Part One: Ronald and Nancy Reagan: The Bastards Behind the AIDS Crisis

In Episode 25, Robert is joined by comedian Andy Beckerman (Couples Therapy Podcast) to discuss Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan and the AIDS crisis. When Robert started researching for this episode, he expected it would be a fairly straightforward episode about how homophobia and religious fundamentalism in the halls of American power led to an executive branch that fiddled while thousands of gay people died. The story he uncovered was very different, and somehow even more offensive, than the one he'd set out to research.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M Hey everybody, I'm Robert Evans and this is once
again behind the Bastards the Shore. We tell you everything
you don't know about the very worst people in all
of history. And we're just allowed beep in the room.
So if you look scared? Is everything okay? Everything's okay.
I'm sorry I had a nuclear device. Oh you need

(00:22):
to leave those outside. The guy with the nuke is
Andy Beckerman, our guest for today. Andy, how are you doing.
I'm as good as anyone can be in this uh
soupy nightmare we live in. Soupy is a good way
to describe it. Now, Andy, I'm gonna apologize right now
because we talked about what I was going to plug
for you, and then there was that beep and it
flew out of my mind. So why don't you plug
the thing that that we were? What's the thing why?

(00:44):
I am a co host of the Wonderful Couples Therapy
stand up show and podcast here on the Stuff Works Network.
A couple of therapy. We have stand ups who are lovers,
are best friends, or siblings do sets together about the relationship,
and then on the podcast we bring the best sets
to you and your coast and that is Naomi Pagan. Yeah,

(01:05):
from your episode he did about all the fringe Nazis. Yeah,
they're the non Nazi pieces of ship behind Hitler. She
was wonderful and I'm excited to talk with you today.
If I can push past the rage, it's a comedy. Well,
the good thing about today is that it'll be a
rage that's different from the rage that you're feeling about
everything in the news. I don't think so I have

(01:27):
a personal stake in this story, I believe. Well, yeah,
but like, okay, so where this is the day after
the Kavanaugh hearing, So so everybody's pretty angry, and this
is a thing to be angry about. That's involves a
lot of the same people, but it's slightly in the past. Sure,
I don't know. I believe when all this was going on,

(01:47):
I was watching Transformers in my you know, babysitters living room. Yeah, yeah,
we are. We're talking about a story from the eighties,
the story of the Reagans in the AIDS crisis, um
and the death of Optimist Prime. Well that is going
to play a role here. So yeah, we When I
started reaching this, I expected it was going to be
a pretty straightforward episode about how homophobia and religious fundamentalism

(02:09):
in the halls of American power led to an executive
branch that fiddled while thousands of gay people died of
a horrible disease. The story I uncovered was that, but
also somehow even more offensive than that. It was somehow
more frustrating in the story I thought I was going
to be telling. So great, Yeah, I guess. Roller coaster, Yeah,

(02:30):
roller coaster from nothing but trouble. You know, the one
that grinds you up into bones. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's exactly what we're going to do today. It's the
murder coaster, Yeah, from nothing but trouble. It's the opposite
of self care. That's today. So let's let's get into
it first. I'd like to start with, like, what what
do you know about Reagan's response to the AIDS epidemic.

(02:51):
I know that he ignored it for as long as possible,
that they labeled at grids at first, so that it
could kind of cordon off every everyone who had AIDS
at the or you know, HIV did even was there
any kind of scientific connection I remember the last no, no, no,
it seems like it started like that was just the

(03:13):
doctors giving it their best name, because it wasn't that
much later that they were like, no, no, actually AIDS
is a better thing to call it, and like they
can't like but it accrued other nicknames around the time,
um that were even more offensive. So like grids was
probably the most palatable nickname that had got before it
started being called AIDS. But um, yeah, it was pretty
it's pretty frustrating story. It was definitely uh yeah, I mean,

(03:36):
let's just get into it. Um, I've got it all
broken down here from time or by time. So ninety
eight is the first year that gay men in Western countries.
Sweden in the United States were the first countries where
Westerners started to get sick with what would become known
as aids. Uh. In nineteen eighty, when Ronald Reagan beat
Jimmy Carter, only about a couple of dozen Americans less
than thirty had perished quote unquote beat Jimmy Carter. Well,

(03:59):
wasn't there some like I mean he did, but like
the whole October surprise bs. Yeah, there was a lot
of shadiness that was done during the election, some of
which we're going to get into in a little bit,
but it was a pretty clean sweep aids, Oh, we're
gonna One of the things that's exciting to me about
this episode is the numerous opportunities will have to do
our Reagan voices. Well, can you read the whole thing

(04:20):
into making voice That might get a little bit old,
But I did two sentences. I think I picked the
right moments to try my Reagan voice out. But you know,
maybe we'll have us a Reagan on Reagan conversation because
there's two sides of Reagan we're going to see in
this episode, one of which is pretty sympathetic, it seems
like a guy who could have dealt with this crisis

(04:41):
in a reasonably woke manner, and one of which is
the Reagan that was actually president. Uh isn't the guy
that he betrayed everyone in sag Um during the McCarthy
hearings and everything. Yeah yeah, but I mean a lot
of people did that, including Khan, who was was also
a gay man but also a piece of ship, total

(05:02):
piece of ship. Isn't the character and Angels in America? Well,
he was one of the guys who win. McCarthy was
doing the house in an American Activities committee was asking people,
are you now or have you ever been a member
of the Communist Party, so he was. Anyway, what we're
getting so far, I can trace that. But I'm just
saying you can trace the darkness back decades. You can monsters,

(05:22):
you can trace the and I think the darkness that
you can trace back with Reagan to that period is
his not only to take any risks that hurt his career,
because I really do think that comes down to it
more than ideology in Reagan's case. But we'll see how
you feel at the end of this. I'm gonna present
all the evidence I have, um So. In June five,
the CDC reported that five young homosexual men in Los

(05:43):
Angeles had been treated for pneumo sisters karini, which is
a like a fungal lung infection that can that's life
threatening and it's only really found in people with very
compromised immune systems. And we know now that this is
one of those like you know, AIDS isn't what kills
you when your immune system gets you know, destroyed. These
little things that are always around us that normally we
don't get sick from. That's what's gets you and so right,

(06:04):
and they're in l A, which is a filthy town.
So well, I mean, that's one of its charms. But yeah,
you call it a charm. Uh. Two of these men
had died by the time the CDC reported it, and
on July four, the CDC reported eight more gay los
angeleos had been treated for Composi sarcoma, which is a
rare form of cancer that again only strikes people with

(06:25):
crippled immune systems. So no one knew what it was
at this point. Really, but doctors start to recognize the
nineteen eight one something really weird is happening, specifically in
like coastal cities and specifically to the gay populations, and
what's going on culturally? In one what movies are hot? Ship?
This isn't that far from Red Dawn, isn't wasn't that five? Yeah? Yeah,
something like that. I said, yes, I have no I've

(06:46):
no idea. I didn't prepare anything on the movies that
we're ready. But I'm guessing when to Dane Jones and
Nina jonesph was what eighty two Star Wars was hot?
People started dying from immuno deficiency. It was it was
beautiful era when we thought, boy, if we get three
good Star Wars movies. I don't think anyone will ever
ask for any more Star Wars movies. That'd be swell.

(07:08):
Uh yeah, what a time. Anyway, doctors around the country
gradually started to realize that something was wrong. Two hundred
and thirty four people died from AIDS over the course
of nineteen eighty one. When did they like name it?
That starts in like eight two, So like in nineteen
eighty one people die, President doesn't say anything. But at
this point it's small enough that like most presidents probably
wouldn't have addressed a thing that's like it's it's it's

(07:30):
still really little at this point. But on May eleventh,
nineteen eighty two, doctors identified the blood borne pathogen behind
all these deaths. So they realized that they're not like
a bunch of different things. There's one thing connecting these all. Uh.
And they call the new disease as you mentioned, gay
related immune deficiency syndrome so GRIDS. Eight hundred and fifty
three Americans died during nineteen eighty two, and a couple

(07:50):
of months after that in June of June nineteen eighty
two is when the term AIDS came into you. So
the medical community corrected pretty quickly. They started off, you know,
with the definitely bigoted position of like, well, let's just
lock this down as a gay disease. But within a
couple of months doctors were like, well, okay, that's not
what's happening, and we've made a mistake and they corrected.
But at this time, the more common names that were

(08:12):
used were yet people called it the gay plague or
gay cancer, like, so that was the more common term,
and Grids definitely reinforced that attitude. That sways my go
to reference for a character who's a disgusting homophobe and
also old he's got the gay pleg Grids will this

(08:34):
plague just came sweeping through the coasts. But by the way,
not a lot of opportunities to to riff on. No, no,
not really people dying of what turned out to be
a horrific, horrific disease. I mean, it doesn't We don't
have to riff because this would just be like a
heartbreaking conversation where we're both emotionally exhausted at the end
of it. Yeah, well, I mean that's life at this point, right. Yeah.

(08:56):
The guiding principle of this podcast is that, like you
have these horrible stories that are important that nobody's gonna
after a week like this week, where like you hear
about all this ship going on in our actual government
right now, very few people are gonna sit down and
be like, well, I'm going to read about you know,
how the government ignored he AIDS epidemic. But it's important
that people know this. So maybe if you you pull
a little bit of frosting, make a couple of Reagan
jokes and whatnot, do some accents and stuff, then people

(09:18):
hear the story and it sticks in their head and
they don't go home and drink bleach because they're just
so sad. That's the goal I've got in my mind.
As Reagan sitting in his chair in the Oval office,
just like shoveling jelly beans as into his mouth as
his mind just deterior rates jelly bean today, like you

(09:38):
can see the pieces of his brain like as dust
like fly out of his ears in a trail. That's
the picture of my head right now. Well, now that
we've lost the conservative listeners, no no, I mean this
was never going to be the episode that they grabbed onto.
Do you have conservative listeners? I assume, so they leave
really angry reviews. Whenever we talk about the Regans, Okay,

(10:00):
I'll say, I'll say I'll give a real message of
conservative listeners. There is an example in this podcast what
we're talking about about a Christian, very far right wing
conservative who was a legitimate hero of the AIDS epidemic.
So we're gonna be giving his story alongside Reagan's. So
we're not biased on this, like we're not based. Yeah,
we're all biased, but you can talk about how the

(10:22):
Reagans act, and you can talk about how other people
who were even more extreme in their beliefs still did
the right thing during the epidemic, which I think is
important because like, people are gonna believe things that I
don't like no matter what. It doesn't mean you have
to ignore hundreds of thousands of people dying of disease. Well,
I think what's interesting is there is a time in
our country where conservative people there was some kind of

(10:43):
moral compass attached to their existence, whereas now if you
are on the right wing, I really do feel like
at this point you knew who Trump was when you
voted for him. He was not unapologetic about being a
racist and a white supremacist and a monster and bounced
his candidacy by calling Mexicans rapists. You knew who he

(11:04):
was when you voted for him. I don't think you
have an excuse anymore. Maybe during the Reagan era. Yeah, well,
the Reagan era was really the first time we start
to see a number of things that are now sort
of hallmarks of the right wing. For one thing, it
was the first time that conservative Evangelical Christians voted as
a group for a conservative candidate, because most Evangelical Christians
had voted for Carter in the election prior, and Carter

(11:27):
had disappointed them, mainly by the fact that he kind
of he governed as more of a moderate because he's
he's the same guy he didn't like, you know, he
opposed abortion personally, but he didn't like push against it
or anything like that. He's an empathetic person. I mean,
he built houses, building houses for having at for humanity.
So they backed him, but they wound up going with

(11:47):
Reagan during the nineteen election. And so it's one of
the things that I think is important to recognize now
since we're talking about like the past, is how weird
Reagan's campaign was for the time because again, for most
of American history, different Christian denominations had voted for different parties.
It was that like the first like big tent kind
of yeah, Republican Athletics voted one way, Protestants voted another way.

(12:10):
Nobody really cared what the Quakers did, but you know,
they made really good butter um. And that was politics
for a couple of hundred years in America. So this
but this is the beginning of like big tent, that
idea that like, and this is the beginning of the
Christian right voting with the Republican Party. So yeah, Ronald
Reagan was this guy who was the first conservative to
really effectively reach out to the evangelical right. But he

(12:32):
was also a TV and movie star and a former
governor of California. He spent most of his life in Hollywood,
around Hollywood movie stars. There's people he socialized with, and
so he and Nancy Reagan had numerous gay friends in
their early life, including the closeted film star Rock Hudson.
During the Kennedy years, California Republicans started preparing Ronald Reagan
for his first political foray. They kind of picked him

(12:52):
before he was even governor, And like, this guy is
someone who we can wedge into power. Since Ronald Reagan
was gonna be getting into politics, the people sort of
grooming him for this new that Nancy Reagan was going
to need a very carefully crafted look if she was
going to be eventually a first lady. So she wound
up hiring a bunch of fashion designers and whatnot to
kind of help her craft a look, and one of
them was a very famous gay fashion designer named Jimmy Galanos.

(13:14):
Working with Jimmy thrust Nancy deeper into Los Angeles's homosexual community,
and she made a lot of friends. She was regularly
seen quote on the arm of a guy named Jerry Zipkin,
who was a gay real estate air and socialite. News
clippings at the time refer to him as I don't know,
I just try to put a picture in my head
of like, you know, it's weird. I tried to research

(13:35):
this guy because like, you can't find out much about him.
Articles at the time will refer to him as a
popular social escort, which is apparently a thing that used
to exist to where like women would want to go
out and go to parties and events and their husband
wouldn't be available and Jerry was a prominent guy that
everybody knew was gay, even though it wasn't really talked about.
So like, if he's with your wife at the opening
of a gallery at a movie premiere, it's fine, you know,

(13:56):
it's Jerry's he's with Jerry. I'm imagine like thick glasses
frames with like tinted lenses. It's the thick frames are
what I get from the name Jerry. The tinted lenses
are all zipkin. Yes, it's it's both parts of his
name complete my belief of his Look, we're not gonna
look that up. We're just gonna keep that in our heads.
So Nancy and Ronald also became friends with Roy Kohen

(14:17):
around this time in the sixties. Cone was, as we said,
kind of a fiercely anti communist lawyer. Uh. Yeah, he
was a big fixer. He was a big influence on
Donald Trump in the early nineties. They were very close,
and he was also a close advisor to Ronald Reagan.
Fire just a phrase for someone who like gets people
murdered and blackmailed and all that kind of stuff. No,
I've used a number of fixtures in my career. When

(14:39):
I've been working in war zones. They're people who basically
like know wherever you are better than you and help
you do like you like I need I have this
goal in Los Angeles and I and he's like, Oh,
we're you gonna need to talk to this person, this person,
this person, they can help you out, or like in
d C, it's the same thing, like, oh, well we
can make this happen. Like fixing is a morally neutral term.
It's gotten like we're talking about Trump's fixers in the

(15:01):
news right now, so it's very shady. But there are
just fixers whose whole job is like, oh, you're trying
to accomplish this goal, these are the people you need
to meet. This the early MGM fixer guy, I forget
his name, but I don't know. Yeah, there's been there's
a lot of fixers throughout history. Sometimes they're just called
advisors or aids or whatever throughout history. Yeah, that would
be a fun thing to do. So Roy Kan was
a famous fixer in this period. He was a closeted

(15:23):
gay man. It's impossible to say one way or the
other if the Reagans knew about his sexuality. We do
know they went to a ton of parties with Roy Khan.
And we do know how Roy Khan behaved at parties
because some of his friends wrote about those nights. So
I'm gonna quote now from a Life article titled The
Snarling Death of Roy m Khne spoilers. At his parties,
he'd hould people up to their feet to sing God

(15:44):
Bless America, evidently his favorite song, even though he was
a lifelong opera goer. Roy's idea of a good time
was to sing patriotic ditties at a piano bar in
Provincetown on Cape Cod. Our friend recalled going home early
one summer evening and on inquiring the next morning about
the rest of the night, being told we else stood
around the piano Roy saying three choruses of God Bless
America and got a heart on and went home to bed.

(16:05):
What is he the founder of the capital steps. He's
just a good American singing the national anthem and drunk
as hell with a really big erection. And that's Roy Kone.
How big I mean they noticed it and they commented
on it in the sixties, so I'm gonna guess they're significant.
I feel like there may be like you know, you know,

(16:27):
like people never speak ill of the dead. Like when
Nixon died, everyone was like, what a great guy, even
though he was just like rat fuck little. He was
a drunk man with his hand on the button, yeah,
screaming the inward regular. So I bet like they're like, oh,
he's dead, let's just talk about how big a dick
he had. I don't. I don't think he was dead
when this story was, but I don't really know. The
snarling death was after he was dead. But like this anecdote,

(16:49):
I think came from an earlier interview. Um, it was
hard to tell. Uh you imagine in an interview where
you're just like, and man, the size of that guy's cock.
What are you telling you about the time I saw
this man's direction. Roy Cohne was hard for America. Okay,
that was a slogan when he was trying to like
when he was running for office himself. Hard hard for America.

(17:11):
And it was like a penis shaped thing with like
the American flag. I was gonna say that the lyrics
of godless America written on the shaft. But different, you know, honest,
men can can can interpret that differently, or like a
constitution with someone writing on it, like you know instead
of a quill, that it's a penis. If that's how
they'd signed. No, no, no, we're getting the family podcast. No,

(17:34):
it's not at all, not in any way, shape or form.
Don't let your kids listen to well, listen to some
of this. Let your kids listen to the one about
the East India tea company. That's important. Okay, So Nancy
Reagan also desperately wanted Billy Haynes, a gay home decorator,
to decorate her home. Um, he had decorated the home
of some other favorite socialite who was sort of like
he decorated the home of somebody that that Nancy really admired,

(17:55):
and so she wanted this guy to do her house.
But Nancy and Ronald did not have enough money at
this point to hire the guy. So they had what
they weren't rich. This is like, this is like sixty nine.
I'm like, they have bed time for bonds. No, that's
not that much money, man, bed time for bonzo. They
were just low enough. On the toldham Pole that like
he could be convinced to go into politics, he was

(18:16):
not that biggest star. Should have got a better business manager.
Well that's a fair point. Um, So Yeah, she wanted
this guy to decorate her house, but they couldn't afford it,
so they hatched a cunning scheme to get the next
best thing. So here's a quote from an article in
The Advocate called Nancy in the Gaze that talks about
how Nancy kind of finankled her way into kind of
having this guy decorate her home without paying for it.

(18:37):
She and Ron soon began socializing with the gay couple.
In nineteen sixty seven, when Reagan became governor of California,
the victory party was held in the home of William
Haynes and Jimmy Shields. Haynes is the guy that she
wanted to decorate her house. Soon, Nancy used Jimmy Shields
as partner as her shopping buddy. Still unable to afford
the high prices and super swank of the Haynes look,
she would take Jimmy along on a shopping junket and
get his advice and use his articulate tastes. So she

(18:57):
basically befriends the husband of the guy that she wants
to decorate her house and just takes him shopping with
her to get advice on stuff she's too cheap to hired.
So there's a history of them exploiting gay men. Yeah,
but in a friendly way. I don't know, friendly exploitation
and maybe exploitation. They may have actually been buddies. I've
read different things on it. Some of them say these

(19:18):
people were pretty close to them. I don't know. It
does seem like they had some legitimately close gay friends
in this period. From what I can tell, I will
say this, I can't find any evidence of movie star
Earon Ronald Reagan pre politics expressing publicly any homophobic views.
In fact, it seems that prior to the fall of
nineteen sixty seven, a lot of people might assumed he
was kind of your best case scenario for a Republican
if you were like a gay person looking at like, okay,

(19:39):
Republicans gonna win. What's the least defensive one. Well, it's
this guy who's already kind of plugged into the gay
community in l A. And has shown willingness and like
open mindedness and at least in his personal life. So
that's how people might have felt in nineteen sixty seven.
Now ninety seven is the year he took office, and
in fall of that year, there was a big series
of news articles at out a quote homosexual clique in

(20:02):
the Reagan administration, because it turned out that a lot
of the guys he had high up in his governor's
administration were gay men. This was exposed by the news
and was seen as a big deal because Reagan had
campaigned on inn in California's moral decline, so it was
not taking well with his conservative bass and he fired
all of the gay men and his administration. He'd been
happy to work with them earlier. Obviously, he only jettison

(20:22):
them because they threatened his career. Might as well, you know,
dump your morals as well well. See. But this is
what's interesting to me because when I got into this,
I had thought, Okay, he was probably just a really conservative,
homophobic person from the beginning. And I don't think that's
the case. I don't think he personally had much of
an issue one way or the other. I think he
just seems works there's a problem. It is worse. That's

(20:43):
what I'm instrumentally homophobic as opposed to just like, I mean,
all of it is is terribly awful, but it's all bad.
I think it is worse though. If he knows there's
nothing wrong with it. Really, he doesn't actually care what
these people are doing in their private lives. He just
wants to stay in power and win more elections, and

(21:03):
so he'll jettison whoever he's got a jettison. Now. The
Reagans did begin after this period to take stronger public
stances against gay people. Nancy still went on her dates
with Zipkin, but she would also in public call homosexuality
a sickness. She called it an abnormality. Also in interviews,
she stop using tinted lenses in his glasses. That's the
worst yet. Um, Jerry, please, I have Nancy. This is well, well,

(21:28):
I love that. If you're going to do the Nancy voice,
you always you're always going to go back to doing
the Ronald voice because nobody knows what Nancy Reagan sounded
like anymore. Don't use drugs. I don't even remember if
that's accurate. I think I can remember Barbara Bush's voice,
but only because I can remember Barbara Bush on The Simpsons.
What do like uptight socialites sound like? I don't know,

(21:48):
they're all dead because we don't have social I mean, like,
tighten my butthole, real tight, and well, it's just my
hello you're just doing Lady Reagan, Lady Reagan, my favorite
Beatle song. All right, now we have to we have
to break through some ads right now. But when we
get back, we're going to talk about a legitimate stance
Reagan took in favor of gay people while he was governor.

(22:10):
And then we're going to talk about the death of
tens of thousands of Americans. So that's all coming up.
But first products and we're back, we're talking about the Reagans.
We just talked about their history, their friendships with gay
people quote unquote friendships. I'm pretty sure they really liked

(22:31):
Roy Cone because he's a vicious monster. Nothings with rock
huts into but there's nothing to do with his homosexuality
in uh in sixties seven. Of course, he fires all
of the gay people in an administration in nineteen seventy eight,
so near the end of Reagan's time in office, eight
movies are out. Star Wars was Star Wars I'm thinking right, yeah.
A conservative lawmaker named Briggs proposed a California ballot initiative

(22:53):
that became known as the Briggs Initiative. If it passed,
it would have banned not only all gay people, but
all people who support did gay rights from teaching in
California schools. So this wasn't even saying you can't talk
about homosexuality in school. This is saying, if you personally
support gay rights, you can't be a teacher in California.
So anyway, the initiative was really popular when it started out.
It was the focus of one of the first major

(23:15):
gay rights campaigns in California I think or American history.
Harvey Milk was a big part of it. UM. It
involved a lot of gay men going door to door
and talking to people and just being like, hey, we
exist in this law sucks and UM. Reagan took a
public stance against the BRIGS initiative UM, along with a
number of other people. President Carter did as well. The
advocates in this case were very successful in turning public
opinion around before the vote, and obviously it was defeated,

(23:39):
so that's good. And so this is where the lug
Cabin Republicans come from. They performed in order to fight
this initiative, and then other things have happened, and then yeah,
what happened, Like why are there's still log Cavan Republicans.
They started out trying to stop a thing that needed
to be stopped. So in this case, they're on the
right side of things, although this is a really hard
thing to be on the wrong side of, Like you're

(23:59):
really a big piece of ship if you're in support
of the Briggs initiative at this point. Again, even Reagan
was against it prior to running for president. So yeah,
this is where I started to realize that, yeah, I
had gotten something wrong about the Reagan's um and started
to realize that the real story is much darker because
he's clearly capable of being convinced to give a ship
about gay people because it happened once, and he has

(24:21):
all these friends. So yeah, this is kind of the
high water mark morally that we're going to get into
here in the story, and it's all downhill from here.
So yeah. In nineteen eighty three, three years after taking office,
Ronald and Nancy hosted interior decorator Ted Graber and his
partner Archie Case at the White House right before right
around the corner. Yeah, right around the corner. So they

(24:42):
have Ted Graber and his partner atch Case over to
the White House. They celebrated Nancy's sixtieth birthday and stayed
the night, and Ted and Archie were probably the first
same sex couple to room together at the White House.
So again we're still at the high wall water mark.
I teased that just a second to early. But this
is the best part of the Ragons, So him standing
up against the briggs An initiative and having one gay

(25:04):
couple at the White House. That's so I want to
make sure of being fair here. That's why the bar
is set very very low. I mean, the sad thing
is that's actually not a low bar for nineteen eighty three,
especially after what we're going to get into here. Anyway,
we'll talk about that later. When AIDS became a very
public and prominent problem in nineteen eighty two, the Reagan
should have known it was serious. They had friends who

(25:26):
were members of the gay community. They were clearly plugged
into Los Angeles. You would have expected something from this
administration on the fact that hundreds of Americans were now
dying from AIDS. Instead, here's what happened. I'm about to
play you audio of the Reagan administration's first official response
to the AIDS crisis. This is a clip from a
nineteen eighty two press conference. Reagan's Press Secretary Larry Speaks
is asked about AIDS. Larry speaks with a with an E. Yeah,

(25:50):
I know, it's even weirder this Secretary Larry speaks. This
is Larry speaks well at the job. Clearly your name
speaks is my defense secretary to any bombs. It's almost
like a dick army kind of ame, Like it really
is if the only they've all been in the same administration.
Um and then yeah, he's being asked a question about
AIDS by a reporter named Lester Consulting. So all right,

(26:12):
let's play it from the Center for Disease Control of
a Lanta that AI d S is now an epidemic
SI six hundred cases. It's known as gay play. I mean,
it's a pretty serious thing that one and every three

(26:34):
people that get this who died. And I wondered if
the president even where I don't have it or you
do you? You don't have it? Well, I'm relieved to
hear that do you? You didn't answer my question? How
do you know the project? The White House looks on
This is a great joke. Now I don't know anything
about it. Master, does anybody in the White House know

(26:56):
about this? Epidemic l I don't think so, I don't
think any there's been no personal experience here last year.
Dr check Thorley with Dr Rugy this morning. He's had
no uh, no patience suffered from a I D S
or whatever it is. Is that what I didn't say that? Yeah,

(27:18):
I thought I heard you in the State department over
there when you stay over there, because I love you,
let's don't put it in those terms. Last year, so
I just love how like smirky these fuckers are like smug.

(27:40):
I mean, it's the same, it's exactly the same today,
like nothing has changed about these elite sons of pitches. Well,
i'll tell you what's changed. I'll tell you it's changed
because what this is and what this is usually when
you this is from like a vanity fair put all
these together in a short little documentary. You can find
one it linked on the site. This will usually be
framed as like, listen to the Reagan administrations the laughter
and stuff that they had over this, which is obviously

(28:01):
Reagan's spokesman is laughing about this, and basically his response
this guy bringing it up is why do you care?
Are you gay? I'm not gay. I don't have it. Yeah,
it's like gay panic. It's like the Also like I
like how they didn't know how to use acronyms. Yeah,
by the way, are we are we gonna get any
information about how much money we're given to N A

(28:22):
T O. Yeah, it's it's it's but like, what's notable
to that to me is that this is not just
Reagan people. These are journalists presumably, people who are more
like to the left of the spectrum. They're all laughing
at it, like it's not just the Reagan people, which
is something that has happened. I don't think if a
disease were to inflict the gay community, I don't think
you have the press box all making fun of it

(28:43):
like that. I don't know. They're a bunch of elite
ship heads too. I don't know. I feel like it's
shocking to me then that you could have And I
think Lester're king Solving or Kinsolving is not a left
wing journals. He's actually conservative right wing guy. He's a
pretty homophobic dude. But at the same point is like
a third of the people who have this have died,
thousands of Americans are sick. You have to say something

(29:05):
That's one of the things that's interesting to me about
this is that you have a number of people who
by certainly by our standards, are really homophobic, people like
Lester who are still like, but something has to be done.
It's not entirely a matter of people's morality. Was different
than because some people who were still pretty bigoted at
least did something. He's not using the terminology that you'd

(29:26):
want anyone to use today, but he's trying to get
the White House to address a plague that's killing people,
which is not nothing. And it's interesting to me that
he's the only one in that room taking it seriously.
Is I mean, sure, Okay, I don't I It's just like,
I guess it's his job too in some way, but
it's all of those journalists job too, and he's the

(29:47):
only one that is something that's worth noting. It's both
worth noting because everybody's really fucking homophobic in that video,
but it's also worth noting because it's not just the
Reagan administrations falling down on this. Mainstream journalist him in
nineteen eighty two considered this worth laughing over. Lester was
a kuk in a crank for talking about it at all.
That's worth noting to me. We shouldn't just be attacking

(30:09):
the Reagan administration because it was it was homophobia at
every level of our nation's culture that allowed AIDS to
get as bad as it god and I think that
video is emblematic of it. Lester obviously wanted the White
House to address this in some way and they don't, Like,
there's no he just wanted a scoop. I mean, at
least he keeps it up, He keeps he keeps doing

(30:30):
this for years, like he's trying to get them to
say something, and they were a few like that is
important to note the Reagan administration refused to even address it,
to even say as much as we're aware that there's
a problem, we're monitoring it. They wouldn't even say that
much at this point. Part of why they weren't willing
to say that much is that twelve days before the
nineteen election, Ronald Reagan had received the endorsement of a
group called Christians for Reagan now Christians for Reagan or

(30:53):
C for Our as I'm gonna call him, to be
cool and Hip, was an ostensibly politically independent Christian fundamentalist
lobbying groups, so see for are paid for what Slate
describes as a barrage of ads attacking President Carter for
catering to gate people. Quote on one spot, an announcer
in toned the gaze in San Francisco elected in mayor,
now they're going to elect a president. Before the ads began,
polls had shown that Carter, a born again Christians, still

(31:14):
had considerable support among evangelicals. But the hard hitting TV
spots were extremely effective, and they helped Reagan carry every
Southern state except Georgia, where Carter had been governor. Partly
because the commercials never aired in New York at Washington,
most people outside the South were never aware of them.
So this is part of I think why the Reagan
administration won't even say we're aware that there's a disease,

(31:36):
because they got elected off the back of people who
were able to shift support away from Carter via homophobia,
so that Reagan knows that's part of his like foundation.
Hey Republicans, wait, we needed racism for the Southern strategy.
Now we need homophobia so we can keep the evangelicals
in line and abortion. So we take that for granted now,

(31:57):
but this is the start of that This is also
really the start of abortion being a major factor in
American politics. That was not always you go back to
the nineteen forties, that wasn't a wedge issue. I mean,
it wasn't even really a most people's radar. It's in
during the Reagan era that this really kicks that both
of these things really kick off as major aspects of
Republican strategy. So whenever the question of homosexuality came up

(32:17):
in Ronald Reagan's political life, uh, he was harsh when
it was, you know, a public statement. He was asked
on the campaign whether or not his ballet dancers son
was gay, and Reagan replied, He's all, man, we made
sure of that them. Sorry, I have nothing funny is
they're just like all fuckers. No, I mean I think
that means Reagan was hitting his kid. But but just um.
The first couple continued to socialize and work with gay

(32:39):
people behind the scenes. The publicly homophobic Roy Kahan was
a close advisor to the Reagan White House. Ted Graber,
who spent the night at the White House, also got
a contract to do a one million dollar renovation job
of the family quarters in the West Wing. So clearly
Ronnie and Nancy weren't above throwing a friend a bone,
even if that friend happened to be homosexual courting taxpayer money.
Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, and that will be noteworthy in

(33:01):
a minute. Here. According to Steve Weisman, a journalist who
covered Reagan's first term for The New York Times, quote
the White House wasn't that homophobic because Nancy head friends
who were gay. But it was definitely a place where
you would hear one staff member call another staff member
a fag behind his back. Jesus Christ. I just a
lot of the fact, like, you know, I can't be racist,
I have a black friend, or like that kind of
justification is Yeah, it's a pretty remarkable quote because it's

(33:24):
like you just described a pretty homophobic office, Like it's
not that sex assive place. We just you know, do
a lot of pinching. Like well, okay, at this point,
federal action who actually stopped the spread of AIDS and
only been taken by a handful of scientists at the
CDC in at this point in two they in a
small caucus of New York and California congressman lobby to
get additional funding to fight AIDS. It's worth noting that

(33:45):
these congressmen got involved because they all had openly gay
staff members who begged them to do something. So these
Democratic congressman, we have gay people on their staff who
are like, there's a fucking problem, You've got to do something.
And so that's why the first real political action starts
getting taken. It's because straight lawmakers have gay people who
worked for them who are like, dude, ships fucked up. Um,

(34:06):
which is why it's important. All of the gay people
who were in Reagan's political orbit got excised in nineteen
sixty seven. That is a factor in this um. So.
One of the books I did read to prepare for
this episode was After the Wrath of God. It's an
Oxford University Press textbook about how American religion impacted the
AIDS crisis. Very interesting um. It tides much of the

(34:27):
Reagan administration's failure to the fact that gay people didn't
have any access to administration officials. Quote. The Reagan era
ushered in not only a new national leader, but also
a new White House staff that included a number of
anti gay conservatives, chief among them Pat Buchanan, Gary Bauer,
and William Bennett. The shift consequently curtailed the already limited
access that gay and lesbian leaders had two aids within
the previous administration. As a Storian William Turner puts it,

(34:50):
rather than having highly sympathetic White House and Executive Agency
staffers serving under a largely indifferent president who supported the
basic logic of civil rights, suddenly activists faced hostile staffers
serving under a largely indifferent president who opposed the basic
logic of civil rights. So one attitude on this is
that the Reagans didn't make a huge difference. It was
the fact that their staff had zero people who gave

(35:11):
a ship about the gay community. They had no control
over the staff. Well, I mean they did control their staff,
but yeah, it's sarcastic. But also I love how like
there's like maybe one or two sentences in the entire Bible, Yeah,
are like that even vaguely tied to it, vaguely tied
to it, And somehow those two outweigh all of jesus
discussion of like loving thy neighbor and like turning to

(35:33):
the cheek and all this other kind of stuff that
is about love. And I don't know, like what is
it with like Christian Conservative what is with their brains
where that somehow those two little sentences or whatever somehow
warps the rest of it. I think it has very
little to do with the Bible. I think it has
much more to do with the fact that a lot
of these people grew up in a culture where like,

(35:54):
that was the thing that you made fun of, that
was the thing you attacked. It was seen as immoral.
They didn't really know much about these people. There's a
great quote from Senator Henry Waxman, who was like one
of the congressmen in a health sub committee who was
like really active in early fighting back against AIDS. In
the nineteen two he wrote, there is no doubt in
my mind that if the same disease had appeared among
Americans of Norwegian descent or among tennis players rather than

(36:16):
gay males, the responses of both the government and the
medical establishment would have been different. And I thinks that
what it's a marginalized group that people are used to
making fun of, so no one treats it seriously. Like
that's the initial response of the administration. You heard it
in that in that audio. It's it's the press secretary
joking that a journalist is gay for asking about gay people.
I think that's why it was so ignored, because they're

(36:38):
just seen as this subcategory of humanity that they don't
like is so far beneath their concern I I really
think that's most of what it is. Yes, no, I
get that, but I'm just saying that, like, the thing
that's supposed to define these Christian Conservatives is the Bible,
and most of it's about loving everyone. Well, we're going

(36:59):
to get into the Bible a little bit because there
are a couple of different ways different Christian Conservatives take
the Bible as relates to the AIDS crisis. So we're
seeing one right now. When we get back, we're gonna
talk more about the Reagan administration's fun up of the
AIDS crisis. That's what we're gonna talk about. Well, time
for some ads Jesus Nicaragua and we're back. Um. Nineteen

(37:27):
two was the first year that something should have been
done by the Reagan administration v v AIDS. It was
also the year that very little was done v AIDS.
While the National Institutes of Health spent thirty six thousand
dollars per toxic shock death in the US and nineteen
eighty two, they spent only eight thousand per AIDS death
in nineteen two. Toxic shock as in keeping in a

(37:49):
there's a number of things that can cause it. Be
keeping a tampon can cause it. It's it's a It's
a less common cause of death than AIDS was by
this point, but it was getting a lot more money,
and so was legionnaire's disease. The soak um legionnaire's disease,
which killed about fifty people in nineteen eighty two, got
way more funding. Between June nine in May nineteen eighty two,

(38:12):
the CDC spent less than a million dollars on AIDS
and nine million on Legionnaire's disease. So more than a lobby,
there's a legionnaire's lobby. Well, yeah, there have been fifty
people killed in that time from legionnaire's disease, in a
thousand from AIDS. So AIDS gets a million dollars and
kills a thousand people. Legionnaire's disease kills fifty people and
gets nine million dollars in federal funding. So yeah, there's

(38:33):
not a lot of money being devoted towards it at
this point. Here's a quote from an Advocate article I
found Congressional staffers joke that the n i H really
stood for the National Institutes of Health RELEA stood for
not interested in homosexuals. Republican priorities were perfectly clear right
from the start of the Reagan government. One of the
administration's first official acts was to propose a cut of
nearly fifty in the appropriation for the CDC from three

(38:54):
d and twenty seven million to one hundred and sixty
one million. So one of the first things the Reagan
administration does as a plague is starting to take off
is cut CDC funding in half um. At the same time,
Reagan asked for an immediate increase of seven billion dollars
in defense spending and an additional increase of twenty five
billion for the following fiscal year, for total of two
and twenty billion dollars spent on defense, when we cut

(39:15):
a hundred and fifty million dollars out of the CDC's budget.
So again, you've got like a perfect storm here, not
all of which is related to homophobia, but certainly all
of which is related to not really giving a ship.
What happens to people where that money go to, like
arming to mine, yeah, mining the harbor and n star
wars and stuff like that. We had to had to

(39:36):
get lasers in space that we still don't have h
space forces crossed you get it in. We helped out
some nice boys in Afghanistan and the last time I checked,
that place has been sailing pretty smooth since the eighties
and good times in Afghanistan. So in three, the CDC
warned Blood Banks that it believed the blood supply may
have been contaminated, but would be a good name for

(39:57):
a like a rich person who like Peter Thiel. That
is happening right now, Peter Teel should his name should
be informally blood Banks. Yeah, we're just Dracula, I mean uh.
The HIV virus was identified and named for the first
time in nineteen eight three. Ronald Reagan did not say
the words AIDS in nineteen eighty three. As far as

(40:18):
we know, he had never uttered the word in his
life at that point, even though two thousand, three hundred
and four Americans died in just nineteen eighty three from AIDS.
On June nineteen eighty three, after roughly one eleven is
worth of total American deaths due to AIDS, the disease
finally came up in a second press conference, You got
any predictions about how this one's going to go? My
guests longer peals of laughter. All right, all right, let's see,

(40:40):
like when you appeel you know, an orange or something,
and you'd use the thing to get the whole peel
off into one little strand. I've never had the patience
that did the environmental destrive vir President's teach on Saturday,
the fairy tale? Is there any true ferry tales? Are

(41:02):
not true? And this one's true? Leicester's ayres perked up
when you said fairies. Yeah, it's pretty bad interest in that.
This is the movement even at the Comers convention, Crest
Food Federal system getting at the age from President has
been involved in um in in briefed on the age

(41:27):
situation number of months ago in a Cabinet meeting and
ordered that high priority be given to research matters on it. UH.
The Center for Disease Control has been involved for some time.
President will continue to be updated. We have recently asked
at twelve million dollars to be reprogrammed for research on
the age. That's extend of the President's involvement, which has

(41:49):
been Laurry. Does the President think that it might help
if he suggested that the gays cut down in their cruising.
Yah told you and hear your answer. I just was
acknowledging your and your interest in this said, you don't
think that it would help if the game has come
down on their cruising and we're researching, and if we

(42:11):
come up with any any, any research that shed some
light on whether gaish and cruise or not crude would
make available to you. The one legitimate piece of progress, motherfuckers,
is that they use the acronym. Now now they understand.
You got to give him credit for that. Took a year,

(42:33):
had an English teacher comment and teach them something. They
are still laughing every time anyone says the word fairy.
By the way, is everyone in the press pool a
twelve year old boys? Yes, this was a time when
everyone in the press pool was a twelve year old book. Well,
that makes what was a Reagan era policy? Um, yeah,
which we should go back to. Actually, if you've watched newsies,
you know how funny kids can be with the news
and cholera. I've never watched newses. I assume they all

(42:55):
die of colera. Kids die from the darnest things. Most
popular show in nineteen nineteen um so, the Reagan administration's
first official meeting of the AIDS crisis with representatives of
the gay community was held on June. It included two
members of the National Gay Task Force, a special Assistant

(43:16):
to the President, and staff members from Health and Human Services.
The members of the Gay Task Force, which was essentially
like a gay advocacy group. I wish it was like
a gay assassin group, like it was made of all
gay men and women and they just murdered homophobes. I
will tell you strom Thurmond would not have lived to
be a hundred and sixteen if that task force had
been doing it. He's still alive, by the way, somewhere

(43:37):
he's that kind of hatred, never quite down. No, no, no, no,
he's I mean, do you think what he died. The
molecules in his body just like floated off in his
infected much much like in the Return of Optimus Prime
with the hate virus that I think molecules from him
disintegrated off of his body and formed a new hand

(44:00):
end avestigial hand on the spine of Roger Stone. Yeah,
so now he can jerk himself off with both of
his hands. That's my theory. Roger Stone can present a
panceless photo of himself to prove it wrong or not.
But I believe he has astigial hand growing on his
thigh like Quatto, like Quatta exactly, but just a hand,
but just a hand for jerking himself off constantly. Roger Stone,

(44:24):
the Baba dooke himself, by the way, at this point
in time, is helping Paul Manaford establish the first lobbying
group explicitly for dictators, which is pretty cool progress. So
there are progressives involved in politics at this point. We
should point that out. So the Gay Task Force people
asked for things from the regular administration like more money
for sex ed at the state level. They wanted a

(44:44):
national conversation about condom use and the destigmatization of AIDS
as a gay disease. By the way, where where did
you grow up? Texas? Texas? I grew up in Pennsylvania.
The sex d and fifth grade was basically like a
nervous Jim teacher being like the oh, we just got
They didn't. They just started the video, walked out of
the room and came back and when it was done

(45:06):
and everyone was very uncomfortable. It was terrible sex said,
but it was Texas, so I'm surprised they let us
know penises exist. They really like to keep that under
wraps in Texas. So yeah, the what the task force
wanted was pretty minor and pretty like a big thing
for them was just like, tell people condoms work to
prevent AIDS. They should know that, maybe give out some condoms.

(45:28):
The Reagan administration was not a big fan of this advice,
so they had a second meeting about AIDS in August.
No representatives of the gay community were invited this time. Instead,
Reagan representatives met with the National director of the Conservative Caucus,
Howard Phillips, who thought any information about AIDS had to
be delivered under a blanket condemnation of homosexuality as a
quote moral wrong. Another attendee, doctor Ron Goodwin, of the

(45:51):
Moral Majority, suggested that the administration should close gay bathhouses
and require blood donors to give their sexual histories. Historian
Jennifer Bryan note that when the CDC officials pushed to
take effective steps against the disease, they struggled against the
fact that quote many of Reagan's domestic advisors and AIDS
wanted to bend what they called AIDS education to fit
the model of social and religious conservatism that posited gay

(46:13):
men as sick and dangerous. By the way, more like
the Moron majority. Oh nice, you really told that one
in time? Guys, I am professional comedy writer. We get
that on some T shirts from the eight four election.
I think we can really make a difference. There's got
to be like some village in sub Saharan Africa where
everyone's either wearing a Moron majority shirt or a Hillary

(46:36):
for Prison shirt. It's just we're still fighting your political
battles from ten years ago here in T shirts. Yeah.
And also they've got like shat T shirts, a lot
of shack T shirts. It's gonna be fun. A lot
of Kazam whatever whatever movie was. Kauzan was the real one,
Shazam was jas was the Mandala effect one. So late

(46:58):
in nineteen three nine Republican congressman wrote a letter to
the President. One of these congressmen was new to ging Ridge.
Here's Jennifer Bryer. Gingridge argued that closing bath houses are
mandating reporting of AIDS was a more reasonable policy than
trying to provide sex education at bath houses or keeping
the names of people who tested positive for HIV anonymous.
Here the common sense arguments betrayed a particular stance on AIDS,

(47:18):
one that sought to make the public healthy by restricting
the civil rights of those believed to be sick. So
you'd certainly never hear about anything like that happening. Again.
One of the doctors working tirelessly to treat the epidemic
was Marcus Kanan. This is new Gingris, the guy who
served his wife divorce papers while she was in the hospital. Right, yes,
moral paragon. Yeah, all these fuckers like to to a man,

(47:42):
there isn't one of them that isn't just like a
dark cathul like beast in their brains. But they're all
these kind of like non Euclidean garbage creatures. No, which
is why I I think, really, if you want to
reform politics in this country, one of the laws that
you pass is that in order to be an elected
politician at the national level, you wear a camera at

(48:05):
all times while you're elected. Everybody sees you go to
the bathroom, Everybody sees you fuck, Everybody sees every conversation
you say. You can just log into a stream. You
can watch Rand Paul do whatever the funk. Rand Paul
does at eleven thirty at night. Zero privacy for you, Yeah, exactly.
And if you once you've got a full look at
these people, you decide I want to keep supporting them.
I think they're in line with myral moral values. Why

(48:28):
is round Paul holling a a six inch hole out
of a copy of the fountain Head? Oh? Man, you
hope it's a copy of the fountain Head shoving all
that vastly in there. I don't know why, but I
when I imagine the thing that Rand Paul has sex with,
that's not a person I was imagining, like a decorative gourd. Yeah,

(48:48):
I was a magic like dollar iron. Rand, you're my mommy.
You're still doing a Reagan voice. We're stuck in well
and RAN's my mommy. One of the doctors working tirely
to treat the epidemic in n was Marcus Connent. He
was among the first physicians in the country to treat

(49:09):
or diagnose AIDS and patients. Due to his work in
you see San Francisco. Dr Connent met with the Reagan
administration three times, first and nineteen eighty three. Here's the
Guardian doc Content and his colleagues quote we're going on
and on about how this was a disease and infectious disease.
He recalled. Reagan's representative wasn't buying it. Her response was
that this was a legal problem, not a medical problem.
Connent said, simply because of who game in with aids

(49:31):
were and who their sexual partners were. She told him
these people were breaking the law. So that's the Reagan
administration's stands to doctors, gay people are breaking the law.
The problem is their law breaking, not the fact that
there's a disease. Ronald Reagan did not address the nation
about Remember when we locked up all those people at Typhus. Yeah, yeah,

(49:51):
that was a good time. Oh man, we that one
lady got out. It was a real problem. We had
tiny handcuffs made for all the lice. I thought you
were talking about tiny handcuffs for children, and I was
thinking that's an industry that had to have taken a
hit since the eighteen hundreds. Oh yeah. Ever, like whatever,
the labor movement started kicking up in the like teens

(50:12):
or whatever. So if we have a children's uprising today,
the police are not prepared to deal with it. Which kids. Hey, look,
if you're a business person, looking forward to the future,
we are going to need children's sized cuffs at some point,
children's size cuffs, children's size cages, all sorts of little
cute little children's size prison paraphernalia. Guys to growth, industry,

(50:34):
capitalism works. Oh man, a little children's guard uniforms too,
could have all child prison Oh my god, Oh my god,
that would be so cute. Little anne Gettis calendars, little
German shepherd puppies, like just ripping people apart on the ground.
Oh man, what a time it's going to be. Anyway,

(50:55):
Ronald Reagan did not address the nation about AIDS as
far as we know at that point, and he still
had not himself said the word. He certainly hadn't said
it in public. His communications director, though, Pat Buchanan, wrote
an article for The New York Yeah. Quote from Pat Buchanan,
The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children, and
among the revolutionary vanguard is gay rights activists. The mortality

(51:17):
rate is highest and climbing the poor homosexuals. They have
declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an
awful retribution. Here's how Randy Schlitz, author of the band
played on sums up pet Buchanan's articles conclusion in his book,
Buchanic concluded by saying that no homosexual should be permitted
to handle food and that the Democratic Party's decision to

(51:37):
hold their next convention in San Francisco would leave delegate
spouses and children at the mercy of quote homosexuals who
belonged to a community that is a common carrier of dangerous, communicable,
and sometimes fatal diseases. Pat Buchanan, everybody, is he still alive?
I think so. I know my dad probably voted for
him for president at one point. God. Yeah, he was
a perennial candidate. Guy, kind of like a fringe, right

(51:58):
dude would always always run, oh you're from Texas again, right, Yeah,
I have to remember that. Yeah. Uh. Four thousand, two
hundred and fifty one Americans died from AIDS in nine four.
President Ronald Reagan still said nothing. He did, however, invite
his buddy Rock Hudson over to the White House. Oh yeah,
look at that. Hudson was really keeping it together at
fifty nine. Now he has HIV in that picture. He's

(52:21):
starting to get sick, but you can't really tell yet.
He's handsome. He is a handsome guy. Very good looking man.
He's almost sixty in this picture. I think that's almost sixty.
Why are you can quibbling with me? Well, you were
asked and I was giving you specifics. He died about
a year after this picture was taken, but we'll get
to that um. In ninety four, the Democratic National Convention
was held in San Francisco as part of an attempt

(52:43):
to get the Reagan administration to give a ship about
the disease that was sweeping through the country. More than
a hundred thousand people marched from the Castro and San
Francisco to Moscow and Center on December eleven, with more
than dred Americans dead from AIDS. The disease came up
in another press conference, and he guesses about this one,
I'm going to guess a two minute like applause break

(53:06):
just for AIDS. Yeah. Just imagine like you know when
Louis c. K came back and uh at the seller
and he got a standing ovation. Uh something that that
dark will happen in the suppress conference. Okay, Lester's beginning
to circle now he's moving in front. Go ahead. The
Center for Disease Control and let of inestimated estimated three

(53:33):
hundred thousand people exposed to AIDS which shouldn't be transmitted
through saliva. Will the President, as commander in chief take
steps to protect armed forces with the medical services from
age patients or the risk of spreading age and in
the same amount of the thing the bed typhoid from

(53:55):
being for the journalists, Yeah, I wish has President concerned
about this subject reaction here? You know what I mean?
Is he gonna do anything? Last i've heard him express anything.

(54:17):
He has no no, express, no opinion about this epidemic. No,
but I must confess I haven't asked him about it.
Would you back? Have you been checked? I didn't hear
the answer. So it's interesting. Lester is clearly angry in
that uh. And this is part of why I think
he deserves a lot of credit for his activist because

(54:39):
he's clear like he's a HOMOPHOBI is a conservative guy.
He's stuck with the questioning. He kept four years trying
to bring this up, and by that third video he's
not laughing anymore. The first couple he chuckles a few times.
He's really piste. Now he's like sucking a couple hundred
thousand people are infected, thousands are dead, you have to
say something that's worth something to me. The fact that, like,
even though this guy had his biases, he understood the

(55:03):
severity of what was happening. Credit for doing that when
nobody else does. All Right, he got me, he did something.
It's not nothing. All Right, I won't hate him as
much as I did. Everyone else in that room deserves
to be hated. This used to be named because also
that that is representative of what the kind of White
House press people's like. It's a bunch of like elite

(55:24):
fox who like going to pool parties with politicians and
then ask them mostly softball questions or like laugh at
things that are affecting you know, large swaths of the populace.
They're not talking about things that are as real to
them as they are to the people who actually need
the news. Yeah, because they're totally separate. It's like, why

(55:47):
why so much of television is bad. It's because it's
a bunch of rich people trying to write about what
they think normal Americans or whatever people around the world,
but mostly Americans right are and they have no idea
because they've been wealthy for so long, possibly for their
entire lives, because they've been living in the hills for
the last thirty five years. Yeah, and they're they're slumming.

(56:08):
Is going to Trader Joe's on a Wednesday. So I
always respect it when people are able to take a
step outside of their own beliefs and biases to understand
something that is a problem for people that they don't
like and take it seriously. It's better to just be
a person who's open minded and believes everyone as a
human being. But if you've got those biases and you're

(56:28):
able to do what Lester does and still take it seriously,
that's better than everyone else. I hope that guy got
the Pulitzer for he did not be he did not know.
I mean specifically the Pulitzer for not being a piece
of ship. That would be a good award. The Pulitzer
Prize for not being a sociopath. Very few people, very
few people qualify in the field. So in July, rock

(56:52):
huts And flew to France to take an experimental AIDS
treatment HP a tree. It hadn't yet been approved for
human use in the United States. He never quite made
it to the hospital. Here's a quote from The Guardian.
He collapsed at the Ritz Hotel and was taken to
the American Hospital in the French capital. His publicist contacted
the White House, the Reagans were old friends, in an
attempt to speed up a transfer to a military hospital
to be seen by Dr Dominique Dormant, a French army

(57:15):
doctor who had previously treated Hudson in secret. So he
needs approval to go to this French military hospital. It
is me. You just sounds like French reag Well, well,
well I have some jelly beans for you maybe. So
they wouldn't let him into the hospital because it will
was like a French army hospital, and they were like,

(57:37):
you're just some guy, Like, we can't let you into
this hospital. So Hudson's publicists telegrammed the Reagans and basically said, like,
this is only the only hospital in the world that
can do what's necessary to save rocks life or at
least make him more comfortable. Please intervened, because you're the
fucking president. You can do something. You call France and
say let this guy into their hospital. They'll do it
for you. According to a note written by an aide
at the time who delivered the message to Nancy Reagan,

(57:59):
a quote I spoke with miss Reagan about the attached telegram.
She did not feel that this was something that the
White House should get into, and agreed to my suggestion
that we referred to the writer to the U. S.
Embassy Paris. Now BuzzFeed actually talked with this aid once
they found the telegram in the right Reagan Library archives.
He claims he advised the first lady that they had
to be fair and not treat Rock different just because
he was their friend. She agreed. The Reagans were very

(58:21):
conscious of not making exceptions for people, he said, just
because they were friends of theirs and or celebrities or
things of that kind. They weren't about that. They were
about treating everybody the same unless you were gay. Well,
there's a lot of reasons that's bullshit. One of them is,
of course, we just talked about the fact that they
paid one of their gay friends a million dollars to
redo the residence at the White House. Clearly they're not
above doing a favor for a friend. Ronald Reagan had

(58:43):
intervened personally like a year before to help his friend
Bob Hope with a fundraiser um and in nineteen eighty two,
when Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan's dear friends, Ferdinand and
Emelda Marcos, were having a little bit of trouble clamping
down unrest in the Philippines caused by the fact that
they tortured and killed thousands of people. Ronnie did his
friend a solid and invited Ferdinand Marcos to the White House.

(59:04):
Now there were big protests at the time. It was
a political risk to invite a fascist to the White House,
but Ronald Reagan did it. He stood by his friend,
and he gave him tens of millions of dollars in
covert military aid, which really is what friendship is all about. Yeah, sure,
I mean, you know, it's why you know, the Clintons
were fans of what's his name, the Egyptian dictator. Oh yeah, yeah,

(59:25):
I mean it's one of those things like they were
clearly not above doing things for their friends. This would
not have been They wouldn't even even had to publicly
call the thing. They just love willing to take the
risk dictators. Hey, if you murder tens of thousands of people,
are disappear them, you're our friend, as long as you
don't like commies or through Islamic terrorists, right, and even

(59:47):
then it might be okay as long as you're okay
with our business interests. Well yeah, so yeah, Rock Hudson
got no special treatment from the Reagan White House. On July,
Hudson announced that he had AIDS. This also served as
his first public announcement that he was a homosexual. Paul
Bonberg of the Mobilization Against AIDS campaign begged President Reagan

(01:00:07):
to speak up. Surely, now that a man who had
been his friend for decades had the disease, the President
would finally do something, By the way, that's kind of
on Rock. Also for still being friends with Maybe there
were fun at parties. I never got to drink with
Ronald Reagan. I don't know all of my family members.
I mean none of my family members, but like family
friends that voted for Trump, i've cut out of my life.

(01:00:28):
Certainly none of my friends ever did. But like, it's
pretty easy to cut out the pieces of ship in
your life. I think this was an age before that
really happened in politics, because even if you're talking about like,
it's not like the gay community had a lot of
play in the Democratic Party in nine right, this was
the first life and death political issue other than just

(01:00:49):
discrimination and whatnot the death that results from that for
gay people. And it was the first one where there
was a clear difference between the Republicans and Democrats, because
if you're talking about like the deaths that result from
social isolation and discrimination, I don't really think they're Democrats
and eight five are much better than the Republicans. But
if you talk about AIDS, the Democrats are directly dealing
with AIDS. They're holding their convention in San Francisco, they're

(01:01:10):
making a march part of it, They're taking some actions.
This is the first time where it becomes a life
and death thing. Um. Who knows what Rock would have
done if he'd lasted another couple of years, but he
died very soon after this on September seventeenth of ninety five,
the same year Rock was sick. A couple of months
after he made his announcement, Ronald Reagan finally, for the
very first time, said the word AIDS in public. Finally,

(01:01:39):
the Great Communicator made a surprise visit to the Department
of Health and Human Services and said, quote, one of
our highest public health priorities is going to be continuing
to find a cure for AIDS. He announced that see
Everett Coupe, the Surgeon General, was being pulled in to
write a report on the disease. Hudson's death changed to
the national conversation about AIDS. He is, this is seen
as like the major dividing point and the national attitudes

(01:02:00):
towards AIDS. A lot of people say there's AIDS before
and after Rock Hudson comes out about it. Um. It
is like the equivalent if there were some weird disease
in a marginalized community and then fucking George Clooney dies
of it, like it catalyzed the nation in the world
because he was a big star. President Reagan finally acknowledged
the diseases existence, but he still had not actually addressed
the American people about AIDS, so he'd never given a

(01:02:21):
speech about it. He'd never talked about it. In the
other context, five thousand, six hundred and thirty six Americans
died of AIDS in what's the grand toll so far?
I think we're gonna get to that in a second. Um.
One of them was Rock Hudson. Um, So we're we're
definitely above ten thousand, like fifteen, fourteen thousand, something like that.
Right now, Rock Hudson died on October two, just a

(01:02:42):
few months after coming out. Ronald Reagan kept quiet about
his homosexuality, and The Advocate named Reagan Homophobe of the
Year that year. Representative Henry Waxman from Los Angeles said this,
it is surprising that the president could remain silent as
six thousand Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge
the epidemics existence. Perhaps his staff felt he had to

(01:03:03):
since many of his New Right supporters have raised money
by campaigning against homosexuals. President Reagan continued to not address
the nation about AIDS in nineteen eighties six, as another
sixteen thousand, three hundred and one Americans died from the disease.
That year, Transformers of the movie came out. It might
be it might be optimist Prime kept quiet too, just endless,
just to give you guys a you know, some context.

(01:03:26):
Megatron donated a lot of money. Well, trap point was it,
I don't I don't actually know anything about Transformers. Um
that year, nineteen eight six was the year that twenty
one thousand total Americans had died. That was the total
of the end of nineteen eighties six. Do you think
Reagan sent a representative to the advocate to collect his homophobe.
But the year well, I hope so, I mean you

(01:03:46):
really want that that trophy on his mantle. Yeah. So,
twenty one deaths into the AIDS crisis, Dr Connent, that
one of the first doctors to treat it, sent a
letter to Ronald Reagan. He recalled its contents to the Ardian.
Dear President Reagan, I have all these patients and they
are dying, and no one's doing anything. It is incumbent
on your administration to direct the Centers for Disease Control

(01:04:07):
and National Institutes of Health to begin efforts to find
the cause and treatment for this disease. Now, the Reagans
responded to this letter, It said fuck off, no, no, no,
It just said Nancy and I thank you for your support.
He got a form letter on Americans dead, which is
I think more than the total Americans who have died
in the entire global War on terror. So yeah, that's

(01:04:30):
that's where we are. Um, that's where we are at
the end of part one of this episode. It is
n Americans have died. Ronald Reagan has said the word
AIDS once and not in a public speech. So that's
where we are. When we come back for part two.
We're going to talk about Reagan's eventual acknowledgment of the epidemic,
and we're also going to talk about one of the
AIDS crisis is Unlikeliest Heroes, a surgeon general with a

(01:04:54):
ridiculous name see Everett Coop. See Everett Coop. Yeah, he's
actually does the right thing in this But yeah, that's
all coming up. So at the end of part one,
do you want to plug some plug doubles before we
get into that. Oh, well, subscribe to a couples therapy. Uh,
if you want to hear me talk about politics and India. Actually,
we don't talk about politics at all. It's a thing.

(01:05:15):
We try to offer you some respite from this nightmare.
And then my dear love Naomi, who is the I'm
the weirdo, she's the populist. So let's get some take
some rest respite from the madness over the next day
or two, and on Thursday, Andy and I will be back.
It just makes me want to vomit. We will continue

(01:05:37):
to make Andy want to vomit. So that's part two,
the vomiting. We've got a cup here on the table.
I think it's about one Vomit's worth it, cup, so
we'll be fine. See, we'll see how much comes out
of me until Thursday and until we all learn how
much comes out of Andy. I am Robert Evans. This
is Behind the Bastard. You can find me on Twitter
at I right, okay. I have a book on Amazon,

(01:05:58):
A Brief History of Vice. You can also find this
podcast on the internet behind the Bastards dot com. We'll
have pictures and sources up there. You can find us
on social media at Bastards pod on Twitter and Instagram.
So come and check us out, and uh come back
Thursday to learn more aboutes and Ronald Reagan Bail. It's

(01:06:19):
time for you to go now. I love about you.
M