Re: Ronald Reagan’s Real Legacy: Death, Heartache and Silence Over AIDS

Geesh, you are one little hateful, vile revisionist aren't ya Lil Tommie? 

 

I really don't think you would know the truth if it kicked you right square in the ass, of which I doubt you even have enough to sit down upon,.

 

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 11:57 PM, Tommy News <tommysnews@gmail.com> wrote:

Ronald Reagan's Real Legacy: Death, Heartache and Silence Over AIDS
by Karen Ocamb on February 6, 2011 | 12:12 PM


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."

More:
http://www.lgbtpov.com/2011/02/ronald-reagans-real-legacy-death-heartache-and-silence-over-aids/
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy

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