) there was no political benefit for him to speak out on AIDS. There was likewise little political benefit in mimicking the anti-gay rhetoric of the Christian right, which was already solidly in his corner. Reagan was silent for so long because the disease afflicted politically irrelevant groups: homosexuals and intravenous drug users.
When Reagan gave his first major address on the issue at an AIDS research foundation dinner held by Elizabeth Taylor, it was not a new concern for gay men that forced him to speak, but rather the increasing paranoia sweeping the nation regarding the exclusion of children with AIDS from public schools. Ultimately, it was politics, not public health concerns, that drove the AIDS debate in the 1980’s, and Reagan was a master of political arts. His silence on the issue caused a great deal of consternation amongst gay activists, and rightly so.
But all too often, people conflate the Reagan administration with President Reagan himself. Most gays would probably be surprised to learn that the Reagans were the first presidential couple to host a gay couple at the White House, in the Lincoln bedroom no less. While he was governor of California, Reagan was an outspoken opponent of a 1978 ballot initiative that would have prohibited open gays from teaching in public schools. It was not an issue that he had to speak out against, but speak out he did. As a Hollywood actor, Reagan certainly counted many gays as friends, not the least of whom was Rock Hudson. That Reagan was a homophobe and wished gays a miserable death, as CBS’s abortive docudrama “The Reagans” would have you believe, is a falsehood.
No one is perfect and no presidential administration is perfect—certainly not Ronald Reagan’s. But by the mid 1980’s, it had become unmistakably clear that AIDS was being transmitted within the gay male community via the large number of gay men having unprotected sex with many partners. Since this was the main route for disease transmission, there was only so much the Federal government could do. Saying this was, and still is, treading through dangerous political waters, and many gay leaders balked at castigating gay men for practicing a lifestyle they considered the apotheosis of gay liberation. Because bathhouses were one of the main loci of AIDS transmission, they became an early target of municipal health agencies. Despite the obvious public health risk posed by the bathhouses, Radical gays viewed the anti-bathhouse movement as an attempt by straight America (and traitorous gays) to repress homosexuals even further, to strip them of their rights to associate and engage in consensual sexual activity. While these fears should be understood in the context of a period in American politics when the right was far more openly homophobic than it is today, many gay leaders and groups responded in an irresponsibly stubborn manner that only led to further infection and death. Randy Shilts, the respected gay author who penned the definitive work about the AIDS epidemic And the Band Played On wrote, “…people died while gay community leaders played politics with the disease, putting political dogma ahead of the preservation of human life.”
These are words that gays should consider before they so quickly cast stones at the legacy of Ronald Reagan.
James Kirchick is a senior in Pierson College and a columnist for the Yale Daily News
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