‘Screw You, Ronald Reagan’

By Rod Dreher • June 22, 2012, 1:03 PM

President Obama invites gay activists to the White House, and a couple respond by having themselves photographed making an obscene gesture towards a portrait of President Reagan. Classy! According to Philadelphia Magazine:

“It’s not a gesture that I would use in the White House when representing our city and our community,” opines Philadelphia Gay News publisher Mark Segal (center), who opted for a sarcastic thumbs-up pose in front of the portrait of George W. Bush over the more vulgar one demonstrated by his Reagan-loathing peers, Matthew “Matty” Hart (left), the national director of public engagement at Solutions for Progress, and self-taught photographer turned toast-of-the-town Zoe Strauss (right).

“I have friends who work in that building,” Segal explains. “I’m not going to do something that could embarrass them or that could somehow damage a campaign that is so important. ‘Be on your best behavior,’ my staff told me.’ I think they know me too well.”

Seriously, with friends like that, Obama needs enemies? Bet he’ll think twice before inviting those self-righteous jerks back. You don’t have to give a fig for Ronald Reagan in order to show basic respect for the occasion, and the present occupant of the office, who is, after all, your host.

Posted in Gay Marriage, Presidential politics. Tagged Barack Obama, gay rights, Ronald Reagan, White House.

82 Responses to ‘Screw You, Ronald Reagan’

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Joseph says:

June 23, 2012 at 12:35 am

“I don’t care if people spite Reagan for failing to respond as he ought to have done, but this idea that promiscuous gay men of the era were innocents who would have lived if not for Ronald Reagan is nonsense.”

I read the Band Played On and based on that book that’s exactly what would have been the case. One of Shilts key points was that this was a public health crisis that required a public health response. This response involved dealing with gay men’s sexual behavior. This made me people feel icky and uncomfortable so they just ignored it.

Imagine in 1980, straight male teenagers (paragons of sexual virtue I know) started dropping dead from a mysterious disease. You are telling me that the governments public health response wouldn’t have been markedly different and would have reduced the number of deaths?

Reagan shares large amount of blame for that response.
AtlasObjectivist says:

June 23, 2012 at 12:37 am

Disgusting behavior and a poor reflection on Obama as well. People should call Mr. Hart and express their opinion directly – 267-825-4270.
Sean Nelson says:

June 23, 2012 at 12:56 am

There are no excuses. Period. It’s time to grow up and stop blaming Reagan for one’s self-destructive behavior, whether through promiscuity or drugs (or both), that got you into that mess in the first place, and nothing has changed.

Please stop misrepresenting your opponents’ arguments. There’s no excuse for it: they’re right there for you to read. If anyone is “steering the audience from the facts,” it’s the person misrepresenting the other side’s position.

No one blames Reagan for how they contracted AIDS. They blame Reagan for allowing them to die once they had the disease. For not, apparently, caring if they lived or died. For doing nothing to save their lives, or protect the lives of others as this new, mysterious disease piled up bodies by the tens of thousands.
Mitchell Young says:

June 23, 2012 at 3:30 am

In a sane society the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as well as all the other off-the-charts rates of STDs among active homosexual men, would have vindicated the relatively mild stigmatization of male homosexuality that existed in the Anglo-sphere before, say, 1975 or so.
James C. says:

June 23, 2012 at 4:02 am

Unfortunately, the numbers are even worse:

New HIV Infections2

In 2009, MSM accounted for 61% of new HIV infections in the US and 79% of infections among all newly infected men. Compared with other groups, MSM accounted for the largest numbers of new HIV infections in 2009.

Among all MSM, white MSM accounted for 11,400 (39%) new HIV infections in 2009. The largest number of new infections (3,400) occurred in those aged 40–49.

Among all MSM, black/African American MSM accounted for 10,800 (37%) new HIV infections in 2009. Whereas new HIV infections were relatively stable among MSM overall from 2006–2009, they increased 34% among young MSM—an increase largely due to a 48% increase among young black/African American MSM aged 13–29.

http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/msm/index.htm

The cost of HIV treatment is staggering. This, of course, is PREVENTABLE. I would also add that gay men have far higher rates of other STDs.

The money spent on HIV treatment and research is enormous, and federal funding for cancer research pales in comparison to HIV/AIDS research, yet cancer kills far more people.

So I think Rod has a good point. Reagan gets demonized because he didn’t place all his attention on the 2% of the population that is gay men. What gives? As if they needed a septuagenarian president to tell them that cutting down on promiscuous anal sex was a far easier and more efficient solution to the AIDS crisis than spending billions of taxpayer dollars on elusive treatments and vaccines. Prevention is the best medicine.
L617 says:

June 23, 2012 at 6:51 am

I’m a mid-40′s gay man who managed to avoid the HIV/AIDS issue throughout my youth, but I can recall the 80′s era outrage at the White House’s lack of response to this emerging national health crisis. It was clear to just about everyone at the time that the general population was at risk of this killer, but since AIDS only impacted (for the time being) the opponents of the religious right, nothing was done. The Reagan White House and those in a position to act or influence policy yet did nothing about AIDS acted in a completely immoral way and are deserving of contempt.

That said, I absolutely condemn those who flipped off the Reagan portrait. It’s not only ugly, but it’s juvenile.
JonF says:

June 23, 2012 at 8:16 am

Re: Could Reagan have done more to find a treatment, cure or vaccine for HIV as a practical matter? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Ronald Reagan was not a doctor or medical researcher, nor a junior god. And good grief, the sun does not rise in the Atlantic and set in the Pacific. If the American government supposedly dragged its heels aren’t other governments equally at fault?

To be fair to everyone, after the Salk vaccine put polio out of sight and out of mind, we thought we had infectious disease licked, that we not longer had to worry about anything deadly in that quarter because we had a cure or vaccine for everything that mattered. Nature undeceived us.
matt says:

June 23, 2012 at 9:01 am

But she did take this:

http://girlsclubcollection.org/wp-content/uploads/StraussZoe-MattressFlip2011-web.jpg
hwm says:

June 23, 2012 at 10:43 am

What could Reagan have done? There’s still no vaccine, and ARV’s have only become affordable and effective in the last ten years. If money was the problem, Liberace and Rock Hudson would still have been alive today.
If Reagan had followed recognised epidemiological protocols he would have looked for the source and isolated the contacts, which is what Castro did. That’s why Cuba has such a negligible HIV rate today. But just imagine the resulting outcry.
But hang on a bit folks; gonorrhoea and syphilis are rapidly becoming resistant to antibiotic treatment. So who are we going to blame then?
As you sow, you reap.
Sean Nelson says:

June 23, 2012 at 11:47 am

Ronald Reagan was not a doctor or medical researcher, nor a junior god.

No, he was President of the United States, with enormous power to persuade, inform, and direct funding. He wasn’t just some guy. With power comes responsibility.

If the American government supposedly dragged its heels aren’t other governments equally at fault?

Those weren’t Germans dying by the thousands in San Francisco, those were Americans. Let the Germans work out whether Helmut Kohl did what he should have done.
Geoff Guth says:

June 23, 2012 at 2:07 pm

JonF, George W. Bush proved pretty conclusively that Presidents can have a huge impact in this area, if they’re willing to engage the issue.

To everyone going on about how fault lies with the people who contracted HIV, you’re not saying anything we haven’t told ourselves (and frankly, said it much earlier, and better, and the more convincingly, in the case of Larry Kramer).

But I’d suggest this attitude of “they bought their tickets; I say, let ‘em crash!” (a little shout-out to Airplane! fans out there) is a huge part of the reason Christian conservatives are enjoying diminished clout today. On the one hand, you claim to endorse a faith of unrestricted love towards your fellow man. But, given a prime opportunity to practice what you preach, you not only avoid comforting the sick, you actively defend others doing so and attack the sick for their inappropriate lifestyle decisions. Not sure if I recall which particular Beatitude that is.

If you want a candid conversation about why a lot of gay men are the way they are, we can have that. I’m quite prepared to admit my own failings, which are many, and take a hard look at both my choices and the environment that enabled them. The question is, are you?

Given the recent hysterical reaction to the quite mild assertion that it’s wrong to bully kids to the point of suicide, I’d say probably not. In fact, the analogy between that discussion and this one is pretty strong, IMO.
JonF says:

June 23, 2012 at 4:13 pm

Re: George W. Bush proved pretty conclusively that Presidents can have a huge impact in this area, if they’re willing to engage the issue.

My point was that he general lack of alarm c 1982 about HIV was due to the fact that we had become very complacent about infectious disease. I recall when stories about HIV first broke; it was often paired with Herpes (an unpleasant but not fatal disease) as just another STD.

And realistically it’s hard to imagine anything Reagan personally could have done which would have gotten today’s meds on the market one day sooner. The heavy lifting on that had to be done by a whole lot of medical researchers all over the world.

Re: That’s why Cuba has such a negligible HIV rate today.

Yes because Cuba is a Communist dictatorship, one thing I thought conservatives had the great good sense not to want to copy. Cuba was and is free to trample on its people’s rights and throw anyone Sr Castro wants into a concentration camp. Which is what some idiot rightwingers wanted in this country too, despite the fact that HIV is very minimally contagious and posed less a threat to the general population than Hepatitis C, which spreads by similar means but is about ten times more virulent. Interesting that no one ever proposed rounding up the Hepatitis C victims and tossing them behind barbed wire where they could die out of sight and mind– but of course too many of them are heterosexuals, and we don’t do that to them.
Rod Dreher says:

June 23, 2012 at 5:00 pm

Yes because Cuba is a Communist dictatorship, one thing I thought conservatives had the great good sense not to want to copy.

I think you’re misreading him. He doesn’t want to copy Castro, but he’s simply saying if one wishes that the US government had acted according to strict epidemiological criteria back then, you would have had a situation a lot more like Castro’s Cuba than Reagan’s America. Is that really what we would have wanted?

Here it is 30+ years after AIDS, and we still have no anti-HIV vaccine. It is hard to imagine anything more that the government might do to retard the spread of the disease. People continue to smoke and die of lung cancer too, nearly 50 years after the Surgeon General’s report. This is not the government’s fault.
Thomas Aquinas says:

June 23, 2012 at 5:36 pm

If one believes that there is no rational basis for believing that male-female marriage is normative, then why show respect for the office of president? If marriage is a “Social Construction,” so much the worse for “president.” . If something as obvious as the way in which our sexual powers are ordered cannot convince you of its normatively, you’re not likely to be swayed by something that the social order–that includes respect for the presidency–carries any weight. If you’re nihilist about human nature, then anything goes, baby.
Geoff Guth says:

June 23, 2012 at 6:40 pm

JonF, OK, let’s stipulate 1982. Then what about 1983? 1984? 1985? 1986? It very rapidly became incredibly clear that this was a terrible scourge. And Reagan ignored it completely, due, many seem to have concluded, to the fact that it was politically convenient for his Moral Majority allies to point at AIDS as a divine judgment on people they didn’t like.

The question of research funding aside (which Reagan could have pushed for, as could the Democrat-controlled Congresses of the time), the symbolic power and prestige of the Presidency is absolutely something he could have employed. He could have at the very last said something, acknowledged that something terrible was happening. He did nothing, which pretty much summed up the attitude: as long as it’s only gay guys dying horrifically, no-one cares. Their lives are worthless anyways.

And, as I said above, this thread has pretty much confirmed that that attitude is style prevalent among a lot on conservatives, which is pretty amusing (in a really dark and bitter way) coming from a constituency that insists on calling itself “pro-life”.

As for Mr. Dreher, I’ll make one more attempt to help you understand. Consider your reaction to your sister’s death. Now imagine that happening on a monthly, weekly, even daily basis. And going through it all while waiting for the other shoe to drop on your own health.

That’s the magnitude of the disaster that Reagan ignored. It’s something that was on a scale that is so totally beyond your experience that I can totally understand why you don’t understand the depth of feelings towards Reagan. I’m just asking for a little empathy here. Imagine Ruthie after Ruthie after Ruthie, the ghosts piling up around you. I can’t think of another analogous situation. Maybe the trenches of WWI.
Rod Dreher says:

June 23, 2012 at 9:47 pm

Consider your reaction to your sister’s death. Now imagine that happening on a monthly, weekly, even daily basis. And going through it all while waiting for the other shoe to drop on your own health.

That’s the magnitude of the disaster that Reagan ignored.

Geoff, I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic. What I don’t understand is why AIDS deaths are, or were, deemed as more urgent than, say, lung cancer deaths.

For 2007, the last year for which we have statistics, 158,000 Americans died of lung cancer. You know how many Americans had died of AIDS, cumulatively by 1986? 16,301. About 3,000 died that year. By the time Reagan left office, 26,000 Americans cumulatively had died from AIDS.

You know how many Americans died of lung cancer, in that time, according to official estimates? 1,120,000.

Percentage of AIDS deaths, versus percentage of lung cancer deaths in the same period: 4.3 percent.

If your friends are family were among the 4.3 percent, of course it’s huge to you. I don’t deny that. But, with respect, I think your closeness to the disease distorts your perspective. if we’re talking about sheer numbers, AIDS likely received a disproportionate amount of attention, versus lung cancer. If the numbers of people dying of a disease is the metric by which we decide whether or not the president of the United States must speak of a disease, then why didn’t Reagan talk about lung cancer every single day?
Siarlys Jenkins says:

June 23, 2012 at 10:49 pm

“Older Comments” STILL isn’t working, although I believe just about every regular here has highlighted the problem once each.

Is anyone working on fixing this?
Geoff Guth says:

June 24, 2012 at 5:29 am

Re: the comparison with lung cancer.

The difference, if course is that lung cancer is something the Surgeon General and the American health establishment was very much focused and engaged on, in spite, I might add, of vigorous opposition from the tobacco industry.

Reagan didn’t advocate for a proportionate response to AIDS; he ignored it completely.

You could make the argument that the subsequent response, after ACT UP!, after the intense lobbying and the mobilization of the nascent political power of the gay community (and in that sense, AIDS was a huge factor in teaching us how to fight later battles), you might argue that funding and research was disproportionate, or at least overcompensating for the neglect of the Reagan years. Then again, HIV and AIDS have led to both a much fuller understanding of the human immune system in general as well as creating the field of anti-viral drugs, which is having spin-off benefits for all kinds of research well beyond HIV. I think it’s worth pointing out that HIV research was directly responsible for research leading to treatments for other viral diseases, including hepatitis, herpes, even flu.

But this is a commentary on Reagan’s actions as President. You can’t point to the actions of his successors and argue that that makes up for his failure to act.
Geoff Guth says:

June 24, 2012 at 5:42 am

James C., your skill at demolishing straw men is astounding.

No-one had ever suggested that Reagan should have focused “all his attention” on AIDS. The suggestion is that he should have put SOME attention on it. Even just a little. Even a brief mention. He didn’t.

On the topic of an ounce of prevention being worth more than a pound of cure, well duh. You’ve managed to encapsulate much of what ails American health care today. But unless you’re also going to complain about expensive bypass surgery for people who insist on eating cheeseburgers or expensive cancer treatments for people who insist on smoking or eating a poor diet or expensive insulin monitoring and injections for people who can’t be bothered to exercise, then all you’re doing is engaging in the same old double standards. Gay guys are doing stuff I don’t like so they shouldn’t be treated, but the results of my bad habits are a completely different story!
JonF says:

June 24, 2012 at 7:22 am

Re: And Reagan ignored it completely, due, many seem to have concluded, to the fact that it was politically convenient for his Moral Majority allies to point at AIDS as a divine judgment on people they didn’t like.

Ronald Reagan never struck me as being a particularly religious person, so I don’t buy into the picture of him dismissing AIDS as divine wrath. What he did strike me as, was a person with a fairly narrow but intense focus: for him that meant the Soviet Union and the Cold War, once his main domestic agenda (tax cuts) was achieved. Yes, he can be blamed for that inattention certainly, but I would not ascribe deliberate malice to it. Also, we shouldn’t discount the “bubble” effect such a high office imposes. An information junkie president (Clinton) can overcome it, but unless a president makes a severe effort to keep up with what is happening in the world of everyday people it’s very easy for him to drift badly out of touch, his knowledge limited to what his people tell him he should know. Bush 43 of course was a textbook example, and even Obama seems to suffer from a touch of this. I actually do not think Reagan realized the extent of AIDS until Rock Hudson died, after which the federal government’s response did become much more energetic.

Rod, AIDS is contagious, if only minimally, whereas lung cancer is not. That does count for something in determining the energy we put into fighting a disease. A better question might be why there appears to be less focus of Hepatitis C.
JonF says:

June 24, 2012 at 7:35 am

Re: if one wishes that the US government had acted according to strict epidemiological criteria back then, you would have had a situation a lot more like Castro’s Cuba than Reagan’s America.

Nonsense. Castro’s response to AIDS was as much a wrong-minded and probably malicious overreaction as that of the people who tried to drive Ryan White out of his home. HIV is minimally contagious; quarantine is not medically indicated for diseases that do not have an easy and efficient (generally, airborne) means of spreading through the populace. Note (again) that there has not been one whisper of “quarantine” for Hepatitis C victims despite the fact that it’s about an order of magnitude more transmissable than HIV.
The proper response to HIV was (as Surgeon General Koop, an actual physician, urged), Education, Education, Education (and condoms). Which of course discomfitted the neo-Prudes because it entailed discussing some of the ickier realities of biological life. Well, too bad, but that’s what has helped stem the epidemic. No doubt the late Victorians had similar conniptions when they had to start talking about human waste and their woefully inadequate facilities for the disposal thereof- but doing so is what drove cholera out of Europe and America long before the first antibiotics. Knowledge has strong disinfectant properties.
MH - Secular Misanthropist says:

June 24, 2012 at 11:44 am

JonF, I’d say you are on the spot with your Reagan characterization. Your last post about HIV, Cuba, and hepatitis C was really good.
Mitchell Young says:

June 24, 2012 at 12:41 pm

The lung cancer analogy is telling.

The government’s message for lung cancer prevention is simply ‘just say no’ to smoking. Not ‘smoke filtered cigs’, not ‘try to cut back’ — just don’t do it. Indeed currently both California and the Feds have some quite brutal advertising trying to shame (in the first case, due to public health and pollution concerned) and scare (in the second case, featuring people with stomas, emphysema etc) us straight.

Imagine what the analog with the HIV/AIDs situation would be. ‘Men, don’t have sex with men’, ‘don’t be a prostitute’, ‘don’t shoot IV drugs’. That would cover something like 75-85 percent of all infections. And, of course, the latter two are already illegal. So the real analogous ‘public awareness’ campaign would be, in effect, and anti-’gay’ message.
J says:

June 24, 2012 at 1:58 pm

Yes, he can be blamed for that inattention certainly, but I would not ascribe deliberate malice to it.

The problem wasn’t personal. It was the combination of the ‘government is the problem’ politics adopted as doctrine and the social politics of Reaganism in which Left-identified separatisms (but not Right-identified separatisms) were to be crushed with force if necessary and/or deprived of lifelines.

Government has a duty to deal with high risk dangers to the public welfare. Epidemics of lethal diseases are certainly such dangers. Once HIV was know to be a viral disease it was obvious that could spread to any population- and in fact did so via blood transfusions. For example, a lot of the American hemophiliac population, many of them children, died of AIDS in the mid/late 1980s.

The Reagan era was a callous time. As Joan Didion pointed out, it was when stupidity became respectable in American public life and more or less became identified with conservatives.
Sean Nelson says:

June 24, 2012 at 4:17 pm

“The lung cancer analogy is telling.”

Yes, Mitchell, it’s telling that you can’t tell the difference between a sexually-transmitted virus and a carcinogen. Even when JonF’s rebuttal was already up when you posted.

I’ll give you this, though. Education did work. Thankfully, the people who put those guidelines together weren’t so stupid as to believe that a “just say no to being gay” campaign was likely to be effective. The “real” public awareness campaign REALLY happened, and partly because it wasn’t simply “anti-gay,” it worked pretty well in the end.

Why bother imagining a hypothetical (but emotionally satisfying) alternate scenario in which AIDS infection go down AND you get to keep claiming gays are untermenschen when what happened in the real world actually ended up working without all that repression?
Geoff Guth says:

June 24, 2012 at 4:55 pm

With respect to Reagan’s motivation, it’s hard to second guess. From what I’ve heard he was a genuinely decent fellow to the individual gay men he’d met in Hollywood.

But I’d go a bit further than the benign neglect theory. All Presidents know how to walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s a big part of the job. I do think it’s impossible to neglect the influence of social conservatives here. The ’80s, after all, is when they really took charge of the GOP and began purging its liberal elements (remember in the ’70s, the GOP actually pushed for the ERA!) So I’m more inclined to think that his advisors decided that AIDS was a political minefield that could get Reagan in trouble with an important new constituency, especially right before the 1984 election. I personally see it as a cowardly move made possible by the pariah status of the gay community.

This is part of the prism through which social conservatism is understood among most gay men, incidentally. If you wonder why Christian conservatives are so utterly reviled, it’s not just because of how individuals from religious families were treated upon coming out, but specifically how their influence played out in the government’s response, or lack thereof, to AIDS. In our community, Christian conservatives are often seen as having blood on their hands and being, to this day, unapologetic and even proud of it.

That’s why Christian animus is the first place many gay people go when it comes to other arguments, like bullying or marriage or whatever. It’s more than just our individual experience of Christianity, but the group’s core understanding of what Christianity represents, socially and politically, in much the same way as many commenters here seem to understand homosexuality first and foremost to be about promiscuity.

In both cases, there’s a core of truth to the stereotype, though in both cases it’s ridiculous to reduce the entire understanding to that core stereotype. I think one big difference though is that gay men will generally own our promiscuity, and even in some cases embrace it. Christians have only very, very rarely and very, very recently begun to admit to the core truths about how un-Christian they’ve been in the treatment of homosexuals.
JonF says:

June 24, 2012 at 5:42 pm

Re: Imagine what the analog with the HIV/AIDs situation would be.

And the analog for preventing traffic deaths would be: “Do not ever drive or ride in a car as a passenger”. Are you going to complain that instead we try to get people to wear seat belts and have insisted that our cars must have air bags?
Sam Haysom says:

June 24, 2012 at 8:07 pm

Mitchell Young’s question remains: why are we more understanding of the vice of sodomy than the vice of smoking? Add to that the fact that smoking had the ancillary benefit of reducing obesity while the ancillary benefits of sodomy are less obvious. Indeed, it is quite remarkable how well the current anti smoking ads, focusing as they do on the disgusting side effects of smoking, would lend themselves to an-anti gay sex campaign namely by emphasizing the body wide lesions etc. that are associated with AIDS. For some reason, we instead opted for Wanda Sykes heroic campaign to stamp out the use of gay as a pegorative.

Indeed, cantagions have long played a role in tempering sexual indulgence. By in effect blaming conservative rather than the bathhouse culture which liberals were loathe to criticize liberals denied gays this stabilizing effect an effect that now seek to artificially and self-righteous impose through the chimera of gay marriage something few gays are interested in.

The sense I’m getting here is that smoking is worse than sodomy which is better than cars.
Sam Haysom says:

June 24, 2012 at 8:14 pm

It does raise an interesting question is Reagan more responsible for crack epidemic or aids. And who ultimately bears more blame for both Reagan or the CIA which created both.

Regardless though the entirel credit for ending the cold war goes to jimmy carter and tom hanks. Actually give Phillip Seymour hoffman a little credit too.
JonF says:

June 25, 2012 at 6:23 am

Re: Indeed, it is quite remarkable how well the current anti smoking ads, focusing as they do on the disgusting side effects of smoking, would lend themselves to an-anti gay sex campaign

STDs are not just transmitted by “gay sex”: microbes really do not care about the gender of whom they infect after all. A anti-gay sex campaign would just be an exercize in homophobia– the equivalent of opposing cigars (nasty, smelly things) while ignoring pipes and cigarettes. No, to be consistent here Mitchell Young (and you) should support an anti-sex campaign period.
And I ask again, where’s that anti-automobile campaign? Far more people are killed in traffic accidents than die of STDs. And by all means let’s start banning everything that can cause harm: bicycles– out with them! Skis– ditto. Sugary snacks and drinks– verboten! Alcohol– bring back Prohibition!
Mitchell Young says:

June 26, 2012 at 5:50 pm

JonF,

You are right that sex in general is a good way to spread disease, which is probably one of the reasons why there are (or were) so many taboos associated with it.

However,look at the CDC data on MSM (that’s Men having Sex with Men, *not* mainstream media). For most STDs, the disease rates for that group are so disproportionate as to be in a whole other league. A large of that is the nature of homosexual male sex (and yes, some heterosexual couples also engage in *the* risky practice, but far less proportionately and far less frequently). Male homosexual promiscuity also plays a huge role — and now that HIV is no longer necessarily a death sentence, we’ve seen disease rates among younger ‘gay’ males shoot up again.
Fran Macadam says:

December 23, 2012 at 12:44 pm

So surgeon gdneral Koop gets praised for his considerable practical efforts, while the man who went to the wall for him is condemned? Reagan stood by his appointee despite a firestorm of criticism.