Ronald reagan gay
When it came to AIDS, Ronald Reagan was far too late and billions of dollars short. That much is clear, as even a charitable rear-view-mirror-look at the history of the epidemic would illustrate. No question that many of Reagan's top political aides held an animus for gay people. As the new documentary history of the ACT Up movement makes clear, a lack of political leadership was only one of the reasons why it took the medical community to take the "gay plague" so seriously.
But Reagan himself was not an instinctive homophobe. While not a gay rights activist, he was ahead of many in his party in attempting to deal with the gay men that he knew with dignity.
This I learned from a great and overlooked novel about the great politico-journalistic rivalry between Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson. Label Feldstein's Poisoning The Press is a good reminder for those of us who hold Anderson as a hero muckracker. He paid his sources. He took bribes not to print stories. He knowingly advanced the causes of his allies. And he hated homosexuals.
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The drama that raged against Reagan’s America
The legacy of The Normal Heart, Lopez contends, is not “just as theatre, but of history; it’s living history, as rarely contemporaneous as you ever get” – while, 35 years on, it also acts as a vital reminder of the continuing battle not only against viruses, but also political neglect, he suggests. “I think we’re evolutionarily conditioned to include a kind of amnesia about things,” Lopez continues. “And it seems as though the impulse is to soften memory; memory starts to soften attention over time. What the great value of that play is, it will forever remind us of exactly what the crisis was.” It’s a text, Lopez believes, that is key to understanding Reagan’s political legacy – a subject on which he does not mince words. “I think the Aids crisis was a genocide of neglect. It was the central story of his presidency, nothing else.” Reagan’s defenders can signal to the fact that, when he did approach to speak out about Aids, he asserted it was one of his administration’s highest priorities on more than one occasion – while by the final year of his
These Ultraconservative Brothers Pulled Strings in Reagan’s Washington. Then One of Them Was Outed as Gay
In the new book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, author James Kirchick exposes how fears and prejudices around homosexuality shaped presidential politics for decades, from the Chilly War-era purge of gays and lesbians from every level of government to the rise of the conservative movement.
This exclusive excerpt goes behind the scenes of Ronald Reagan’s Washington to meet the forceful Dolan brothers: Terry the fiery founder of the notorious National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), which pioneered the second invade ad; older brother Tony the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist turned chief Reagan speechwriter.
But one of these fierce pillars of the conservative community had a secret: Terry was gay — a reality his fellow Republicans could no longer ignore after he died of AIDS a several days after Christmas,
Here, Kirchick traces the story of Terry Dolan’s posthumous outing in a Washington Post obituary, and Ton 5 days from today will be February 6th- the th birthday of the 40th President of the United States, the late Ronald Reagan. Around this time every single year there are always reflections in the media about President Reagan’s legacy and how it relates to the current political situation here in America. Conservatives will communicate about Reagan’s virtues and the ways they have faith he positively benefited this country while in office; liberals will talk about the ways they perceive he ignored the problems of the nation and allowed many of them to fester into the stew of political messiness we face today. I also contend with this subject, not just around February 6th but on a fairly regular basis. After all President Reagan played a large role in the history of my family; my father was a close companion of his and worked both on his campaign for the White Residence as well as in the administration. It also is personal for me because of my identity as a gay gentleman and the unique, often contentious and bitter relationship my community has had with the late president. Most of the gay Duke’s Download