Andrew Sullivan has a very good post on AIDS and Reagan (he also <a href=”http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_06_06_dish_archive.html#10866721681460437

” target=”_blank”> responds to Ramesh.)

Having grown-up in New York City during the 1980s, when ACT-UP seemed to be acting up everywhere, I never understood the obsession with Reagan and AIDS. As Sullivan says, Reagan could probably have done and said more earlier, but there was this almost mystical notion at the time that if Reagan would say the word “AIDS” it would be half-way to cured. Part of it, it seemed to me, was a desire to paint AIDS as an affliction that could hit anybody at any time no matter what their orientation or the type of activity they engaged in. Some people believed this to be true. But it was also very clear, at least on a cultural level, that a lot of people wanted this to be true. Many felt that homosexuals wouldn’t get any help from the federal government unless the threat of the disease was expanded beyond a politically marginal population. Fair enough, but at the same time we were being inundated with exhortations about the need to have a “full and frank” discussion about AIDS anybody who refused to toe the left’s line on the issue was shouted down. Anybody remember the reception of Michael Fumento’s The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS? In effect it wasn’t a full-and-frank discussion the gay left wanted, it was mandated ideological conformity.