Gay community harbours bitter memories of Reagan

AS TENS of thousands of Americans were paying their respects at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, a group of dissenting voices were making themselves heard.

The death of Ronald Reagan has gone largely unmourned by America’s gay community, which harbours bitter memories of the former president’s indifference to the emerging AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. And in a 2001 speech at a national symposium on US AIDS Policy, C Everett Koop, Reagan’s surgeon general, said Reagan’s advisors believed AIDS sufferers were “getting what they deserved”. “Because transmission of AIDS was understood primarily in the homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs, the advisors to the president took the stand that they are only getting what they justly deserve,” Dr Koop said.

As the eulogies poured in at home and around the world, gay activists offered a sharply divergent verdict on the Reagan presidency, which they see as tainted with the blood of thousands of victims of the HIV epidemic.

“It wasn’t just that he ignored the AIDS crisis,” said Mark Milano, an HIV treatment educator who has been living with the virus since 1981. “What was so unconscionable was that he and members of his administration actually took a pro-active decision to do nothing about it.”

Initial public awareness of AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) dates back to the early days of Mr Reagan’s first term, with the publication of a New York Times article in 1981 that detailed a rare cancer being seen in the homosexual community. The acronym AIDS was first used in 1982 when 1,500 Americans were diagnosed with the disease. Mr Reagan, as gay activists point out, never mentioned the word in public until 1987, by which time some 60,000 cases had been diagnosed, of whom half had died.