Washington Blade - June 11, 2004
Lou Chibbaro Jr., lchibbaro@washblade.com.

U.S. AIDS cases/deaths by year Below is a breakdown of the new AIDS cases and number of deaths reported during the presidency of Ronald Reagan:

Year: Pre-1981

New Cases: 92

Deaths: 29

Total Deaths: 29

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Year: 1981

New Cases: 323

Deaths: 122

Total Deaths: 151

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Year: 1982

New Cases: 1170

Deaths:453

Total Deaths: 604

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Year: 1983

New Cases: 3,076

Deaths: 1,481

Total Deaths: 2,265

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Year: 1984

New Cases: 6,247

Deaths: 3,474

Total Deaths: 5,739

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Year: 1985

New Cases: 11,794

Deaths: 6,877

Total Deaths: 12,616

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Year: 1986

New Cases: 19,064

Deaths: 12,016

Total Deaths: 24,632

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Year: 1987

New Cases: 28,599

Deaths: 16,194

Total Deaths: 40,826

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Year: 1988

New Cases: 35,508

Deaths: 20,922

Total Deaths: 61,748

Source: Centers for Disease Control & Prevention

Reagan's death on June 5 at age 93 of Alzheimer's disease came on the 21st anniversary of the U.S. Center for Disease Control & Prevention's first published report of gay men contracting a rare form of pneumonia in Los Angeles - the first identified cases of an illness that would later be named AIDS.

Gay critics - including New York playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer - recalled the horrifying early years of the epidemic, when friends and loved ones in New York and San Francisco started dying from Pneumocystis carini pneumonia and Kaposi's Sarcoma, ailments that were linked to an impaired immune system.

"There was no research into our health. Even as we were dying like flies," Kramer wrote in a column to published next month by the Advocate. "How could he not have seen us dying? The answer is he did see us dying and he chose to do nothing."

Reagan's supporters have called such criticism unfair, saying the Reagan administration sought to grapple with a puzzling new disease as scientists and public health officials scrambled to learn how best to respond. Although they acknowledge that more money could have been allocated to fight the epidemic in the early years, Reagan supporters note that billions of dollars in federal funds were spent on AIDS during Reagan's eight years in office.

Critics say much of those funds were initiated by both Democratic and Republican members of Congress, which "force-fed" the Reagan administration by imposing more AIDS funds in the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Health & Human Services.

On the gay rights front, officials with the gay group Log Cabin Republicans joined other gay leaders in praising Reagan for taking a lead role in opposing a 1978 anti-gay ballot measure in California known as the Briggs Initiative, which sought to prevent gays from teaching in public schools.

Reagan, who served as governor of California from 1967 to 1975, was credited with helping to defeat the initiative at a time when he was preparing his 1980 run for the presidency. Political pundits noted that Reagan ignored advice by some conservative supporters to stay away from the controversial "homosexual" issue, which they warned would alienate conservative Christian voters.

"Whatever it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles," Reagan wrote in a September 1978 statement opposing the initiative. "Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual's sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child's teachers do not really influence this."

Patrick Guerriero, executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, and Cheryl Jacques, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay political group, issued statements praising Reagan for taking a stand against the Briggs Initiative, which was named after an anti-gay California legislator.

"Like all Americans, the Human Rights Campaign is saddened by the passing of President Ronald Reagan," Jacques said.

Guerriero said Log Cabin members were indebted to Reagan's efforts to defeat the Briggs Initiative, especially since the initiative prompted California gay Republicans to found the Log Cabin group as a means of fighting the anti-gay ballot measure.

"He will go down in history as one of our greatest presidents," Guerriero said in a June 7 statement.

Reagan slow to act on AIDS

But Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, raised concerns about Reagan's handling of AIDS and gay issues during his presidency. Foreman released his views in the form of an emotional letter to Steven Powsner, a close friend who of died of AIDS in 1995. [Please see column on page 59].

Foreman states in his letter that he feels for Reagan's family and friends, who are grieving over the loss of a loved one. But he said he is also "not able to set aside the shaking anger I feel over Reagan's non-response to the AIDS epidemic or for the continuing anti-gay legacy of his administration."

Added Foreman, "AIDS was first reported in 1981, but President Reagan could not bring himself to address the plague until March 31, 1987, at which time there were 60,000 reported cases of full-blown AIDS and 30,000 deaths."

Foreman's comments reflect the views of a large number of gay and AIDS activists who say Reagan's passing prompted them to revisit the early AIDS years, unleashing memories that have taken the form of an emotional roller coaster.

Much of the discussion has centered on when Reagan first spoke publicly on AIDS. Critics for years have denounced the former president for not making a major public speech on the subject until March 1987, when he appeared at a Washington, D.C., ceremony held in conjunction with the Third International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C.

Supporters point to White House records showing that Reagan first spoke publicly on AIDS at a September 1985 White House news conference. Reagan's comments came in response to a reporter's question about whether he would support a massive government research program on AIDS similar to the U.S. space program's effort to land a man on the moon.

"It's been one of the top priorities with us," Reagan said. "And over the last four years, and including what we have in the budget for '86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS."

When the reporter, in a follow-up question, said a government scientist believes the funding levels cited by Reagan were "not nearly enough" to address the problem, Reagan disagreed.

"I think with our budgetary constraints and all, it seems to me that $126 million in a single year for research has got to be something of a vital contribution."

Reagan issued a written statement to Congress in February 1986, the same week he delivered his State of the Union address, in which he discussed AIDS among other domestic issues.

"While there are hopes for drugs and vaccines against AIDS, none is immediately at hand," he said. "Consequently, efforts should focus on prevention, to inform and to lower risks of further transmission of the AIDS virus. To this end, I am asking the surgeon general to prepare a report to the American people on AIDS."

Edmund Morris, author of the 1999 authorized Reagan biography, "Dutch," stated in the book that Reagan once said this about AIDS: "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague" because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments."

That quote was challenged by at least one book reviewer, who said Morris admitted to making up Reagan quotes.

In his authoritative book, "And The Band Played On," the late gay journalist Randy Shilts has been credited with persuading many government scientists and officials to speak frankly about how the Reagan administration handled AIDS in the early years.

Shilts reported that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, which detected the first cases of AIDS before the disease was named, regularly struggled for more funds to conduct crucial research to track the disease. Shilts said other government scientists and public health officials at the National Institutes of Health spurned the CDC.

Those officials did not perceive the development as the makings of an international epidemic in the first two years, he said, and the White House - which was calling for across-the-board budget cuts - was in no mood to back CDC, Shilts reported.

Several years later, according to Shilts, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian whom gay activists viewed as being anti-gay, startled conservative leaders in and out of government when he called for a massive sex education campaign and the promotion of condom use as part of an AIDS prevention campaign.

Meanwhile, Shilts and AIDS activists pointed to how, in the early years of the epidemic, the U.S. government devoted far less attention and emergency funds to AIDS than it did to Legionnaires disease, an illness that afflicts a relatively much smaller number of mostly elderly people.

Ignoring gay civil rights? On the gay rights front, gay leaders have criticized Reagan for ignoring gay civil rights issues during his two terms as president and for appointing a cadre of anti-gay, religious-right advocates to key administration jobs.

Among them were Patrick Buchanan, the anti-gay commentator and newspaper columnist who served in the White House communications office; William Bennett, who served as secretary of education; and Gary Bauer, who served as White House domestic policy adviser.

Reagan also drew strong objections from gay activists and African-American civil rights leaders when he named an anti-gay black minister, Sam Hart, as chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Hart led efforts to oppose a gay civil rights bill in Philadelphia, his hometown.

The commission, although only an advisory body, had played an historic role in promoting civil rights laws since the 1960s. Critics charged Reagan with stacking it with conservative ideologues.

Still, Reagan's own views on gays are undetermined.

In his column submitted to the Advocate, AIDS activist Kramer speculated that Reagan's failure to act to curtail the AIDS epidemic may be due to hostility toward homosexuality brought about by speculation that his son, Ron Reagan Jr., may be gay. Ron Reagan Jr. has said he is not gay and that the rumors were an insult to his wife.

"I suspect by now Ron Reagan Jr. actually believes he is straight," Kramer wrote. "By now he may very well be. He may very well have been all along. He just looked so suspicious, and of course it was this suspicion that, one way or the other, is what caused his father to murder so many of us."

Reagan's stepdaughter, Patti Davis, took strong exception to this assessment in an essay she wrote for Time magazine last year. The essay objected to the script of a fictional documentary about Reagan that was about to be broadcast on CBS television, in which Reagan expressed discomfort over his son's interest in ballet. The script also portrayed Reagan as saying people with AIDS deserved their fate because God condemned homosexuality.

"Not only did my father never say such a thing, he never would have," Davis wrote in her Time essay. She also described a conversation her father had with her when she was eight or nine years old, while the two watched a Rock Hudson movie. According to Davis, Reagan explained to her that Hudson, who was shown kissing a woman, "would much prefer to be kissing a man."

"This was said in the same tone that would be used if he had been telling me about people with different colored eyes, and I accepted it without question that this whole kissing thing wasn't reserved just for men and women," Davis wrote.

'Benign neglect' on gay rights

Yet, while social conservatives within the administration pushed hard for advancing the religious-right agenda, Reagan himself never spoke out against gays in a speech or public document and never spoke in favor of the anti-gay positions of the religious right.

Veteran D.C. gay activist Frank Kameny, who is among the nation's founding gay civil rights leaders, said Reagan appeared to take a posture of benign neglect when it came to gay issues.

"We didn't gain much on the gay front," Kameny said. "Aside from the AIDS issue, there were major cultural changes going on, most in our favor. The administration did not push those, but they were for the most part a non-player in those changes. I didn't see the White House doing anything, one way or the other."

Similar to other Republican administrations, a number of closeted gays worked in key White House and administration positions during the Reagan years, and in some cases they did not conceal their sexual orientation on the job, according to gay Republicans.

D.C. gay Republican activist Bob Kabel served from 1982 to 1984 as White House special assistant for legislative affairs.

"My being gay came out in my FBI background check," Kabel said. Also revealed in the background investigation was his domestic partner, Kabel said. "No one ever raised any objections to my living arrangement."

Among those who didn't seem to mind, Kabel said, was Reagan's White House Chief of Staff James Baker, to whom he reported. Kabel wasn't sure if Reagan himself knew of his sexual orientation, but he said he attended frequent White House meetings in which Reagan was present.

One development that appeared to contradict Kabel's experience surfaced in 1984, when the White House revoked the security clearance of a gay stenographer who had been employed by a company retained by the White House to transcribe Reagan's news conferences and speeches.

In a lawsuit filed against the White House, D.C. resident Killian Swift charged that officials violated the Administrative Procedures Act by revoking Swift's clearance after they learned he was gay through a routine background check and declared him a security risk. The company that employed Swift, Koba Associates, fired him as a result of the loss of his clearance, saying he could no longer perform his job duties.

A Justice Department attorney argued in court that the White House had a legal right to bar Swift from working at the White House without offering an explanation because the executive mansion is the president's private residence and is not bound by due process regulations.

Swift's tenure at the White House was a privilege, not a right, said DOJ attorney Jeffrey Paulsen. In a court document, Paulsen said the president or his staff could revoke that privilege in the same way they could cancel the services of a caterer if the president dislikes the taste of soup prepared by the caterer.

Killian lost his suit. White House officials at the time did not disclose whether Reagan was aware of the firing or the lawsuit.

Gay link to Iran-Contra

Another gay man who had access to the Reagan White House in a prominent capacity was Carl "Spitz" Channell. A prot g of the late gay conservative leader and fund-raiser Terry Dolan, Channell founded the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty, a front group used to raise illegal funds for the Nicaraguan Contras.

Under the direction of then White House official Oliver North, Channell used his organization as a vehicle for wealthy conservative donors to pay for arms for the Nicaraguan Contras, according to a report by U.S. special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. The fund-raising took place after Congress enacted a law banning the United States from providing financial or military support to the Contras.

To the amazement of some political observers, the flamboyant Channell often helped North put together White House visits with Reagan for contributors to Channell's group and other front groups created to fund what Walsh said was an illegal White House operation to circumvent the congressional ban on aid to the Contras. With Channell helping out with the logistics, North often gave the donors special White House briefings after Reagan greeted them, the special prosecutor's office reported.

Channell became the first Iran-Contra figure to be indicted. He pleaded guilty in 1987 to defrauding the government. He had been charged with using his non-profit group to raise funds and funnel the money to secret bank accounts used to purchase arms for the war in Nicaragua.

He died at age 44 in 1990 after being struck by a car on Capitol Hill while under treatment for cancer.

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