A commentary by author and ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer, slated for the July 6th issue of The Advocate (on sale June 22), is making the rounds of the 'net. It's headlined "Adolf Reagan," and the Hitler/Reagan comparisons aren't limited to the title. Kramer begins his polemic:
Our murderer is dead. The man who murdered more gay people than anyone in the entire history of the world, is dead. More people than Hitler even.
Andrew Sullivan has a well-reasoned response
on his andrewsullivan.com blog to this kind of anti-Reagan
hyperbole. Sullivan writes that once the epidemic became
evident:
Many people most at risk were aware -- mostly too late, alas -- that unprotected sex had become fatal in the late 1970s and still was. You can read Randy Shilts' bracing And The Band Played On to see how some of the resistance to those warnings came from within the gay movement itself. In the polarized atmosphere of the beleaguered gay ghettoes of the 1980s, one also wonders what an instruction from Ronald Reagan to wear condoms would have accomplished.
As for research, we didn't even know what HIV was until 1983. Nevertheless, the Reagan presidency spent some $5.7 billion on HIV in its two terms -- not peanuts. The resources increased by 450 percent in 1983, 134 percent in 1984, 99 percent the next year and 148 percent the year after.
And than there's the oft-repeated charge, or variants thereof, that Reagan never mentioned AIDS until a 1987 speech. For instance, writes Matt Foreman, head of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force:
AIDS was first reported in 1981, but President Reagan could not bring himself to address the plague until March 31, 1987, at which time there were 60,000 reported cases of full-blown AIDS and 30,000 deaths.
But the New York Times, in an article dated September 18, 1985 and titled "Reagan Defends Financing for AIDS," reported:
President Reagan, who has been accused of public indifference to the AIDS crisis by groups representing victims of the deadly disease, said last night that his Administration was already making a "vital contribution" to research on the disease....
Mr. Reagan said that he had been supporting research into AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, for the last four years and that the effort was a "top priority" for the Administration.
No, Reagan didn't poison the drinking water or otherwise engage
in "murder." Could and should he have done more to let people know
his government cared about their plight? Yes. Did his efforts to
embrace the religious right as part of the GOP coalition give power
and prestige to some very bad people? Yes. But that's far from what
some are accusing him of. It seems the extremes of both the left
and the right are united in their need to express a daily dose of
hate and vitriol.