NEW YORK, June 8 (AFP) - The death of Ronald Reagan has gone largely unmourned by America's gay community, which still harbours bitter memories of the former president's indifference to the emerging AIDs epidemic in the 1980s.
Even 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 scourge.
"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 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 more than 1,500 Americans were diagnosed with the disease.
Reagan, as gay activists still angrily 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.
The lack of major federal funding to combat AIDS as the disease took hold is cited by many as a major factor behind its dramatic spread.
In the critical years of 1984 and 1985, according to his White House physician, Reagan thought of AIDS as though "it was measles and would go away."
Lou Cannon, one of the most respected of Reagan biographers, wrote in his authoritative "President Reagan," that the president's response to the epidemic was "halting and ineffective."
And in a 2001 speech at a national symposium on US AIDS Policy, C. Everett Koop, Reagan's surgeon general, said that due to "intra-departmental politics" he was cut out of all AIDS discussions for the first five years of the Reagan administration.
"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, they are only getting what they justly deserve," Koop said.
Many gay activists refrain from labelling Reagan as personally homophobic, focusing instead on the record of his administration and the conservative agenda of the "New Right" and "Moral Majority" that flourished under his presidency.
"The government's response was dictated by the grip of evangelical Christian conservatives who saw gay people as sinners and AIDS as God's well-deserved punishment," said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
"I don't think that Reagan hated gay people," Foreman said. "But I do know that the Reagan administration's policies on AIDS and anything gay-related resulted -- and continue to result -- in despair and death."
Others voiced irritation with the media reaction to Reagan's death, arguing that the former president's inaction on AIDS had been forgotten in the rush to praise the victor of the Cold War.
Christopher Babick, a former executive director of the People with AIDS Coalition, wrote a letter published in The New York Times on Monday, sharply criticising the newspaper for failing to mention the AIDS epidemic once in its front-page obituary of the president.
"For years, we begged, we pleaded, we lobbied and we marched in the streets to get the attention of the 'Great Communicator'. Alas no support came," Babick said.
"AIDS, not the fall of the Berlin Wall, may very well be the marker by which Ronald Reagan's presidency is judged," he added.
But criticizing Reagan was a tough course even before the outpouring of emotion that followed his death.
In November, the CBS network was pressured into pulling a controversial mini-series about his presidency. The original screenplay quoted Reagan in a private conversation about AIDS as saying: "They that live in sin shall die in sin."
The series was finally aired on the pay-cable channel Showtime, but without the controversial line which, while almost certainly fictional, was seen by many in the gay community as an accurate representation of the Reagan adminstration's stance.
"I shed no tears at the passing of Ronald Reagan," Philip Hitchcock, an openly gay sculptor from Venice, California, wrote in another letter published Monday in The Los Angeles Times.
"My tears are and were for the hundreds of thousands of Americans with HIV on whom Mr. Reagan turned his back," he said. "I weep for the scores and scores of men whose names, one by one, I blacked out of my address book."
Additional Reading
1. Larry Kramer, Adolph Reagan, The Advocate, On sale June 22, 2004
2. Lawrence O. Gostin, Michael Kirby, The AIDS Pandemic: Complacency, Injustice, and Unfulfilled Expectations, 2004
3. Greg Behrman, The Invisible People : How the U.S. Has Slept Through the Global AIDS Pandemic, the Greatest Humanitarian Catastrophe of Our Time, 2004
4. Elinor Burkett, The Gravest Show on Earth: America in the Age of AIDS, 1996
5. Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. Available also on: VHS or DVD.
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