First let me agree on public health services, woefully underfunded and misallocated then and now.

But your point about folks outside the gay community grapevine is off target. And, if anything, misinformation erred on the side of overstated risks. Perhaps heteros or even men having sex with men in Hicksville, Alabama, had inaccurate information and feared mosquitoes and drinking glasses. But that wasn’t who or where the epidemic was occuring.

Regardless of what they did or didn’t believe, by 1984 the vast majority of men who became infected by HIV did so with the knowledge that being a recipient in unprotected anal sex – virtually the sole factor at the time – was a risk for transmission. Few, if any, ever said “well I didn’t know I could be exposed to HIV if I did that!

And, in reality, I’m not sure any other president would have spent all that much more on HIV/AIDS or that it was what we were really calling for (we don’t exactly adore Dubya but he spent more on HIV/AIDS than anyone else combined).

HIV/AIDS was not (and is not) a facts problem; HIV/AIDS is a social problem. It didn’t spread – after discovery – due to a lack of knowledge but rather due to faulty decisions, chemical thinking, betrayed trust, fatalism, heat of the moment, and such. And these are all attributes of, and responses to, social attitudes about sex.

When told that all gay sex is evil and you are an abomination worse than a murderer or a child molester who is destined to get AIDS and burn for eternity in hell, it truly f*cks with your head. If safe sex makes you as much a monster as just going for it, and you’re going to get it anyway you nasty pervert, then why bother protecting yourself? If you are evil anyway, why care about whether you infect others?

(And our community’s contempt for “heteroconformists” who chose monogamy over the hotness of strangers surely didn’t help.)

We didn’t need more pamphlets. We needed a change in attitude. And this is where Ronald Reagan truly let us down.

In those moments when the response to a terrible disease was unyet developed, when the populace could have gone with either compassion or condemnation, a handful of truly awful people led the charge for hate.

And Ronald Reagan said nothing.

Sure, a lot of people said nothing, but his ability was unique and his voice was absent from a discussion that perhaps he alone could have reframed. And as Andrew said,

Reagan wasn’t known as the “Great Communicator” because everyone liked his message, but because of the efficacy with which he delivered it. To have that power silent at that critical time is such an incredible missed opportunity.

I don’t hate the man. I see his flaws and lament the horror of the missed opportunity, but can’t bring myself to hate him.

But if you must hate him, do it for the right reasons. It wasn’t his insufficient funding that could have prevented an epidemic. Rather, it was his failure to lead.

Just don’t let my bf read this thread – he grew up under Reagan, has 14 years more experience with him age-wise, was a politics major in the U.C. system, and absolutely loathes the man.

His situation sounds a lot like mine. I was well into my 20s and had had years as an aware teenager and adult living under presidents before Reagan. I remember him as a politician and his administration and his scummy underlings with loathing.

This country became SO MUCH WORSE after just a couple of years of Reagan as president, especially economically. He and his supporters are why we suddenly had masses of homelessness people nationwide for the first time in my memory, probably for the first time since the First Great Depression. He successfully brought far right economics into federal governance which did immense damage to this country.

Something like 60% of people liked or loved him and believe in that “Morning in America” crap, but the other 40% of us disliked or implacably hated him and his regime. He was the Great Disuniter, the Great Polariser, all the praise of him and his nasty retinue of far right California sleazebags notwithstanding.

He brought a bombastic, attacking style of rhetoric into national play, a type of expression that previously had been restricted to Southern California right wing conservatives, and ended the Fairness Doctrine, enabling the building of what is now the conservative media behemoth.

His admin enacted SO MANY bad policies. I remember that restrictions to the Freedom of Information Act came out of his administration so often that it seemed like a new restriction every few months.

As to AIDS, I remember when his HHS secretary Margaret Heckler said that we needed to stop AIDS before it reached the heterosexual population. As yes, the good old days. [/sarcasm]

As to AIDS awareness and money spent, I just don’t agree with you, Timothy. Everyone did NOT know how AIDS was spread by 1984. Unless you only count people well connected into the gay community grapevine. Outside that demographic, there was still great ignorance. And rightwingers, Reagan’s allies, were trying to fight AIDS awareness programs that were effective, ones that just happened to be most effective for gay people and people of color, because these rightwingers thought the language in those materials was too crude and explicit.

I question whether anyone familiar with what was going on and not hobbled by ideological blinders could honestly say that enough money was being spent on the fight against AIDS in the ’80s. Timothy, your claims on this reek of fiscal conservatism for its own sake.

And it’s true even now that significant demographics in this country are not served well by AIDS-related information and public health services.

While Reagan used the right but never catered to them, subsequent Republicans have been used by the right and catered to the point where young people see the party as beholding to haters and loons.

And while there may be an argument that Reagan made a calculated risk to pit economy against economy and in that way bankrupt the soviets, his followers in both parties just spent like drunken sailors without any strategic purpose to it.

I had only Two major problems with him. One was his willingness to cozy up to the religious right, the other were the massive deficits incurred. We outspent the soviets, and they collapsed under tHeir own mismanaged weight.

Giving Reagan responsibility for the Soviet leaders’ bad choices is about like claiming you won your war with your neighbor over his new fence because his house burned down last night when some wiring went bad and set the wall on fire.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!