Reply #54: Many people averted their eyes in those days. [View All]

[megatherium]

Even the NY Times ignored the epidemic in the early 1980s. They ran a front page story about a herpes virus that was killing a troupe of dancing stallions, at a time when they had not yet run a front page story about AIDS. (They were forced to apologize after a firestorm of criticism.) Time magazine had a big cover story in 1983 or so about "The End of the Sexual Revolution," which talked about dangers of sex (mainly herpes). I recall being furious that this long article devoted one paragraph to AIDS.

As far as Reagan goes, it now appears that he didn't really know anything about the disease until Rock Hudson (an old Hollywood friend of his) had it -- Reagan asked his personal physician about the disease. The real villains in the Reagan administration are probably Garry Bauer and Bill Bennett, Reagan's domestic policy advisers. They were well aware of the disease, and made the decision to ignore it. I doubt they envisioned the disease killing all the gay population, however; more likely they envisioned the disease damaging the gay rights movement politically, as well as discouraging people from being gay (they thought gay sexuality was a choice) -- no one in those days understood that the virus had such a high mortality rate or that hundreds of thousands of Americans already had been infected with it.