I try to remember what it was like when the AIDS epidemic first hit in the early 1980s. It’s true that it took a while to really understand what was happening, how it was transmitted, and what might be done about it. For these reasons, I’ve always been willing to cut the Reagan administration a tiny bit of slack for their slow response. But the thing that has always really bothered me about it is that the Reagans were uniquely positioned to have an early insight into the impact of the disease by virtue of all their connections to the artistic community, particularly in Hollywood. It’s true that Reagan was put in office by a conservative coalition that was, by disposition, unsympathetic to a disease that was associated with homosexuality and promiscuity. But the Reagans themselves were personally touched by the epidemic almost immediately.
Rock Hudson didn’t reach out for their help until 1985 when he was already on death’s door, but by that time the retrovirus had been identified and Hollywood had been grappling with the impact for several years. By March 1984, Joan Rivers, a friend of the Reagans, had already fronted a major fundraiser.
The spin here is that the Reagans didn’t help Rock Hudson get treatment in France because they didn’t want to show favoritism to a friend, but the truth is that they didn’t want to listen to the people they knew who were trying to get them to move on the issue.
Some favoritism would have been preferable to their indifference. And the excuse that no one understood is less available to the Reagans than it would have been to, say, the Bushes.
I was gonna write about this at the Pond. What shitty, rotten people.
The spin here is that the Reagans didn’t help Rock Hudson get treatment in France because they didn’t want to show favoritism to a friend, …
If so, it goes to show just what kind of friends they were. Not very good ones.
I remember, back in the early 80’s, when I first read about AIDS in a long Village Voice article.
They said the disease was “contained” within the Gay and Haitian communities.
Well, I wasn’t gay, and I’m not Haitian, so, while I felt bad about this horrible disease, it wouldn’t effect me.
Then, it came out that it could easily cross-over into the heterosexual community.
I was in my early-mid 20’s, living in NY City, and dating a lot of female dancers, models, and actresses.
And I realized that, while not many, but some of my sexual partner’s were probably bi-sexual, and I could get AIDS through them!
Well, let me tell you, NY City went into a virtual sexual lockdown for about a year.
No certificate from the Board of Health that you were AIDS-free – no nookie tonight!!!
And then, finally, the Reagan mis-administration saw reason, and federal money was spent on explaining, and minimizing the spread of this horrible disease.
Man, back then, I wished I was 5 years older, so that I could have enjoyed NYC’s dating life a little longer.
After AIDS came out, it was never the same as I must have been in the 60’s & 70’s….
Would that have been when Rupert Murdoch owned the Voice?
I think, before.
I didn’t even know who the hell he was until he bought the NY Post – a paper too foul to wrap a dead fish in, because it’s an insult to the intellect of the poor dead fisth
CNNRupert Mudoch Fast Facts:
1977 – Purchase New York Magazine, Corp., which includes New York magazine and The Village Voice. Murdoch has since sold both The Village Voice and New York magazine.
Chicago Tribune 6/21/85:
News Corp. Ltd., a company controlled by Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch, said it sold the Village Voice weekly newspaper to Leonard Stern for “in excess of $55 million.“ Stern is chairman and chief executive officer of Hartz Mountain Industries, a pet-supplies and real estate development firm based in New Jersey. Murdoch disclosed last month that he planned to sell the Village Voice, a publication with a circulation of about 150,000 and an editorial stance far more liberal than most other Murdoch publications.
Then there was the lifelong GOP mover and shaker Roy Cohn. Of course everyone, including Cohn, pretended he wasn’t gay and wasn’t promiscuous. And it was liver cancer and not AIDS that killed him.
When people like me try to convince others that both the contemporary and historical conservatism is not just charmingly and forgivably misguided (oh, those wacky conservatives! They’re just doing their best and they’re occasionally on the mark) but instead sadistic and malicious HIV denialism is one of the first arrows in our quiver.
HIV denialism was just unadulterated, cackling evil. Conservatives didn’t even have the fig leaf of it benefiting people in the overclass, they just felt like hurting people and laughing about it. A lot of liberals about my age cite Iraq War as the point when conservatism crossed the line into one of the insane, boogeyman ideologies like fascism and communism, but I can’t help but imagine that HIV denial was Gen-X’s rude awakening. This is what conservatives are really like: not Ward Cleaver or Hank Hill or even Archie Bunker, but the evil villain in bad action movies who just want to see the world burn.
Whenever there is a new disease, or an unexpected outbreak of an old one, there is a massive response on the part of both the government and the media. That happened in the 1970s for the swine flu epidemic that never actually broke out. We see it today for the Ebola scare and the measles outbreak. When you think about the fact that one person in the US died of Ebola, it puts into vivid perspective how incredibly bizarre the lack of response to AIDS was in the Reagan years.
From the very start, I made sure that I was well informed about AIDS, since it was a life and death issue for me personally. However, to be informed about AIDS, there were only two sources: the gay press and medical journals. The press all but ignored AIDS.
Looking back at that era, it’s almost incomprehensible, but it is a fact. In the Reagan years, people were so uncomfortable with the very concept of homosexuality, that even when a major story broke out like people dropping dead from a mysterious disease, the press just refused to cover it.
There are other culprits besides Ronald Reagan. In the early years of AIDS, the epicenter of the disease was New York City. The mayor of New York at the time, Ed Koch, was almost certainly gay, but was closeted. The wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was a strange time. And it seems stranger and stranger as we get more perspective on it. The best book on the era is “And the Band Played On” by Randy Shilts, who died of AIDS in 1994.