Speaker 1: M Hey everybody, I'm Robert Evans and this is once
Speaker 1: again behind the Bastards the Shore. We tell you everything
Speaker 1: you don't know about the very worst people in all
Speaker 1: of history. And we're just allowed beep in the room.
Speaker 1: So if you look scared? Is everything okay? Everything's okay.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry I had a nuclear device. Oh you need
Speaker 1: to leave those outside. The guy with the nuke is
Speaker 1: Andy Beckerman, our guest for today. Andy, how are you doing.
Speaker 1: I'm as good as anyone can be in this uh
Speaker 1: soupy nightmare we live in. Soupy is a good way
Speaker 1: to describe it. Now, Andy, I'm gonna apologize right now
Speaker 1: because we talked about what I was going to plug
Speaker 1: for you, and then there was that beep and it
Speaker 1: flew out of my mind. So why don't you plug
Speaker 1: the thing that that we were? What's the thing why?
Speaker 1: I am a co host of the Wonderful Couples Therapy
Speaker 1: stand up show and podcast here on the Stuff Works Network.
Speaker 1: A couple of therapy. We have stand ups who are lovers,
Speaker 1: are best friends, or siblings do sets together about the relationship,
Speaker 1: and then on the podcast we bring the best sets
Speaker 1: to you and your coast and that is Naomi Pagan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: from your episode he did about all the fringe Nazis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're the non Nazi pieces of ship behind Hitler. She
Speaker 1: was wonderful and I'm excited to talk with you today.
Speaker 1: If I can push past the rage, it's a comedy. Well,
Speaker 1: the good thing about today is that it'll be a
Speaker 1: rage that's different from the rage that you're feeling about
Speaker 1: everything in the news. I don't think so I have
Speaker 1: a personal stake in this story, I believe. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but like, okay, so where this is the day after
Speaker 1: the Kavanaugh hearing, So so everybody's pretty angry, and this
Speaker 1: is a thing to be angry about. That's involves a
Speaker 1: lot of the same people, but it's slightly in the past. Sure,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I believe when all this was going on,
Speaker 1: I was watching Transformers in my you know, babysitters living room. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we are. We're talking about a story from the eighties,
Speaker 1: the story of the Reagans in the AIDS crisis, um
Speaker 1: and the death of Optimist Prime. Well that is going
Speaker 1: to play a role here. So yeah, we When I
Speaker 1: started reaching this, I expected it was going to be
Speaker 1: a pretty straightforward episode about how homophobia and religious fundamentalism
Speaker 1: in the halls of American power led to an executive
Speaker 1: branch that fiddled while thousands of gay people died of
Speaker 1: a horrible disease. The story I uncovered was that, but
Speaker 1: also somehow even more offensive than that. It was somehow
Speaker 1: more frustrating in the story I thought I was going
Speaker 1: to be telling. So great, Yeah, I guess. Roller coaster, Yeah,
Speaker 1: roller coaster from nothing but trouble. You know, the one
Speaker 1: that grinds you up into bones. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what we're going to do today. It's the
Speaker 1: murder coaster, Yeah, from nothing but trouble. It's the opposite
Speaker 1: of self care. That's today. So let's let's get into
Speaker 1: it first. I'd like to start with, like, what what
Speaker 1: do you know about Reagan's response to the AIDS epidemic.
Speaker 1: I know that he ignored it for as long as possible,
Speaker 1: that they labeled at grids at first, so that it
Speaker 1: could kind of cordon off every everyone who had AIDS
Speaker 1: at the or you know, HIV did even was there
Speaker 1: any kind of scientific connection I remember the last no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it seems like it started like that was just the
Speaker 1: doctors giving it their best name, because it wasn't that
Speaker 1: much later that they were like, no, no, actually AIDS
Speaker 1: is a better thing to call it, and like they
Speaker 1: can't like but it accrued other nicknames around the time,
Speaker 1: um that were even more offensive. So like grids was
Speaker 1: probably the most palatable nickname that had got before it
Speaker 1: started being called AIDS. But um, yeah, it was pretty
Speaker 1: it's pretty frustrating story. It was definitely uh yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: let's just get into it. Um, I've got it all
Speaker 1: broken down here from time or by time. So ninety
Speaker 1: eight is the first year that gay men in Western countries.
Speaker 1: Sweden in the United States were the first countries where
Speaker 1: Westerners started to get sick with what would become known
Speaker 1: as aids. Uh. In nineteen eighty, when Ronald Reagan beat
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter, only about a couple of dozen Americans less
Speaker 1: than thirty had perished quote unquote beat Jimmy Carter. Well,
Speaker 1: wasn't there some like I mean he did, but like
Speaker 1: the whole October surprise bs. Yeah, there was a lot
Speaker 1: of shadiness that was done during the election, some of
Speaker 1: which we're going to get into in a little bit,
Speaker 1: but it was a pretty clean sweep aids, Oh, we're
Speaker 1: gonna One of the things that's exciting to me about
Speaker 1: this episode is the numerous opportunities will have to do
Speaker 1: our Reagan voices. Well, can you read the whole thing
Speaker 1: into making voice That might get a little bit old,
Speaker 1: But I did two sentences. I think I picked the
Speaker 1: right moments to try my Reagan voice out. But you know,
Speaker 1: maybe we'll have us a Reagan on Reagan conversation because
Speaker 1: there's two sides of Reagan we're going to see in
Speaker 1: this episode, one of which is pretty sympathetic, it seems
Speaker 1: like a guy who could have dealt with this crisis
Speaker 1: in a reasonably woke manner, and one of which is
Speaker 1: the Reagan that was actually president. Uh isn't the guy
Speaker 1: that he betrayed everyone in sag Um during the McCarthy
Speaker 1: hearings and everything. Yeah yeah, but I mean a lot
Speaker 1: of people did that, including Khan, who was was also
Speaker 1: a gay man but also a piece of ship, total
Speaker 1: piece of ship. Isn't the character and Angels in America? Well,
Speaker 1: he was one of the guys who win. McCarthy was
Speaker 1: doing the house in an American Activities committee was asking people,
Speaker 1: are you now or have you ever been a member
Speaker 1: of the Communist Party, so he was. Anyway, what we're
Speaker 1: getting so far, I can trace that. But I'm just
Speaker 1: saying you can trace the darkness back decades. You can monsters,
Speaker 1: you can trace the and I think the darkness that
Speaker 1: you can trace back with Reagan to that period is
Speaker 1: his not only to take any risks that hurt his career,
Speaker 1: because I really do think that comes down to it
Speaker 1: more than ideology in Reagan's case. But we'll see how
Speaker 1: you feel at the end of this. I'm gonna present
Speaker 1: all the evidence I have, um So. In June five,
Speaker 1: the CDC reported that five young homosexual men in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles had been treated for pneumo sisters karini, which is
Speaker 1: a like a fungal lung infection that can that's life
Speaker 1: threatening and it's only really found in people with very
Speaker 1: compromised immune systems. And we know now that this is
Speaker 1: one of those like you know, AIDS isn't what kills
Speaker 1: you when your immune system gets you know, destroyed. These
Speaker 1: little things that are always around us that normally we
Speaker 1: don't get sick from. That's what's gets you and so right,
Speaker 1: and they're in l A, which is a filthy town.
Speaker 1: So well, I mean, that's one of its charms. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you call it a charm. Uh. Two of these men
Speaker 1: had died by the time the CDC reported it, and
Speaker 1: on July four, the CDC reported eight more gay los
Speaker 1: angeleos had been treated for Composi sarcoma, which is a
Speaker 1: rare form of cancer that again only strikes people with
Speaker 1: crippled immune systems. So no one knew what it was
Speaker 1: at this point. Really, but doctors start to recognize the
Speaker 1: nineteen eight one something really weird is happening, specifically in
Speaker 1: like coastal cities and specifically to the gay populations, and
Speaker 1: what's going on culturally? In one what movies are hot? Ship?
Speaker 1: This isn't that far from Red Dawn, isn't wasn't that five? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: something like that. I said, yes, I have no I've
Speaker 1: no idea. I didn't prepare anything on the movies that
Speaker 1: we're ready. But I'm guessing when to Dane Jones and
Speaker 1: Nina jonesph was what eighty two Star Wars was hot?
Speaker 1: People started dying from immuno deficiency. It was it was
Speaker 1: beautiful era when we thought, boy, if we get three
Speaker 1: good Star Wars movies. I don't think anyone will ever
Speaker 1: ask for any more Star Wars movies. That'd be swell.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, what a time. Anyway, doctors around the country
Speaker 1: gradually started to realize that something was wrong. Two hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty four people died from AIDS over the course
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty one. When did they like name it?
Speaker 1: That starts in like eight two, So like in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty one people die, President doesn't say anything. But at
Speaker 1: this point it's small enough that like most presidents probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't have addressed a thing that's like it's it's it's
Speaker 1: still really little at this point. But on May eleventh,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two, doctors identified the blood borne pathogen behind
Speaker 1: all these deaths. So they realized that they're not like
Speaker 1: a bunch of different things. There's one thing connecting these all. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they call the new disease as you mentioned, gay
Speaker 1: related immune deficiency syndrome so GRIDS. Eight hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: three Americans died during nineteen eighty two, and a couple
Speaker 1: of months after that in June of June nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: two is when the term AIDS came into you. So
Speaker 1: the medical community corrected pretty quickly. They started off, you know,
Speaker 1: with the definitely bigoted position of like, well, let's just
Speaker 1: lock this down as a gay disease. But within a
Speaker 1: couple of months doctors were like, well, okay, that's not
Speaker 1: what's happening, and we've made a mistake and they corrected.
Speaker 1: But at this time, the more common names that were
Speaker 1: used were yet people called it the gay plague or
Speaker 1: gay cancer, like, so that was the more common term,
Speaker 1: and Grids definitely reinforced that attitude. That sways my go
Speaker 1: to reference for a character who's a disgusting homophobe and
Speaker 1: also old he's got the gay pleg Grids will this
Speaker 1: plague just came sweeping through the coasts. But by the way,
Speaker 1: not a lot of opportunities to to riff on. No, no,
Speaker 1: not really people dying of what turned out to be
Speaker 1: a horrific, horrific disease. I mean, it doesn't We don't
Speaker 1: have to riff because this would just be like a
Speaker 1: heartbreaking conversation where we're both emotionally exhausted at the end
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, well, I mean that's life at this point, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The guiding principle of this podcast is that, like you
Speaker 1: have these horrible stories that are important that nobody's gonna
Speaker 1: after a week like this week, where like you hear
Speaker 1: about all this ship going on in our actual government
Speaker 1: right now, very few people are gonna sit down and
Speaker 1: be like, well, I'm going to read about you know,
Speaker 1: how the government ignored he AIDS epidemic. But it's important
Speaker 1: that people know this. So maybe if you you pull
Speaker 1: a little bit of frosting, make a couple of Reagan
Speaker 1: jokes and whatnot, do some accents and stuff, then people
Speaker 1: hear the story and it sticks in their head and
Speaker 1: they don't go home and drink bleach because they're just
Speaker 1: so sad. That's the goal I've got in my mind.
Speaker 1: As Reagan sitting in his chair in the Oval office,
Speaker 1: just like shoveling jelly beans as into his mouth as
Speaker 1: his mind just deterior rates jelly bean today, like you
Speaker 1: can see the pieces of his brain like as dust
Speaker 1: like fly out of his ears in a trail. That's
Speaker 1: the picture of my head right now. Well, now that
Speaker 1: we've lost the conservative listeners, no no, I mean this
Speaker 1: was never going to be the episode that they grabbed onto.
Speaker 1: Do you have conservative listeners? I assume, so they leave
Speaker 1: really angry reviews. Whenever we talk about the Regans, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll say, I'll say I'll give a real message of
Speaker 1: conservative listeners. There is an example in this podcast what
Speaker 1: we're talking about about a Christian, very far right wing
Speaker 1: conservative who was a legitimate hero of the AIDS epidemic.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna be giving his story alongside Reagan's. So
Speaker 1: we're not biased on this, like we're not based. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're all biased, but you can talk about how the
Speaker 1: Reagans act, and you can talk about how other people
Speaker 1: who were even more extreme in their beliefs still did
Speaker 1: the right thing during the epidemic, which I think is
Speaker 1: important because like, people are gonna believe things that I
Speaker 1: don't like no matter what. It doesn't mean you have
Speaker 1: to ignore hundreds of thousands of people dying of disease. Well,
Speaker 1: I think what's interesting is there is a time in
Speaker 1: our country where conservative people there was some kind of
Speaker 1: moral compass attached to their existence, whereas now if you
Speaker 1: are on the right wing, I really do feel like
Speaker 1: at this point you knew who Trump was when you
Speaker 1: voted for him. He was not unapologetic about being a
Speaker 1: racist and a white supremacist and a monster and bounced
Speaker 1: his candidacy by calling Mexicans rapists. You knew who he
Speaker 1: was when you voted for him. I don't think you
Speaker 1: have an excuse anymore. Maybe during the Reagan era. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: the Reagan era was really the first time we start
Speaker 1: to see a number of things that are now sort
Speaker 1: of hallmarks of the right wing. For one thing, it
Speaker 1: was the first time that conservative Evangelical Christians voted as
Speaker 1: a group for a conservative candidate, because most Evangelical Christians
Speaker 1: had voted for Carter in the election prior, and Carter
Speaker 1: had disappointed them, mainly by the fact that he kind
Speaker 1: of he governed as more of a moderate because he's
Speaker 1: he's the same guy he didn't like, you know, he
Speaker 1: opposed abortion personally, but he didn't like push against it
Speaker 1: or anything like that. He's an empathetic person. I mean,
Speaker 1: he built houses, building houses for having at for humanity.
Speaker 1: So they backed him, but they wound up going with
Speaker 1: Reagan during the nineteen election. And so it's one of
Speaker 1: the things that I think is important to recognize now
Speaker 1: since we're talking about like the past, is how weird
Speaker 1: Reagan's campaign was for the time because again, for most
Speaker 1: of American history, different Christian denominations had voted for different parties.
Speaker 1: It was that like the first like big tent kind
Speaker 1: of yeah, Republican Athletics voted one way, Protestants voted another way.
Speaker 1: Nobody really cared what the Quakers did, but you know,
Speaker 1: they made really good butter um. And that was politics
Speaker 1: for a couple of hundred years in America. So this
Speaker 1: but this is the beginning of like big tent, that
Speaker 1: idea that like, and this is the beginning of the
Speaker 1: Christian right voting with the Republican Party. So yeah, Ronald
Speaker 1: Reagan was this guy who was the first conservative to
Speaker 1: really effectively reach out to the evangelical right. But he
Speaker 1: was also a TV and movie star and a former
Speaker 1: governor of California. He spent most of his life in Hollywood,
Speaker 1: around Hollywood movie stars. There's people he socialized with, and
Speaker 1: so he and Nancy Reagan had numerous gay friends in
Speaker 1: their early life, including the closeted film star Rock Hudson.
Speaker 1: During the Kennedy years, California Republicans started preparing Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: for his first political foray. They kind of picked him
Speaker 1: before he was even governor, And like, this guy is
Speaker 1: someone who we can wedge into power. Since Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: was gonna be getting into politics, the people sort of
Speaker 1: grooming him for this new that Nancy Reagan was going
Speaker 1: to need a very carefully crafted look if she was
Speaker 1: going to be eventually a first lady. So she wound
Speaker 1: up hiring a bunch of fashion designers and whatnot to
Speaker 1: kind of help her craft a look, and one of
Speaker 1: them was a very famous gay fashion designer named Jimmy Galanos.
Speaker 1: Working with Jimmy thrust Nancy deeper into Los Angeles's homosexual community,
Speaker 1: and she made a lot of friends. She was regularly
Speaker 1: seen quote on the arm of a guy named Jerry Zipkin,
Speaker 1: who was a gay real estate air and socialite. News
Speaker 1: clippings at the time refer to him as I don't know,
Speaker 1: I just try to put a picture in my head
Speaker 1: of like, you know, it's weird. I tried to research
Speaker 1: this guy because like, you can't find out much about him.
Speaker 1: Articles at the time will refer to him as a
Speaker 1: popular social escort, which is apparently a thing that used
Speaker 1: to exist to where like women would want to go
Speaker 1: out and go to parties and events and their husband
Speaker 1: wouldn't be available and Jerry was a prominent guy that
Speaker 1: everybody knew was gay, even though it wasn't really talked about.
Speaker 1: So like, if he's with your wife at the opening
Speaker 1: of a gallery at a movie premiere, it's fine, you know,
Speaker 1: it's Jerry's he's with Jerry. I'm imagine like thick glasses
Speaker 1: frames with like tinted lenses. It's the thick frames are
Speaker 1: what I get from the name Jerry. The tinted lenses
Speaker 1: are all zipkin. Yes, it's it's both parts of his
Speaker 1: name complete my belief of his Look, we're not gonna
Speaker 1: look that up. We're just gonna keep that in our heads.
Speaker 1: So Nancy and Ronald also became friends with Roy Kohen
Speaker 1: around this time in the sixties. Cone was, as we said,
Speaker 1: kind of a fiercely anti communist lawyer. Uh. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: was a big fixer. He was a big influence on
Speaker 1: Donald Trump in the early nineties. They were very close,
Speaker 1: and he was also a close advisor to Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 1: Fire just a phrase for someone who like gets people
Speaker 1: murdered and blackmailed and all that kind of stuff. No,
Speaker 1: I've used a number of fixtures in my career. When
Speaker 1: I've been working in war zones. They're people who basically
Speaker 1: like know wherever you are better than you and help
Speaker 1: you do like you like I need I have this
Speaker 1: goal in Los Angeles and I and he's like, Oh,
Speaker 1: we're you gonna need to talk to this person, this person,
Speaker 1: this person, they can help you out, or like in
Speaker 1: d C, it's the same thing, like, oh, well we
Speaker 1: can make this happen. Like fixing is a morally neutral term.
Speaker 1: It's gotten like we're talking about Trump's fixers in the
Speaker 1: news right now, so it's very shady. But there are
Speaker 1: just fixers whose whole job is like, oh, you're trying
Speaker 1: to accomplish this goal, these are the people you need
Speaker 1: to meet. This the early MGM fixer guy, I forget
Speaker 1: his name, but I don't know. Yeah, there's been there's
Speaker 1: a lot of fixers throughout history. Sometimes they're just called
Speaker 1: advisors or aids or whatever throughout history. Yeah, that would
Speaker 1: be a fun thing to do. So Roy Kan was
Speaker 1: a famous fixer in this period. He was a closeted
Speaker 1: gay man. It's impossible to say one way or the
Speaker 1: other if the Reagans knew about his sexuality. We do
Speaker 1: know they went to a ton of parties with Roy Khan.
Speaker 1: And we do know how Roy Khan behaved at parties
Speaker 1: because some of his friends wrote about those nights. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote now from a Life article titled The
Speaker 1: Snarling Death of Roy m Khne spoilers. At his parties,
Speaker 1: he'd hould people up to their feet to sing God
Speaker 1: Bless America, evidently his favorite song, even though he was
Speaker 1: a lifelong opera goer. Roy's idea of a good time
Speaker 1: was to sing patriotic ditties at a piano bar in
Speaker 1: Provincetown on Cape Cod. Our friend recalled going home early
Speaker 1: one summer evening and on inquiring the next morning about
Speaker 1: the rest of the night, being told we else stood
Speaker 1: around the piano Roy saying three choruses of God Bless
Speaker 1: America and got a heart on and went home to bed.
Speaker 1: What is he the founder of the capital steps. He's
Speaker 1: just a good American singing the national anthem and drunk
Speaker 1: as hell with a really big erection. And that's Roy Kone.
Speaker 1: How big I mean they noticed it and they commented
Speaker 1: on it in the sixties, so I'm gonna guess they're significant.
Speaker 1: I feel like there may be like you know, you know,
Speaker 1: like people never speak ill of the dead. Like when
Speaker 1: Nixon died, everyone was like, what a great guy, even
Speaker 1: though he was just like rat fuck little. He was
Speaker 1: a drunk man with his hand on the button, yeah,
Speaker 1: screaming the inward regular. So I bet like they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: he's dead, let's just talk about how big a dick
Speaker 1: he had. I don't. I don't think he was dead
Speaker 1: when this story was, but I don't really know. The
Speaker 1: snarling death was after he was dead. But like this anecdote,
Speaker 1: I think came from an earlier interview. Um, it was
Speaker 1: hard to tell. Uh you imagine in an interview where
Speaker 1: you're just like, and man, the size of that guy's cock.
Speaker 1: What are you telling you about the time I saw
Speaker 1: this man's direction. Roy Cohne was hard for America. Okay,
Speaker 1: that was a slogan when he was trying to like
Speaker 1: when he was running for office himself. Hard hard for America.
Speaker 1: And it was like a penis shaped thing with like
Speaker 1: the American flag. I was gonna say that the lyrics
Speaker 1: of godless America written on the shaft. But different, you know, honest,
Speaker 1: men can can can interpret that differently, or like a
Speaker 1: constitution with someone writing on it, like you know instead
Speaker 1: of a quill, that it's a penis. If that's how
Speaker 1: they'd signed. No, no, no, we're getting the family podcast. No,
Speaker 1: it's not at all, not in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 1: Don't let your kids listen to well, listen to some
Speaker 1: of this. Let your kids listen to the one about
Speaker 1: the East India tea company. That's important. Okay, So Nancy
Speaker 1: Reagan also desperately wanted Billy Haynes, a gay home decorator,
Speaker 1: to decorate her home. Um, he had decorated the home
Speaker 1: of some other favorite socialite who was sort of like
Speaker 1: he decorated the home of somebody that that Nancy really admired,
Speaker 1: and so she wanted this guy to do her house.
Speaker 1: But Nancy and Ronald did not have enough money at
Speaker 1: this point to hire the guy. So they had what
Speaker 1: they weren't rich. This is like, this is like sixty nine.
Speaker 1: I'm like, they have bed time for bonds. No, that's
Speaker 1: not that much money, man, bed time for bonzo. They
Speaker 1: were just low enough. On the toldham Pole that like
Speaker 1: he could be convinced to go into politics, he was
Speaker 1: not that biggest star. Should have got a better business manager.
Speaker 1: Well that's a fair point. Um, So Yeah, she wanted
Speaker 1: this guy to decorate her house, but they couldn't afford it,
Speaker 1: so they hatched a cunning scheme to get the next
Speaker 1: best thing. So here's a quote from an article in
Speaker 1: The Advocate called Nancy in the Gaze that talks about
Speaker 1: how Nancy kind of finankled her way into kind of
Speaker 1: having this guy decorate her home without paying for it.
Speaker 1: She and Ron soon began socializing with the gay couple.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty seven, when Reagan became governor of California,
Speaker 1: the victory party was held in the home of William
Speaker 1: Haynes and Jimmy Shields. Haynes is the guy that she
Speaker 1: wanted to decorate her house. Soon, Nancy used Jimmy Shields
Speaker 1: as partner as her shopping buddy. Still unable to afford
Speaker 1: the high prices and super swank of the Haynes look,
Speaker 1: she would take Jimmy along on a shopping junket and
Speaker 1: get his advice and use his articulate tastes. So she
Speaker 1: basically befriends the husband of the guy that she wants
Speaker 1: to decorate her house and just takes him shopping with
Speaker 1: her to get advice on stuff she's too cheap to hired.
Speaker 1: So there's a history of them exploiting gay men. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but in a friendly way. I don't know, friendly exploitation
Speaker 1: and maybe exploitation. They may have actually been buddies. I've
Speaker 1: read different things on it. Some of them say these
Speaker 1: people were pretty close to them. I don't know. It
Speaker 1: does seem like they had some legitimately close gay friends
Speaker 1: in this period. From what I can tell, I will
Speaker 1: say this, I can't find any evidence of movie star
Speaker 1: Earon Ronald Reagan pre politics expressing publicly any homophobic views.
Speaker 1: In fact, it seems that prior to the fall of
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven, a lot of people might assumed he
Speaker 1: was kind of your best case scenario for a Republican
Speaker 1: if you were like a gay person looking at like, okay,
Speaker 1: Republicans gonna win. What's the least defensive one. Well, it's
Speaker 1: this guy who's already kind of plugged into the gay
Speaker 1: community in l A. And has shown willingness and like
Speaker 1: open mindedness and at least in his personal life. So
Speaker 1: that's how people might have felt in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1: Now ninety seven is the year he took office, and
Speaker 1: in fall of that year, there was a big series
Speaker 1: of news articles at out a quote homosexual clique in
Speaker 1: the Reagan administration, because it turned out that a lot
Speaker 1: of the guys he had high up in his governor's
Speaker 1: administration were gay men. This was exposed by the news
Speaker 1: and was seen as a big deal because Reagan had
Speaker 1: campaigned on inn in California's moral decline, so it was
Speaker 1: not taking well with his conservative bass and he fired
Speaker 1: all of the gay men and his administration. He'd been
Speaker 1: happy to work with them earlier. Obviously, he only jettison
Speaker 1: them because they threatened his career. Might as well, you know,
Speaker 1: dump your morals as well well. See. But this is
Speaker 1: what's interesting to me because when I got into this,
Speaker 1: I had thought, Okay, he was probably just a really conservative,
Speaker 1: homophobic person from the beginning. And I don't think that's
Speaker 1: the case. I don't think he personally had much of
Speaker 1: an issue one way or the other. I think he
Speaker 1: just seems works there's a problem. It is worse. That's
Speaker 1: what I'm instrumentally homophobic as opposed to just like, I mean,
Speaker 1: all of it is is terribly awful, but it's all bad.
Speaker 1: I think it is worse though. If he knows there's
Speaker 1: nothing wrong with it. Really, he doesn't actually care what
Speaker 1: these people are doing in their private lives. He just
Speaker 1: wants to stay in power and win more elections, and
Speaker 1: so he'll jettison whoever he's got a jettison. Now. The
Speaker 1: Reagans did begin after this period to take stronger public
Speaker 1: stances against gay people. Nancy still went on her dates
Speaker 1: with Zipkin, but she would also in public call homosexuality
Speaker 1: a sickness. She called it an abnormality. Also in interviews,
Speaker 1: she stop using tinted lenses in his glasses. That's the
Speaker 1: worst yet. Um, Jerry, please, I have Nancy. This is well, well,
Speaker 1: I love that. If you're going to do the Nancy voice,
Speaker 1: you always you're always going to go back to doing
Speaker 1: the Ronald voice because nobody knows what Nancy Reagan sounded
Speaker 1: like anymore. Don't use drugs. I don't even remember if
Speaker 1: that's accurate. I think I can remember Barbara Bush's voice,
Speaker 1: but only because I can remember Barbara Bush on The Simpsons.
Speaker 1: What do like uptight socialites sound like? I don't know,
Speaker 1: they're all dead because we don't have social I mean, like,
Speaker 1: tighten my butthole, real tight, and well, it's just my
Speaker 1: hello you're just doing Lady Reagan, Lady Reagan, my favorite
Speaker 1: Beatle song. All right, now we have to we have
Speaker 1: to break through some ads right now. But when we
Speaker 1: get back, we're going to talk about a legitimate stance
Speaker 1: Reagan took in favor of gay people while he was governor.
Speaker 1: And then we're going to talk about the death of
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of Americans. So that's all coming up.
Speaker 1: But first products and we're back, we're talking about the Reagans.
Speaker 1: We just talked about their history, their friendships with gay
Speaker 1: people quote unquote friendships. I'm pretty sure they really liked
Speaker 1: Roy Cone because he's a vicious monster. Nothings with rock
Speaker 1: huts into but there's nothing to do with his homosexuality
Speaker 1: in uh in sixties seven. Of course, he fires all
Speaker 1: of the gay people in an administration in nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: so near the end of Reagan's time in office, eight
Speaker 1: movies are out. Star Wars was Star Wars I'm thinking right, yeah.
Speaker 1: A conservative lawmaker named Briggs proposed a California ballot initiative
Speaker 1: that became known as the Briggs Initiative. If it passed,
Speaker 1: it would have banned not only all gay people, but
Speaker 1: all people who support did gay rights from teaching in
Speaker 1: California schools. So this wasn't even saying you can't talk
Speaker 1: about homosexuality in school. This is saying, if you personally
Speaker 1: support gay rights, you can't be a teacher in California.
Speaker 1: So anyway, the initiative was really popular when it started out.
Speaker 1: It was the focus of one of the first major
Speaker 1: gay rights campaigns in California I think or American history.
Speaker 1: Harvey Milk was a big part of it. UM. It
Speaker 1: involved a lot of gay men going door to door
Speaker 1: and talking to people and just being like, hey, we
Speaker 1: exist in this law sucks and UM. Reagan took a
Speaker 1: public stance against the BRIGS initiative UM, along with a
Speaker 1: number of other people. President Carter did as well. The
Speaker 1: advocates in this case were very successful in turning public
Speaker 1: opinion around before the vote, and obviously it was defeated,
Speaker 1: so that's good. And so this is where the lug
Speaker 1: Cabin Republicans come from. They performed in order to fight
Speaker 1: this initiative, and then other things have happened, and then yeah,
Speaker 1: what happened, Like why are there's still log Cavan Republicans.
Speaker 1: They started out trying to stop a thing that needed
Speaker 1: to be stopped. So in this case, they're on the
Speaker 1: right side of things, although this is a really hard
Speaker 1: thing to be on the wrong side of, Like you're
Speaker 1: really a big piece of ship if you're in support
Speaker 1: of the Briggs initiative at this point. Again, even Reagan
Speaker 1: was against it prior to running for president. So yeah,
Speaker 1: this is where I started to realize that, yeah, I
Speaker 1: had gotten something wrong about the Reagan's um and started
Speaker 1: to realize that the real story is much darker because
Speaker 1: he's clearly capable of being convinced to give a ship
Speaker 1: about gay people because it happened once, and he has
Speaker 1: all these friends. So yeah, this is kind of the
Speaker 1: high water mark morally that we're going to get into
Speaker 1: here in the story, and it's all downhill from here.
Speaker 1: So yeah. In nineteen eighty three, three years after taking office,
Speaker 1: Ronald and Nancy hosted interior decorator Ted Graber and his
Speaker 1: partner Archie Case at the White House right before right
Speaker 1: around the corner. Yeah, right around the corner. So they
Speaker 1: have Ted Graber and his partner atch Case over to
Speaker 1: the White House. They celebrated Nancy's sixtieth birthday and stayed
Speaker 1: the night, and Ted and Archie were probably the first
Speaker 1: same sex couple to room together at the White House.
Speaker 1: So again we're still at the high wall water mark.
Speaker 1: I teased that just a second to early. But this
Speaker 1: is the best part of the Ragons, So him standing
Speaker 1: up against the briggs An initiative and having one gay
Speaker 1: couple at the White House. That's so I want to
Speaker 1: make sure of being fair here. That's why the bar
Speaker 1: is set very very low. I mean, the sad thing
Speaker 1: is that's actually not a low bar for nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: especially after what we're going to get into here. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that later. When AIDS became a very
Speaker 1: public and prominent problem in nineteen eighty two, the Reagan
Speaker 1: should have known it was serious. They had friends who
Speaker 1: were members of the gay community. They were clearly plugged
Speaker 1: into Los Angeles. You would have expected something from this
Speaker 1: administration on the fact that hundreds of Americans were now
Speaker 1: dying from AIDS. Instead, here's what happened. I'm about to
Speaker 1: play you audio of the Reagan administration's first official response
Speaker 1: to the AIDS crisis. This is a clip from a
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two press conference. Reagan's Press Secretary Larry Speaks
Speaker 1: is asked about AIDS. Larry speaks with a with an E. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, it's even weirder this Secretary Larry speaks. This
Speaker 1: is Larry speaks well at the job. Clearly your name
Speaker 1: speaks is my defense secretary to any bombs. It's almost
Speaker 1: like a dick army kind of ame, Like it really
Speaker 1: is if the only they've all been in the same administration.
Speaker 1: Um and then yeah, he's being asked a question about
Speaker 1: AIDS by a reporter named Lester Consulting. So all right,
Speaker 1: let's play it from the Center for Disease Control of
Speaker 1: a Lanta that AI d S is now an epidemic
Speaker 1: SI six hundred cases. It's known as gay play. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a pretty serious thing that one and every three
Speaker 1: people that get this who died. And I wondered if
Speaker 1: the president even where I don't have it or you
Speaker 1: do you? You don't have it? Well, I'm relieved to
Speaker 1: hear that do you? You didn't answer my question? How
Speaker 1: do you know the project? The White House looks on
Speaker 1: This is a great joke. Now I don't know anything
Speaker 1: about it. Master, does anybody in the White House know
Speaker 1: about this? Epidemic l I don't think so, I don't
Speaker 1: think any there's been no personal experience here last year.
Speaker 1: Dr check Thorley with Dr Rugy this morning. He's had
Speaker 1: no uh, no patience suffered from a I D S
Speaker 1: or whatever it is. Is that what I didn't say that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I thought I heard you in the State department over
Speaker 1: there when you stay over there, because I love you,
Speaker 1: let's don't put it in those terms. Last year, so
Speaker 1: I just love how like smirky these fuckers are like smug.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's the same, it's exactly the same today,
Speaker 1: like nothing has changed about these elite sons of pitches. Well,
Speaker 1: i'll tell you what's changed. I'll tell you it's changed
Speaker 1: because what this is and what this is usually when
Speaker 1: you this is from like a vanity fair put all
Speaker 1: these together in a short little documentary. You can find
Speaker 1: one it linked on the site. This will usually be
Speaker 1: framed as like, listen to the Reagan administrations the laughter
Speaker 1: and stuff that they had over this, which is obviously
Speaker 1: Reagan's spokesman is laughing about this, and basically his response
Speaker 1: this guy bringing it up is why do you care?
Speaker 1: Are you gay? I'm not gay. I don't have it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like gay panic. It's like the Also like I
Speaker 1: like how they didn't know how to use acronyms. Yeah,
Speaker 1: by the way, are we are we gonna get any
Speaker 1: information about how much money we're given to N A
Speaker 1: T O. Yeah, it's it's it's but like, what's notable
Speaker 1: to that to me is that this is not just
Speaker 1: Reagan people. These are journalists presumably, people who are more
Speaker 1: like to the left of the spectrum. They're all laughing
Speaker 1: at it, like it's not just the Reagan people, which
Speaker 1: is something that has happened. I don't think if a
Speaker 1: disease were to inflict the gay community, I don't think
Speaker 1: you have the press box all making fun of it
Speaker 1: like that. I don't know. They're a bunch of elite
Speaker 1: ship heads too. I don't know. I feel like it's
Speaker 1: shocking to me then that you could have And I
Speaker 1: think Lester're king Solving or Kinsolving is not a left
Speaker 1: wing journals. He's actually conservative right wing guy. He's a
Speaker 1: pretty homophobic dude. But at the same point is like
Speaker 1: a third of the people who have this have died,
Speaker 1: thousands of Americans are sick. You have to say something
Speaker 1: That's one of the things that's interesting to me about
Speaker 1: this is that you have a number of people who
Speaker 1: by certainly by our standards, are really homophobic, people like
Speaker 1: Lester who are still like, but something has to be done.
Speaker 1: It's not entirely a matter of people's morality. Was different
Speaker 1: than because some people who were still pretty bigoted at
Speaker 1: least did something. He's not using the terminology that you'd
Speaker 1: want anyone to use today, but he's trying to get
Speaker 1: the White House to address a plague that's killing people,
Speaker 1: which is not nothing. And it's interesting to me that
Speaker 1: he's the only one in that room taking it seriously.
Speaker 1: Is I mean, sure, Okay, I don't I It's just like,
Speaker 1: I guess it's his job too in some way, but
Speaker 1: it's all of those journalists job too, and he's the
Speaker 1: only one that is something that's worth noting. It's both
Speaker 1: worth noting because everybody's really fucking homophobic in that video,
Speaker 1: but it's also worth noting because it's not just the
Speaker 1: Reagan administrations falling down on this. Mainstream journalist him in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two considered this worth laughing over. Lester was
Speaker 1: a kuk in a crank for talking about it at all.
Speaker 1: That's worth noting to me. We shouldn't just be attacking
Speaker 1: the Reagan administration because it was it was homophobia at
Speaker 1: every level of our nation's culture that allowed AIDS to
Speaker 1: get as bad as it god and I think that
Speaker 1: video is emblematic of it. Lester obviously wanted the White
Speaker 1: House to address this in some way and they don't, Like,
Speaker 1: there's no he just wanted a scoop. I mean, at
Speaker 1: least he keeps it up, He keeps he keeps doing
Speaker 1: this for years, like he's trying to get them to
Speaker 1: say something, and they were a few like that is
Speaker 1: important to note the Reagan administration refused to even address it,
Speaker 1: to even say as much as we're aware that there's
Speaker 1: a problem, we're monitoring it. They wouldn't even say that
Speaker 1: much at this point. Part of why they weren't willing
Speaker 1: to say that much is that twelve days before the
Speaker 1: nineteen election, Ronald Reagan had received the endorsement of a
Speaker 1: group called Christians for Reagan now Christians for Reagan or
Speaker 1: C for Our as I'm gonna call him, to be
Speaker 1: cool and Hip, was an ostensibly politically independent Christian fundamentalist
Speaker 1: lobbying groups, so see for are paid for what Slate
Speaker 1: describes as a barrage of ads attacking President Carter for
Speaker 1: catering to gate people. Quote on one spot, an announcer
Speaker 1: in toned the gaze in San Francisco elected in mayor,
Speaker 1: now they're going to elect a president. Before the ads began,
Speaker 1: polls had shown that Carter, a born again Christians, still
Speaker 1: had considerable support among evangelicals. But the hard hitting TV
Speaker 1: spots were extremely effective, and they helped Reagan carry every
Speaker 1: Southern state except Georgia, where Carter had been governor. Partly
Speaker 1: because the commercials never aired in New York at Washington,
Speaker 1: most people outside the South were never aware of them.
Speaker 1: So this is part of I think why the Reagan
Speaker 1: administration won't even say we're aware that there's a disease,
Speaker 1: because they got elected off the back of people who
Speaker 1: were able to shift support away from Carter via homophobia,
Speaker 1: so that Reagan knows that's part of his like foundation.
Speaker 1: Hey Republicans, wait, we needed racism for the Southern strategy.
Speaker 1: Now we need homophobia so we can keep the evangelicals
Speaker 1: in line and abortion. So we take that for granted now,
Speaker 1: but this is the start of that This is also
Speaker 1: really the start of abortion being a major factor in
Speaker 1: American politics. That was not always you go back to
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties, that wasn't a wedge issue. I mean,
Speaker 1: it wasn't even really a most people's radar. It's in
Speaker 1: during the Reagan era that this really kicks that both
Speaker 1: of these things really kick off as major aspects of
Speaker 1: Republican strategy. So whenever the question of homosexuality came up
Speaker 1: in Ronald Reagan's political life, uh, he was harsh when
Speaker 1: it was, you know, a public statement. He was asked
Speaker 1: on the campaign whether or not his ballet dancers son
Speaker 1: was gay, and Reagan replied, He's all, man, we made
Speaker 1: sure of that them. Sorry, I have nothing funny is
Speaker 1: they're just like all fuckers. No, I mean I think
Speaker 1: that means Reagan was hitting his kid. But but just um.
Speaker 1: The first couple continued to socialize and work with gay
Speaker 1: people behind the scenes. The publicly homophobic Roy Kahan was
Speaker 1: a close advisor to the Reagan White House. Ted Graber,
Speaker 1: who spent the night at the White House, also got
Speaker 1: a contract to do a one million dollar renovation job
Speaker 1: of the family quarters in the West Wing. So clearly
Speaker 1: Ronnie and Nancy weren't above throwing a friend a bone,
Speaker 1: even if that friend happened to be homosexual courting taxpayer money.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, and that will be noteworthy in
Speaker 1: a minute. Here. According to Steve Weisman, a journalist who
Speaker 1: covered Reagan's first term for The New York Times, quote
Speaker 1: the White House wasn't that homophobic because Nancy head friends
Speaker 1: who were gay. But it was definitely a place where
Speaker 1: you would hear one staff member call another staff member
Speaker 1: a fag behind his back. Jesus Christ. I just a
Speaker 1: lot of the fact, like, you know, I can't be racist,
Speaker 1: I have a black friend, or like that kind of
Speaker 1: justification is Yeah, it's a pretty remarkable quote because it's
Speaker 1: like you just described a pretty homophobic office, Like it's
Speaker 1: not that sex assive place. We just you know, do
Speaker 1: a lot of pinching. Like well, okay, at this point,
Speaker 1: federal action who actually stopped the spread of AIDS and
Speaker 1: only been taken by a handful of scientists at the
Speaker 1: CDC in at this point in two they in a
Speaker 1: small caucus of New York and California congressman lobby to
Speaker 1: get additional funding to fight AIDS. It's worth noting that
Speaker 1: these congressmen got involved because they all had openly gay
Speaker 1: staff members who begged them to do something. So these
Speaker 1: Democratic congressman, we have gay people on their staff who
Speaker 1: are like, there's a fucking problem, You've got to do something.
Speaker 1: And so that's why the first real political action starts
Speaker 1: getting taken. It's because straight lawmakers have gay people who
Speaker 1: worked for them who are like, dude, ships fucked up. Um,
Speaker 1: which is why it's important. All of the gay people
Speaker 1: who were in Reagan's political orbit got excised in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven. That is a factor in this um. So.
Speaker 1: One of the books I did read to prepare for
Speaker 1: this episode was After the Wrath of God. It's an
Speaker 1: Oxford University Press textbook about how American religion impacted the
Speaker 1: AIDS crisis. Very interesting um. It tides much of the
Speaker 1: Reagan administration's failure to the fact that gay people didn't
Speaker 1: have any access to administration officials. Quote. The Reagan era
Speaker 1: ushered in not only a new national leader, but also
Speaker 1: a new White House staff that included a number of
Speaker 1: anti gay conservatives, chief among them Pat Buchanan, Gary Bauer,
Speaker 1: and William Bennett. The shift consequently curtailed the already limited
Speaker 1: access that gay and lesbian leaders had two aids within
Speaker 1: the previous administration. As a Storian William Turner puts it,
Speaker 1: rather than having highly sympathetic White House and Executive Agency
Speaker 1: staffers serving under a largely indifferent president who supported the
Speaker 1: basic logic of civil rights, suddenly activists faced hostile staffers
Speaker 1: serving under a largely indifferent president who opposed the basic
Speaker 1: logic of civil rights. So one attitude on this is
Speaker 1: that the Reagans didn't make a huge difference. It was
Speaker 1: the fact that their staff had zero people who gave
Speaker 1: a ship about the gay community. They had no control
Speaker 1: over the staff. Well, I mean they did control their staff,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's sarcastic. But also I love how like
Speaker 1: there's like maybe one or two sentences in the entire Bible, Yeah,
Speaker 1: are like that even vaguely tied to it, vaguely tied
Speaker 1: to it, And somehow those two outweigh all of jesus
Speaker 1: discussion of like loving thy neighbor and like turning to
Speaker 1: the cheek and all this other kind of stuff that
Speaker 1: is about love. And I don't know, like what is
Speaker 1: it with like Christian Conservative what is with their brains
Speaker 1: where that somehow those two little sentences or whatever somehow
Speaker 1: warps the rest of it. I think it has very
Speaker 1: little to do with the Bible. I think it has
Speaker 1: much more to do with the fact that a lot
Speaker 1: of these people grew up in a culture where like,
Speaker 1: that was the thing that you made fun of, that
Speaker 1: was the thing you attacked. It was seen as immoral.
Speaker 1: They didn't really know much about these people. There's a
Speaker 1: great quote from Senator Henry Waxman, who was like one
Speaker 1: of the congressmen in a health sub committee who was
Speaker 1: like really active in early fighting back against AIDS. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen two he wrote, there is no doubt in
Speaker 1: my mind that if the same disease had appeared among
Speaker 1: Americans of Norwegian descent or among tennis players rather than
Speaker 1: gay males, the responses of both the government and the
Speaker 1: medical establishment would have been different. And I thinks that
Speaker 1: what it's a marginalized group that people are used to
Speaker 1: making fun of, so no one treats it seriously. Like
Speaker 1: that's the initial response of the administration. You heard it
Speaker 1: in that in that audio. It's it's the press secretary
Speaker 1: joking that a journalist is gay for asking about gay people.
Speaker 1: I think that's why it was so ignored, because they're
Speaker 1: just seen as this subcategory of humanity that they don't
Speaker 1: like is so far beneath their concern I I really
Speaker 1: think that's most of what it is. Yes, no, I
Speaker 1: get that, but I'm just saying that, like, the thing
Speaker 1: that's supposed to define these Christian Conservatives is the Bible,
Speaker 1: and most of it's about loving everyone. Well, we're going
Speaker 1: to get into the Bible a little bit because there
Speaker 1: are a couple of different ways different Christian Conservatives take
Speaker 1: the Bible as relates to the AIDS crisis. So we're
Speaker 1: seeing one right now. When we get back, we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk more about the Reagan administration's fun up of the
Speaker 1: AIDS crisis. That's what we're gonna talk about. Well, time
Speaker 1: for some ads Jesus Nicaragua and we're back. Um. Nineteen
Speaker 1: two was the first year that something should have been
Speaker 1: done by the Reagan administration v v AIDS. It was
Speaker 1: also the year that very little was done v AIDS.
Speaker 1: While the National Institutes of Health spent thirty six thousand
Speaker 1: dollars per toxic shock death in the US and nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two, they spent only eight thousand per AIDS death
Speaker 1: in nineteen two. Toxic shock as in keeping in a
Speaker 1: there's a number of things that can cause it. Be
Speaker 1: keeping a tampon can cause it. It's it's a It's
Speaker 1: a less common cause of death than AIDS was by
Speaker 1: this point, but it was getting a lot more money,
Speaker 1: and so was legionnaire's disease. The soak um legionnaire's disease,
Speaker 1: which killed about fifty people in nineteen eighty two, got
Speaker 1: way more funding. Between June nine in May nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: the CDC spent less than a million dollars on AIDS
Speaker 1: and nine million on Legionnaire's disease. So more than a lobby,
Speaker 1: there's a legionnaire's lobby. Well, yeah, there have been fifty
Speaker 1: people killed in that time from legionnaire's disease, in a
Speaker 1: thousand from AIDS. So AIDS gets a million dollars and
Speaker 1: kills a thousand people. Legionnaire's disease kills fifty people and
Speaker 1: gets nine million dollars in federal funding. So yeah, there's
Speaker 1: not a lot of money being devoted towards it at
Speaker 1: this point. Here's a quote from an Advocate article I
Speaker 1: found Congressional staffers joke that the n i H really
Speaker 1: stood for the National Institutes of Health RELEA stood for
Speaker 1: not interested in homosexuals. Republican priorities were perfectly clear right
Speaker 1: from the start of the Reagan government. One of the
Speaker 1: administration's first official acts was to propose a cut of
Speaker 1: nearly fifty in the appropriation for the CDC from three
Speaker 1: d and twenty seven million to one hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: one million. So one of the first things the Reagan
Speaker 1: administration does as a plague is starting to take off
Speaker 1: is cut CDC funding in half um. At the same time,
Speaker 1: Reagan asked for an immediate increase of seven billion dollars
Speaker 1: in defense spending and an additional increase of twenty five
Speaker 1: billion for the following fiscal year, for total of two
Speaker 1: and twenty billion dollars spent on defense, when we cut
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty million dollars out of the CDC's budget.
Speaker 1: So again, you've got like a perfect storm here, not
Speaker 1: all of which is related to homophobia, but certainly all
Speaker 1: of which is related to not really giving a ship.
Speaker 1: What happens to people where that money go to, like
Speaker 1: arming to mine, yeah, mining the harbor and n star
Speaker 1: wars and stuff like that. We had to had to
Speaker 1: get lasers in space that we still don't have h
Speaker 1: space forces crossed you get it in. We helped out
Speaker 1: some nice boys in Afghanistan and the last time I checked,
Speaker 1: that place has been sailing pretty smooth since the eighties
Speaker 1: and good times in Afghanistan. So in three, the CDC
Speaker 1: warned Blood Banks that it believed the blood supply may
Speaker 1: have been contaminated, but would be a good name for
Speaker 1: a like a rich person who like Peter Thiel. That
Speaker 1: is happening right now, Peter Teel should his name should
Speaker 1: be informally blood Banks. Yeah, we're just Dracula, I mean uh.
Speaker 1: The HIV virus was identified and named for the first
Speaker 1: time in nineteen eight three. Ronald Reagan did not say
Speaker 1: the words AIDS in nineteen eighty three. As far as
Speaker 1: we know, he had never uttered the word in his
Speaker 1: life at that point, even though two thousand, three hundred
Speaker 1: and four Americans died in just nineteen eighty three from AIDS.
Speaker 1: On June nineteen eighty three, after roughly one eleven is
Speaker 1: worth of total American deaths due to AIDS, the disease
Speaker 1: finally came up in a second press conference, You got
Speaker 1: any predictions about how this one's going to go? My
Speaker 1: guests longer peals of laughter. All right, all right, let's see,
Speaker 1: like when you appeel you know, an orange or something,
Speaker 1: and you'd use the thing to get the whole peel
Speaker 1: off into one little strand. I've never had the patience
Speaker 1: that did the environmental destrive vir President's teach on Saturday,
Speaker 1: the fairy tale? Is there any true ferry tales? Are
Speaker 1: not true? And this one's true? Leicester's ayres perked up
Speaker 1: when you said fairies. Yeah, it's pretty bad interest in that.
Speaker 1: This is the movement even at the Comers convention, Crest
Speaker 1: Food Federal system getting at the age from President has
Speaker 1: been involved in um in in briefed on the age
Speaker 1: situation number of months ago in a Cabinet meeting and
Speaker 1: ordered that high priority be given to research matters on it. UH.
Speaker 1: The Center for Disease Control has been involved for some time.
Speaker 1: President will continue to be updated. We have recently asked
Speaker 1: at twelve million dollars to be reprogrammed for research on
Speaker 1: the age. That's extend of the President's involvement, which has
Speaker 1: been Laurry. Does the President think that it might help
Speaker 1: if he suggested that the gays cut down in their cruising.
Speaker 1: Yah told you and hear your answer. I just was
Speaker 1: acknowledging your and your interest in this said, you don't
Speaker 1: think that it would help if the game has come
Speaker 1: down on their cruising and we're researching, and if we
Speaker 1: come up with any any, any research that shed some
Speaker 1: light on whether gaish and cruise or not crude would
Speaker 1: make available to you. The one legitimate piece of progress, motherfuckers,
Speaker 1: is that they use the acronym. Now now they understand.
Speaker 1: You got to give him credit for that. Took a year,
Speaker 1: had an English teacher comment and teach them something. They
Speaker 1: are still laughing every time anyone says the word fairy.
Speaker 1: By the way, is everyone in the press pool a
Speaker 1: twelve year old boys? Yes, this was a time when
Speaker 1: everyone in the press pool was a twelve year old book. Well,
Speaker 1: that makes what was a Reagan era policy? Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: which we should go back to. Actually, if you've watched newsies,
Speaker 1: you know how funny kids can be with the news
Speaker 1: and cholera. I've never watched newses. I assume they all
Speaker 1: die of colera. Kids die from the darnest things. Most
Speaker 1: popular show in nineteen nineteen um so, the Reagan administration's
Speaker 1: first official meeting of the AIDS crisis with representatives of
Speaker 1: the gay community was held on June. It included two
Speaker 1: members of the National Gay Task Force, a special Assistant
Speaker 1: to the President, and staff members from Health and Human Services.
Speaker 1: The members of the Gay Task Force, which was essentially
Speaker 1: like a gay advocacy group. I wish it was like
Speaker 1: a gay assassin group, like it was made of all
Speaker 1: gay men and women and they just murdered homophobes. I
Speaker 1: will tell you strom Thurmond would not have lived to
Speaker 1: be a hundred and sixteen if that task force had
Speaker 1: been doing it. He's still alive, by the way, somewhere
Speaker 1: he's that kind of hatred, never quite down. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: he's I mean, do you think what he died. The
Speaker 1: molecules in his body just like floated off in his
Speaker 1: infected much much like in the Return of Optimus Prime
Speaker 1: with the hate virus that I think molecules from him
Speaker 1: disintegrated off of his body and formed a new hand
Speaker 1: end avestigial hand on the spine of Roger Stone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so now he can jerk himself off with both of
Speaker 1: his hands. That's my theory. Roger Stone can present a
Speaker 1: panceless photo of himself to prove it wrong or not.
Speaker 1: But I believe he has astigial hand growing on his
Speaker 1: thigh like Quatto, like Quatta exactly, but just a hand,
Speaker 1: but just a hand for jerking himself off constantly. Roger Stone,
Speaker 1: the Baba dooke himself, by the way, at this point
Speaker 1: in time, is helping Paul Manaford establish the first lobbying
Speaker 1: group explicitly for dictators, which is pretty cool progress. So
Speaker 1: there are progressives involved in politics at this point. We
Speaker 1: should point that out. So the Gay Task Force people
Speaker 1: asked for things from the regular administration like more money
Speaker 1: for sex ed at the state level. They wanted a
Speaker 1: national conversation about condom use and the destigmatization of AIDS
Speaker 1: as a gay disease. By the way, where where did
Speaker 1: you grow up? Texas? Texas? I grew up in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: The sex d and fifth grade was basically like a
Speaker 1: nervous Jim teacher being like the oh, we just got
Speaker 1: They didn't. They just started the video, walked out of
Speaker 1: the room and came back and when it was done
Speaker 1: and everyone was very uncomfortable. It was terrible sex said,
Speaker 1: but it was Texas, so I'm surprised they let us
Speaker 1: know penises exist. They really like to keep that under
Speaker 1: wraps in Texas. So yeah, the what the task force
Speaker 1: wanted was pretty minor and pretty like a big thing
Speaker 1: for them was just like, tell people condoms work to
Speaker 1: prevent AIDS. They should know that, maybe give out some condoms.
Speaker 1: The Reagan administration was not a big fan of this advice,
Speaker 1: so they had a second meeting about AIDS in August.
Speaker 1: No representatives of the gay community were invited this time. Instead,
Speaker 1: Reagan representatives met with the National director of the Conservative Caucus,
Speaker 1: Howard Phillips, who thought any information about AIDS had to
Speaker 1: be delivered under a blanket condemnation of homosexuality as a
Speaker 1: quote moral wrong. Another attendee, doctor Ron Goodwin, of the
Speaker 1: Moral Majority, suggested that the administration should close gay bathhouses
Speaker 1: and require blood donors to give their sexual histories. Historian
Speaker 1: Jennifer Bryan note that when the CDC officials pushed to
Speaker 1: take effective steps against the disease, they struggled against the
Speaker 1: fact that quote many of Reagan's domestic advisors and AIDS
Speaker 1: wanted to bend what they called AIDS education to fit
Speaker 1: the model of social and religious conservatism that posited gay
Speaker 1: men as sick and dangerous. By the way, more like
Speaker 1: the Moron majority. Oh nice, you really told that one
Speaker 1: in time? Guys, I am professional comedy writer. We get
Speaker 1: that on some T shirts from the eight four election.
Speaker 1: I think we can really make a difference. There's got
Speaker 1: to be like some village in sub Saharan Africa where
Speaker 1: everyone's either wearing a Moron majority shirt or a Hillary
Speaker 1: for Prison shirt. It's just we're still fighting your political
Speaker 1: battles from ten years ago here in T shirts. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And also they've got like shat T shirts, a lot
Speaker 1: of shack T shirts. It's gonna be fun. A lot
Speaker 1: of Kazam whatever whatever movie was. Kauzan was the real one,
Speaker 1: Shazam was jas was the Mandala effect one. So late
Speaker 1: in nineteen three nine Republican congressman wrote a letter to
Speaker 1: the President. One of these congressmen was new to ging Ridge.
Speaker 1: Here's Jennifer Bryer. Gingridge argued that closing bath houses are
Speaker 1: mandating reporting of AIDS was a more reasonable policy than
Speaker 1: trying to provide sex education at bath houses or keeping
Speaker 1: the names of people who tested positive for HIV anonymous.
Speaker 1: Here the common sense arguments betrayed a particular stance on AIDS,
Speaker 1: one that sought to make the public healthy by restricting
Speaker 1: the civil rights of those believed to be sick. So
Speaker 1: you'd certainly never hear about anything like that happening. Again.
Speaker 1: One of the doctors working tirelessly to treat the epidemic
Speaker 1: was Marcus Kanan. This is new Gingris, the guy who
Speaker 1: served his wife divorce papers while she was in the hospital. Right, yes,
Speaker 1: moral paragon. Yeah, all these fuckers like to to a man,
Speaker 1: there isn't one of them that isn't just like a
Speaker 1: dark cathul like beast in their brains. But they're all
Speaker 1: these kind of like non Euclidean garbage creatures. No, which
Speaker 1: is why I I think, really, if you want to
Speaker 1: reform politics in this country, one of the laws that
Speaker 1: you pass is that in order to be an elected
Speaker 1: politician at the national level, you wear a camera at
Speaker 1: all times while you're elected. Everybody sees you go to
Speaker 1: the bathroom, Everybody sees you fuck, Everybody sees every conversation
Speaker 1: you say. You can just log into a stream. You
Speaker 1: can watch Rand Paul do whatever the funk. Rand Paul
Speaker 1: does at eleven thirty at night. Zero privacy for you, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And if you once you've got a full look at
Speaker 1: these people, you decide I want to keep supporting them.
Speaker 1: I think they're in line with myral moral values. Why
Speaker 1: is round Paul holling a a six inch hole out
Speaker 1: of a copy of the fountain Head? Oh? Man, you
Speaker 1: hope it's a copy of the fountain Head shoving all
Speaker 1: that vastly in there. I don't know why, but I
Speaker 1: when I imagine the thing that Rand Paul has sex with,
Speaker 1: that's not a person I was imagining, like a decorative gourd. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was a magic like dollar iron. Rand, you're my mommy.
Speaker 1: You're still doing a Reagan voice. We're stuck in well
Speaker 1: and RAN's my mommy. One of the doctors working tirely
Speaker 1: to treat the epidemic in n was Marcus Connent. He
Speaker 1: was among the first physicians in the country to treat
Speaker 1: or diagnose AIDS and patients. Due to his work in
Speaker 1: you see San Francisco. Dr Connent met with the Reagan
Speaker 1: administration three times, first and nineteen eighty three. Here's the
Speaker 1: Guardian doc Content and his colleagues quote we're going on
Speaker 1: and on about how this was a disease and infectious disease.
Speaker 1: He recalled. Reagan's representative wasn't buying it. Her response was
Speaker 1: that this was a legal problem, not a medical problem.
Speaker 1: Connent said, simply because of who game in with aids
Speaker 1: were and who their sexual partners were. She told him
Speaker 1: these people were breaking the law. So that's the Reagan
Speaker 1: administration's stands to doctors, gay people are breaking the law.
Speaker 1: The problem is their law breaking, not the fact that
Speaker 1: there's a disease. Ronald Reagan did not address the nation
Speaker 1: about Remember when we locked up all those people at Typhus. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a good time. Oh man, we that one
Speaker 1: lady got out. It was a real problem. We had
Speaker 1: tiny handcuffs made for all the lice. I thought you
Speaker 1: were talking about tiny handcuffs for children, and I was
Speaker 1: thinking that's an industry that had to have taken a
Speaker 1: hit since the eighteen hundreds. Oh yeah. Ever, like whatever,
Speaker 1: the labor movement started kicking up in the like teens
Speaker 1: or whatever. So if we have a children's uprising today,
Speaker 1: the police are not prepared to deal with it. Which kids. Hey, look,
Speaker 1: if you're a business person, looking forward to the future,
Speaker 1: we are going to need children's sized cuffs at some point,
Speaker 1: children's size cuffs, children's size cages, all sorts of little
Speaker 1: cute little children's size prison paraphernalia. Guys to growth, industry,
Speaker 1: capitalism works. Oh man, a little children's guard uniforms too,
Speaker 1: could have all child prison Oh my god, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: that would be so cute. Little anne Gettis calendars, little
Speaker 1: German shepherd puppies, like just ripping people apart on the ground.
Speaker 1: Oh man, what a time it's going to be. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan did not address the nation about AIDS as
Speaker 1: far as we know at that point, and he still
Speaker 1: had not himself said the word. He certainly hadn't said
Speaker 1: it in public. His communications director, though, Pat Buchanan, wrote
Speaker 1: an article for The New York Yeah. Quote from Pat Buchanan,
Speaker 1: The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children, and
Speaker 1: among the revolutionary vanguard is gay rights activists. The mortality
Speaker 1: rate is highest and climbing the poor homosexuals. They have
Speaker 1: declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an
Speaker 1: awful retribution. Here's how Randy Schlitz, author of the band
Speaker 1: played on sums up pet Buchanan's articles conclusion in his book,
Speaker 1: Buchanic concluded by saying that no homosexual should be permitted
Speaker 1: to handle food and that the Democratic Party's decision to
Speaker 1: hold their next convention in San Francisco would leave delegate
Speaker 1: spouses and children at the mercy of quote homosexuals who
Speaker 1: belonged to a community that is a common carrier of dangerous, communicable,
Speaker 1: and sometimes fatal diseases. Pat Buchanan, everybody, is he still alive?
Speaker 1: I think so. I know my dad probably voted for
Speaker 1: him for president at one point. God. Yeah, he was
Speaker 1: a perennial candidate. Guy, kind of like a fringe, right
Speaker 1: dude would always always run, oh you're from Texas again, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have to remember that. Yeah. Uh. Four thousand, two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty one Americans died from AIDS in nine four.
Speaker 1: President Ronald Reagan still said nothing. He did, however, invite
Speaker 1: his buddy Rock Hudson over to the White House. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: look at that. Hudson was really keeping it together at
Speaker 1: fifty nine. Now he has HIV in that picture. He's
Speaker 1: starting to get sick, but you can't really tell yet.
Speaker 1: He's handsome. He is a handsome guy. Very good looking man.
Speaker 1: He's almost sixty in this picture. I think that's almost sixty.
Speaker 1: Why are you can quibbling with me? Well, you were
Speaker 1: asked and I was giving you specifics. He died about
Speaker 1: a year after this picture was taken, but we'll get
Speaker 1: to that um. In ninety four, the Democratic National Convention
Speaker 1: was held in San Francisco as part of an attempt
Speaker 1: to get the Reagan administration to give a ship about
Speaker 1: the disease that was sweeping through the country. More than
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand people marched from the Castro and San
Speaker 1: Francisco to Moscow and Center on December eleven, with more
Speaker 1: than dred Americans dead from AIDS. The disease came up
Speaker 1: in another press conference, and he guesses about this one,
Speaker 1: I'm going to guess a two minute like applause break
Speaker 1: just for AIDS. Yeah. Just imagine like you know when
Speaker 1: Louis c. K came back and uh at the seller
Speaker 1: and he got a standing ovation. Uh something that that
Speaker 1: dark will happen in the suppress conference. Okay, Lester's beginning
Speaker 1: to circle now he's moving in front. Go ahead. The
Speaker 1: Center for Disease Control and let of inestimated estimated three
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people exposed to AIDS which shouldn't be transmitted
Speaker 1: through saliva. Will the President, as commander in chief take
Speaker 1: steps to protect armed forces with the medical services from
Speaker 1: age patients or the risk of spreading age and in
Speaker 1: the same amount of the thing the bed typhoid from
Speaker 1: being for the journalists, Yeah, I wish has President concerned
Speaker 1: about this subject reaction here? You know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Is he gonna do anything? Last i've heard him express anything.
Speaker 1: He has no no, express, no opinion about this epidemic. No,
Speaker 1: but I must confess I haven't asked him about it.
Speaker 1: Would you back? Have you been checked? I didn't hear
Speaker 1: the answer. So it's interesting. Lester is clearly angry in
Speaker 1: that uh. And this is part of why I think
Speaker 1: he deserves a lot of credit for his activist because
Speaker 1: he's clear like he's a HOMOPHOBI is a conservative guy.
Speaker 1: He's stuck with the questioning. He kept four years trying
Speaker 1: to bring this up, and by that third video he's
Speaker 1: not laughing anymore. The first couple he chuckles a few times.
Speaker 1: He's really piste. Now he's like sucking a couple hundred
Speaker 1: thousand people are infected, thousands are dead, you have to
Speaker 1: say something that's worth something to me. The fact that, like,
Speaker 1: even though this guy had his biases, he understood the
Speaker 1: severity of what was happening. Credit for doing that when
Speaker 1: nobody else does. All Right, he got me, he did something.
Speaker 1: It's not nothing. All Right, I won't hate him as
Speaker 1: much as I did. Everyone else in that room deserves
Speaker 1: to be hated. This used to be named because also
Speaker 1: that that is representative of what the kind of White
Speaker 1: House press people's like. It's a bunch of like elite
Speaker 1: fox who like going to pool parties with politicians and
Speaker 1: then ask them mostly softball questions or like laugh at
Speaker 1: things that are affecting you know, large swaths of the populace.
Speaker 1: They're not talking about things that are as real to
Speaker 1: them as they are to the people who actually need
Speaker 1: the news. Yeah, because they're totally separate. It's like, why
Speaker 1: why so much of television is bad. It's because it's
Speaker 1: a bunch of rich people trying to write about what
Speaker 1: they think normal Americans or whatever people around the world,
Speaker 1: but mostly Americans right are and they have no idea
Speaker 1: because they've been wealthy for so long, possibly for their
Speaker 1: entire lives, because they've been living in the hills for
Speaker 1: the last thirty five years. Yeah, and they're they're slumming.
Speaker 1: Is going to Trader Joe's on a Wednesday. So I
Speaker 1: always respect it when people are able to take a
Speaker 1: step outside of their own beliefs and biases to understand
Speaker 1: something that is a problem for people that they don't
Speaker 1: like and take it seriously. It's better to just be
Speaker 1: a person who's open minded and believes everyone as a
Speaker 1: human being. But if you've got those biases and you're
Speaker 1: able to do what Lester does and still take it seriously,
Speaker 1: that's better than everyone else. I hope that guy got
Speaker 1: the Pulitzer for he did not be he did not know.
Speaker 1: I mean specifically the Pulitzer for not being a piece
Speaker 1: of ship. That would be a good award. The Pulitzer
Speaker 1: Prize for not being a sociopath. Very few people, very
Speaker 1: few people qualify in the field. So in July, rock
Speaker 1: huts And flew to France to take an experimental AIDS
Speaker 1: treatment HP a tree. It hadn't yet been approved for
Speaker 1: human use in the United States. He never quite made
Speaker 1: it to the hospital. Here's a quote from The Guardian.
Speaker 1: He collapsed at the Ritz Hotel and was taken to
Speaker 1: the American Hospital in the French capital. His publicist contacted
Speaker 1: the White House, the Reagans were old friends, in an
Speaker 1: attempt to speed up a transfer to a military hospital
Speaker 1: to be seen by Dr Dominique Dormant, a French army
Speaker 1: doctor who had previously treated Hudson in secret. So he
Speaker 1: needs approval to go to this French military hospital. It
Speaker 1: is me. You just sounds like French reag Well, well,
Speaker 1: well I have some jelly beans for you maybe. So
Speaker 1: they wouldn't let him into the hospital because it will
Speaker 1: was like a French army hospital, and they were like,
Speaker 1: you're just some guy, Like, we can't let you into
Speaker 1: this hospital. So Hudson's publicists telegrammed the Reagans and basically said, like,
Speaker 1: this is only the only hospital in the world that
Speaker 1: can do what's necessary to save rocks life or at
Speaker 1: least make him more comfortable. Please intervened, because you're the
Speaker 1: fucking president. You can do something. You call France and
Speaker 1: say let this guy into their hospital. They'll do it
Speaker 1: for you. According to a note written by an aide
Speaker 1: at the time who delivered the message to Nancy Reagan,
Speaker 1: a quote I spoke with miss Reagan about the attached telegram.
Speaker 1: She did not feel that this was something that the
Speaker 1: White House should get into, and agreed to my suggestion
Speaker 1: that we referred to the writer to the U. S.
Speaker 1: Embassy Paris. Now BuzzFeed actually talked with this aid once
Speaker 1: they found the telegram in the right Reagan Library archives.
Speaker 1: He claims he advised the first lady that they had
Speaker 1: to be fair and not treat Rock different just because
Speaker 1: he was their friend. She agreed. The Reagans were very
Speaker 1: conscious of not making exceptions for people, he said, just
Speaker 1: because they were friends of theirs and or celebrities or
Speaker 1: things of that kind. They weren't about that. They were
Speaker 1: about treating everybody the same unless you were gay. Well,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of reasons that's bullshit. One of them is,
Speaker 1: of course, we just talked about the fact that they
Speaker 1: paid one of their gay friends a million dollars to
Speaker 1: redo the residence at the White House. Clearly they're not
Speaker 1: above doing a favor for a friend. Ronald Reagan had
Speaker 1: intervened personally like a year before to help his friend
Speaker 1: Bob Hope with a fundraiser um and in nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: when Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan's dear friends, Ferdinand and
Speaker 1: Emelda Marcos, were having a little bit of trouble clamping
Speaker 1: down unrest in the Philippines caused by the fact that
Speaker 1: they tortured and killed thousands of people. Ronnie did his
Speaker 1: friend a solid and invited Ferdinand Marcos to the White House.
Speaker 1: Now there were big protests at the time. It was
Speaker 1: a political risk to invite a fascist to the White House,
Speaker 1: but Ronald Reagan did it. He stood by his friend,
Speaker 1: and he gave him tens of millions of dollars in
Speaker 1: covert military aid, which really is what friendship is all about. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's why you know, the Clintons
Speaker 1: were fans of what's his name, the Egyptian dictator. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's one of those things like they were
Speaker 1: clearly not above doing things for their friends. This would
Speaker 1: not have been They wouldn't even even had to publicly
Speaker 1: call the thing. They just love willing to take the
Speaker 1: risk dictators. Hey, if you murder tens of thousands of people,
Speaker 1: are disappear them, you're our friend, as long as you
Speaker 1: don't like commies or through Islamic terrorists, right, and even
Speaker 1: then it might be okay as long as you're okay
Speaker 1: with our business interests. Well yeah, so yeah, Rock Hudson
Speaker 1: got no special treatment from the Reagan White House. On July,
Speaker 1: Hudson announced that he had AIDS. This also served as
Speaker 1: his first public announcement that he was a homosexual. Paul
Speaker 1: Bonberg of the Mobilization Against AIDS campaign begged President Reagan
Speaker 1: to speak up. Surely, now that a man who had
Speaker 1: been his friend for decades had the disease, the President
Speaker 1: would finally do something, By the way, that's kind of
Speaker 1: on Rock. Also for still being friends with Maybe there
Speaker 1: were fun at parties. I never got to drink with
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan. I don't know all of my family members.
Speaker 1: I mean none of my family members, but like family
Speaker 1: friends that voted for Trump, i've cut out of my life.
Speaker 1: Certainly none of my friends ever did. But like, it's
Speaker 1: pretty easy to cut out the pieces of ship in
Speaker 1: your life. I think this was an age before that
Speaker 1: really happened in politics, because even if you're talking about like,
Speaker 1: it's not like the gay community had a lot of
Speaker 1: play in the Democratic Party in nine right, this was
Speaker 1: the first life and death political issue other than just
Speaker 1: discrimination and whatnot the death that results from that for
Speaker 1: gay people. And it was the first one where there
Speaker 1: was a clear difference between the Republicans and Democrats, because
Speaker 1: if you're talking about like the deaths that result from
Speaker 1: social isolation and discrimination, I don't really think they're Democrats
Speaker 1: and eight five are much better than the Republicans. But
Speaker 1: if you talk about AIDS, the Democrats are directly dealing
Speaker 1: with AIDS. They're holding their convention in San Francisco, they're
Speaker 1: making a march part of it, They're taking some actions.
Speaker 1: This is the first time where it becomes a life
Speaker 1: and death thing. Um. Who knows what Rock would have
Speaker 1: done if he'd lasted another couple of years, but he
Speaker 1: died very soon after this on September seventeenth of ninety five,
Speaker 1: the same year Rock was sick. A couple of months
Speaker 1: after he made his announcement, Ronald Reagan finally, for the
Speaker 1: very first time, said the word AIDS in public. Finally,
Speaker 1: the Great Communicator made a surprise visit to the Department
Speaker 1: of Health and Human Services and said, quote, one of
Speaker 1: our highest public health priorities is going to be continuing
Speaker 1: to find a cure for AIDS. He announced that see
Speaker 1: Everett Coupe, the Surgeon General, was being pulled in to
Speaker 1: write a report on the disease. Hudson's death changed to
Speaker 1: the national conversation about AIDS. He is, this is seen
Speaker 1: as like the major dividing point and the national attitudes
Speaker 1: towards AIDS. A lot of people say there's AIDS before
Speaker 1: and after Rock Hudson comes out about it. Um. It
Speaker 1: is like the equivalent if there were some weird disease
Speaker 1: in a marginalized community and then fucking George Clooney dies
Speaker 1: of it, like it catalyzed the nation in the world
Speaker 1: because he was a big star. President Reagan finally acknowledged
Speaker 1: the diseases existence, but he still had not actually addressed
Speaker 1: the American people about AIDS, so he'd never given a
Speaker 1: speech about it. He'd never talked about it. In the
Speaker 1: other context, five thousand, six hundred and thirty six Americans
Speaker 1: died of AIDS in what's the grand toll so far?
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna get to that in a second. Um.
Speaker 1: One of them was Rock Hudson. Um, So we're we're
Speaker 1: definitely above ten thousand, like fifteen, fourteen thousand, something like that.
Speaker 1: Right now, Rock Hudson died on October two, just a
Speaker 1: few months after coming out. Ronald Reagan kept quiet about
Speaker 1: his homosexuality, and The Advocate named Reagan Homophobe of the
Speaker 1: Year that year. Representative Henry Waxman from Los Angeles said this,
Speaker 1: it is surprising that the president could remain silent as
Speaker 1: six thousand Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge
Speaker 1: the epidemics existence. Perhaps his staff felt he had to
Speaker 1: since many of his New Right supporters have raised money
Speaker 1: by campaigning against homosexuals. President Reagan continued to not address
Speaker 1: the nation about AIDS in nineteen eighties six, as another
Speaker 1: sixteen thousand, three hundred and one Americans died from the disease.
Speaker 1: That year, Transformers of the movie came out. It might
Speaker 1: be it might be optimist Prime kept quiet too, just endless,
Speaker 1: just to give you guys a you know, some context.
Speaker 1: Megatron donated a lot of money. Well, trap point was it,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't actually know anything about Transformers. Um
Speaker 1: that year, nineteen eight six was the year that twenty
Speaker 1: one thousand total Americans had died. That was the total
Speaker 1: of the end of nineteen eighties six. Do you think
Speaker 1: Reagan sent a representative to the advocate to collect his homophobe.
Speaker 1: But the year well, I hope so, I mean you
Speaker 1: really want that that trophy on his mantle. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: twenty one deaths into the AIDS crisis, Dr Connent, that
Speaker 1: one of the first doctors to treat it, sent a
Speaker 1: letter to Ronald Reagan. He recalled its contents to the Ardian.
Speaker 1: Dear President Reagan, I have all these patients and they
Speaker 1: are dying, and no one's doing anything. It is incumbent
Speaker 1: on your administration to direct the Centers for Disease Control
Speaker 1: and National Institutes of Health to begin efforts to find
Speaker 1: the cause and treatment for this disease. Now, the Reagans
Speaker 1: responded to this letter, It said fuck off, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: It just said Nancy and I thank you for your support.
Speaker 1: He got a form letter on Americans dead, which is
Speaker 1: I think more than the total Americans who have died
Speaker 1: in the entire global War on terror. So yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's where we are. Um, that's where we are at
Speaker 1: the end of part one of this episode. It is
Speaker 1: n Americans have died. Ronald Reagan has said the word
Speaker 1: AIDS once and not in a public speech. So that's
Speaker 1: where we are. When we come back for part two.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about Reagan's eventual acknowledgment of the epidemic,
Speaker 1: and we're also going to talk about one of the
Speaker 1: AIDS crisis is Unlikeliest Heroes, a surgeon general with a
Speaker 1: ridiculous name see Everett Coop. See Everett Coop. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: actually does the right thing in this But yeah, that's
Speaker 1: all coming up. So at the end of part one,
Speaker 1: do you want to plug some plug doubles before we
Speaker 1: get into that. Oh, well, subscribe to a couples therapy. Uh,
Speaker 1: if you want to hear me talk about politics and India. Actually,
Speaker 1: we don't talk about politics at all. It's a thing.
Speaker 1: We try to offer you some respite from this nightmare.
Speaker 1: And then my dear love Naomi, who is the I'm
Speaker 1: the weirdo, she's the populist. So let's get some take
Speaker 1: some rest respite from the madness over the next day
Speaker 1: or two, and on Thursday, Andy and I will be back.
Speaker 1: It just makes me want to vomit. We will continue
Speaker 1: to make Andy want to vomit. So that's part two,
Speaker 1: the vomiting. We've got a cup here on the table.
Speaker 1: I think it's about one Vomit's worth it, cup, so
Speaker 1: we'll be fine. See, we'll see how much comes out
Speaker 1: of me until Thursday and until we all learn how
Speaker 1: much comes out of Andy. I am Robert Evans. This
Speaker 1: is Behind the Bastard. You can find me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at I right, okay. I have a book on Amazon,
Speaker 1: A Brief History of Vice. You can also find this
Speaker 1: podcast on the internet behind the Bastards dot com. We'll
Speaker 1: have pictures and sources up there. You can find us
Speaker 1: on social media at Bastards pod on Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker 1: So come and check us out, and uh come back
Speaker 1: Thursday to learn more aboutes and Ronald Reagan Bail. It's
Speaker 1: time for you to go now. I love about you.
Speaker 1: M