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Nancy Reagan and her husband were silent as tens of thousands died. They were monsters.
For many in the LGBTQ Community, it has been difficult to watch Nancy Reagan be praised and remembered so fondly. It's as if the cis-gender and straight community lived in a completely different reality. I am making this post to talk about the REAL legacy of Nancy Reagan, and how she should be remembered.
I want to begin by encouraging you to recall the reaction surrounding the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. I want you to recall the reaction from the government, the reaction from the media, and the fear and panic that swept across the general public. I want you to hold that memory in your mind, as you watch this video below. This video shows how the Reagan Administration and the press responded to the AIDS Crisis. It is important for everyone to watch this video.
Now, let us focus on Nancy Reagan and her personal reaction and involvement in the Crisis. These excerpts are from an article in Teen Vogue:
...
The first lady notoriously had enormous sway over her husband, and could have intervened if she wished. She infamously tried to champion another epidemic of the era, drugs, with the overly simplified and ultimately harmful "Just Say No" campaign. It failed due to ignoring the roots of the cause and not understanding that addiction is a disease, not a choice. {The Guardian} writes, "Much like abstinence-based sex education... 'Just Say No' spread fear and ignorance instead of information." Like HIV/AIDS, the White House failed to properly educate itself, and as a result, let down its most vulnerable citizens in another spectacular way.
...
"On a personal level, she was someone who was not against gay people," Richard Socarides, a former White House adviser for President Bill Clinton, told the Associated Press about Nancy Reagan. "But when the country needed leadership, President Reagan was not there, and his wife — who was able to do more — was not willing to step up. It reflects rather harshly on both of them."
...
Taylor, one of the most famous actresses in the world at the time, knew that the way to White House recognition was through Nancy. Vanity Fair described the first lady’s reception to Taylor’s request as “frosty,” but within two years of Hudson’s death, Ronald Reagan was at the AmfAR Award Dinner.
...
Despite the offensive speech, the White House had finally acknowledged AIDS, urged by the celebrities, rather than the ordinary citizens, suffering from the epidemic. "If you can personalize an issue, either because of a tragedy like Rock Hudson or in some other way,” Ron Reagan, the couple’s son, said in an interview with PBS.. “That was the way you got to {Ronald Reagan} and she was well aware of that. She would always try to put a human face on something to him.”
The first lady notoriously had enormous sway over her husband, and could have intervened if she wished. She infamously tried to champion another epidemic of the era, drugs, with the overly simplified and ultimately harmful "Just Say No" campaign. It failed due to ignoring the roots of the cause and not understanding that addiction is a disease, not a choice. {The Guardian} writes, "Much like abstinence-based sex education... 'Just Say No' spread fear and ignorance instead of information." Like HIV/AIDS, the White House failed to properly educate itself, and as a result, let down its most vulnerable citizens in another spectacular way.
...
"On a personal level, she was someone who was not against gay people," Richard Socarides, a former White House adviser for President Bill Clinton, told the Associated Press about Nancy Reagan. "But when the country needed leadership, President Reagan was not there, and his wife — who was able to do more — was not willing to step up. It reflects rather harshly on both of them."
...
Taylor, one of the most famous actresses in the world at the time, knew that the way to White House recognition was through Nancy. Vanity Fair described the first lady’s reception to Taylor’s request as “frosty,” but within two years of Hudson’s death, Ronald Reagan was at the AmfAR Award Dinner.
...
Despite the offensive speech, the White House had finally acknowledged AIDS, urged by the celebrities, rather than the ordinary citizens, suffering from the epidemic. "If you can personalize an issue, either because of a tragedy like Rock Hudson or in some other way,” Ron Reagan, the couple’s son, said in an interview with PBS.. “That was the way you got to {Ronald Reagan} and she was well aware of that. She would always try to put a human face on something to him.”
In short, while the White House itself treated AIDS as a joke, Nancy Reagan deliberately stood in the way of anything getting done. Why? She didn't want a scandal. All the pressure on Nancy and Ronald came from outside of Washington and the White House. What ultimately moved Nancy was not the deaths of tens of thousands of people--not even the death of her close personal friend Rock Hudson (who she refused to help and let die)--no, what ultimately moved Nancy was pressure from people like Elizabeth Taylor. The Reagans were, of course, very much socially connected with the Hollywood elite. Had they continued to be silent, it would have been a social problem for them, and this is what prompted their most minimal of actions--such as Ronald Reagan finally mentioning AIDS publicly toward the end of his Presidency.
However, I don't think you can properly grasp what AIDS was like for most in the LGBTQ Community at the time. This is an impossible thing to really visualize or understand. It is something so horrible that it is something you have to live through to really get it. However, there is a great article in the Arkansas Times that everyone should read. Here are some excerpts that does not do the piece justice:
...
...Now a grandmother living a quiet life in Rogers, in the mid-1980s Burks took it as a calling to care for people with AIDS at the dawn of the epidemic, when survival from diagnosis to death was sometimes measured in weeks. For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s and before better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care for AIDS patients effectively rendered her obsolete, Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
...
Her son was a sinner, the woman told Burks. She didn't know what was wrong with him and didn't care. She wouldn't come, as he was already dead to her as far as she was concerned. She said she wouldn't even claim his body when he died. It was a hymn Burks would hear again and again over the next decade: sure judgment and yawning hellfire, abandonment on a platter of scripture. Burks estimates she worked with more than a thousand people dying of AIDS over the course of the years. Of those, she said, only a handful of families didn't turn their backs on their loved ones. Whether that was because of religious conviction or fear of the virus, Burks still doesn't know.
...
Burks' stories from that time border on nightmarish, with her watching one person after another waste away before her eyes. She would sometimes go to three funerals a day in the early years, including the funerals of many people she'd befriended while fighting the disease. Many of her memories seem to have blurred together into a kind of terrible shade. Others are told with perfect, minute clarity.
...
She recalled the mother who called Burks up and demanded to know how much longer it would be before her son died. " 'I just want to know, when is he going to die?' " Burks recalled the woman asking. "'We have to get on with our lives, and he's holding up our lives. We can't go on with our lives until he dies. He's ruined our lives, and we don't want people up here to know {he has AIDS}, so how long do you think he's going to stay here?' Like it was a punishment to her."
...Now a grandmother living a quiet life in Rogers, in the mid-1980s Burks took it as a calling to care for people with AIDS at the dawn of the epidemic, when survival from diagnosis to death was sometimes measured in weeks. For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s and before better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care for AIDS patients effectively rendered her obsolete, Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
...
Her son was a sinner, the woman told Burks. She didn't know what was wrong with him and didn't care. She wouldn't come, as he was already dead to her as far as she was concerned. She said she wouldn't even claim his body when he died. It was a hymn Burks would hear again and again over the next decade: sure judgment and yawning hellfire, abandonment on a platter of scripture. Burks estimates she worked with more than a thousand people dying of AIDS over the course of the years. Of those, she said, only a handful of families didn't turn their backs on their loved ones. Whether that was because of religious conviction or fear of the virus, Burks still doesn't know.
...
Burks' stories from that time border on nightmarish, with her watching one person after another waste away before her eyes. She would sometimes go to three funerals a day in the early years, including the funerals of many people she'd befriended while fighting the disease. Many of her memories seem to have blurred together into a kind of terrible shade. Others are told with perfect, minute clarity.
...
She recalled the mother who called Burks up and demanded to know how much longer it would be before her son died. " 'I just want to know, when is he going to die?' " Burks recalled the woman asking. "'We have to get on with our lives, and he's holding up our lives. We can't go on with our lives until he dies. He's ruined our lives, and we don't want people up here to know {he has AIDS}, so how long do you think he's going to stay here?' Like it was a punishment to her."
This article and the story of Ruth Coker Burks exemplifies what it was like for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Americans. While many people in the straight community were losing maybe one or two people they knew to AIDS, within the LGBTQ community entire lists of friends, lovers, and acquaintances were being systematically wiped out. There are people who you can literally walk through the streets with, and they can point at a building and say, "I knew everyone who used to live there. They are all dead now." Imagine watching everyone you know waste away and die. Imagine not knowing or understanding what was causing it. Imagine the government turning a blind eye. Imagine when it came up in public people laughed and treated it like a joke. Imagine people cheering on this plague as it swept through your community, wistfully hoping that it killed you all. This is what the AIDS Crisis was like.
Nancy Reagan and her husband deserve to be remembered only for their silence, and the blood of tens of thousands of people on their hands. There were people--good people--trying to urge action to try and save lives. Yet, they chose to do nothing, to sit by and watch as tens of thousands died. This is the true legacy of Nancy Reagan.
To not acknowledge this truth about the Reagan legacy should be the social equivalent to denying the Holocaust.
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Reagan the ol football player was homophobic from way back, I would bet. His telling and enjoying of anti gay jokes seems very enthusiastic.
