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| Nancy and Ronald Reagan |
President Reagan is long-revered because he was a president that looked like a movie star (most likely because he was one), and who ushered in an iconic new day for conservatives. Long associated with either the moderation of Eisenhower or the corruption of Nixon, the Republicans in 1980 did what would have been nearly impossible even four years earlier-elected a very conservative man to the White House. Reagan's time in office is remembered fondly by conservatives for his economic policies (which I'll quibble caused a lot of the inequality of today, but that's a different article in itself, so I'll leave that alone for now), as well as for the conservative glamour of the era. Admittedly, not since Jack and Jackie had a couple so well-adapted to the glitz of the White House, with Nancy throwing elegant soirees that brought Bob Hope and Princess Diana to the White House. Looking at the pictures, it's hard to believe that this wasn't just the best of times, but for thousands of Americans, many just like me, it was hell.
That's because the 1980's for a gay man is about dying. I didn't grew up in the 1980's, but I was haunted by its specter as a young closeted youth, as AIDS was the first thing I learned about gay people-that this was what was going to kill me. Had I been born 15-20 years earlier, I almost certainly would have died from the disease. I look at gay men in their 50's and 60's and marvel how they survived, perhaps out of luck or chance or not getting caught in the Russian roulette of the early stages of the disease, but I view those who stood up for those suffering at the time as true heroes of that age, people who risked their reputations and their careers to help their fellow Americans who were dying all around them.
President and Mrs. Reagan were not those people. It took President Reagan five years to acknowledge the AIDS crisis and this was only after a question from a reporter, despite at that point thousands of his young gay citizens dying all around them. Instead, his White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes would laugh and make homophobic jokes when journalists would ask about the AIDS crisis, dismissing it out-of-hand as something that didn't affect the White House, and implying the journalist might have be gay just for knowing about the disease. Reagan's first policy speech about AIDS happened in 1987, at which point over 20,000 people had died of the disease. The Reagans knew of the disease first-hand as their longtime friend Rock Hudson was dying from the disease, and yet they refused to acknowledge it publicly or aid him in getting treatment (he famously reached out to Nancy just to get a refusal over wanting to be involved with the "gay disease"). The first significant legislation to help curb the AIDS crisis wouldn't occur until 1990, during the administration of his predecessor (George HW Bush with the Ryan White Care Act), and really AIDS wouldn't be taken seriously by a presidential administration until the tenure of Bill Clinton, who passed a number of measures to help curb the epidemic and find a cure. Reagan's "Morning in America" didn't account for gay men-they were viewed as criminals and degenerates by his administration.
The fact that he ignored gay people may be an inconvenient fact for Republicans who don't have a more recent president to look at as a hero, but it's a fact. Had I been born a bit earlier, I would have likely died from a "cancer" that the Reagan administration did nothing to curb and made jokes about in the Press Office; young gay men's immune systems being torn asunder was nothing more than punchline to them. I'm all for helping to stop the opioid crisis, but don't do it by further marginalizing a group that Reagan and the Republican Party spent a decade ignoring. In fact, perhaps Christie doesn't need a history lesson after all-dismissing the AIDS epidemic and treating Reagan like a hero seem to go hand-in-hand.
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