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Viva L'Reagan Revolution


Peter_Puget

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"I hate to be a pill, to piss on smoldering embers, no matter how warming, but the facts are these: it was neither Larry Kramer's hysterics, the courageous reporting of the New York Native, Everett Koop's blinding-hot moral flash or anything else that turned the tide of AIDS recognition in America and of AIDS research funding by the American government. It was nothing less or other than Ronald Reagan's sentimental - goddamnit - feelings for a fellow guy he just happened to like a whole hell of a lot from their Hollywood days, a guy called Rock Hudson who came down with the goddamn thing. And if you don't think them's the facts, go look them up. As our story winds down to a close, darlings, in the year 1985, rather than cut AIDS funding by ten million, Ronald Reagan - or more probably Nancy, as Ronnie was already, courtesy of Alzheimer's, more and more lunching out, though not in public - was upped to one hundred million, and, get this right please, a 270 percent increase in AIDS funding. You see, darlings, all that heaven allows written on the wind by tarnished angels is an imitation of life." - dialogue from James McCourt's "Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947 - 1985."

 

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Peter_Puget said:

"I hate to be a pill, to piss on smoldering embers, no matter how warming, but the facts are these: it was neither Larry Kramer's hysterics, the courageous reporting of the New York Native, Everett Koop's blinding-hot moral flash or anything else that turned the tide of AIDS recognition in America and of AIDS research funding by the American government. It was nothing less or other than Ronald Reagan's sentimental - goddamnit - feelings for a fellow guy he just happened to like a whole hell of a lot from their Hollywood days, a guy called Rock Hudson who came down with the goddamn thing. And if you don't think them's the facts, go look them up. As our story winds down to a close, darlings, in the year 1985, rather than cut AIDS funding by ten million, Ronald Reagan - or more probably Nancy, as Ronnie was already, courtesy of Alzheimer's, more and more lunching out, though not in public - was upped to one hundred million, and, get this right please, a 270 percent increase in AIDS funding. You see, darlings, all that heaven allows written on the wind by tarnished angels is an imitation of life." - dialogue from James McCourt's "Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947 - 1985."

 

Reagan ignored AIDS as a public health crisis because he considered it retribution from God against homosexuals. Only when AIDS had become an epidemic was he forced to do something about it.

 

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