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

Episode Date: October 9, 2018

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

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Once Again Behind the Bastard. The show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And we're just a loud beep in the room, so if you look scared, is everything okay? Everything's okay.

I'm sorry, I had a nuclear device. Oh, you need to leave those outside. The guy with the nuke is Andy Beckerman, our guest for today. Andy, how are you doing? I'm as good as anyone can be in this soupy nightmare we live in. Soupy is a good way to describe it. Now Andy, I'm going to apologize right now because we talked about what I was going to plug for you, and then there was that beep, and it flew out of my mind. So why don't you plug the thing that we were, what's the thing? Well, I am a co-host of the wonderful Stand Up Show and Podcast.

Here on the How Stuff Works Network, Couples Therapy. We have stand-ups who are lovers or best friends or siblings do sets together about their relationship. And then on the podcast, we bring the best sets to you. And you're a co-host, and that is Naomi Ekpergen. Yeah, from your episode, you did about all the fringe Nazis. Yeah, they had the non-Nazi pieces of shit behind Hitler. She was wonderful, and I'm excited to talk with you today. Sure, if I can push past the rage into comedy.

Well, the good thing about today is that it'll be a rage that's different from the rage that you're feeling about everything in the news. I don't think so. I have a personal stake in this story, I believe. Well, yeah, but like, okay. So this is the day after the Kavanaugh hearing. So everybody's pretty angry, and this is a thing to be angry about that involves a lot of the same people, but is slightly in the past. Sure. I believe when all this was going on, I was watching Transformers in my, you know, babysitter's living room. Yeah, yeah, we're talking about a story from the 80s, the story of the Reagan's and the AIDS crisis.

And the death of Optimus Prime. Yeah, well, that is going to play a role here. So, yeah, when I started reaching this, I expected it was going to be a pretty straightforward episode about how homophobia and religious fundamentalism in the halls of American power led to an executive branch that fiddled while thousands of gay people died of a horrible disease. The story I uncovered was that, but also somehow even more offensive than that. It was somehow more frustrating than the story I thought I was going to be telling. Great. Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is...

I'm ready to go on this roller coaster. Yeah. Roller coaster from Nothing But Trouble. You know the one that grinds you up into bones? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what we're going to do today. It's the murder coaster from Nothing But Trouble. It's the opposite of self-care.

That's today. So, let's get into it. First, I'd like to start with what do you know about Reagan's response to the AIDS epidemic? I know that he ignored it for as long as possible. Okay. That they labeled it grids at first so that they could kind of cordon off everyone who had AIDS at the... or HIV. Was there any kind of scientific connection?

I remember the last time I... Yeah, no, no, no. It seems like it started... That was just the doctors giving it their best name because it wasn't that much later that they were like, no, no, actually AIDS is a better thing to call it. But it accrued other nicknames around the time that were even more offensive. Grids was probably the most palatable nickname that it got before it started being called AIDS. Yeah.

But, yeah, it was pretty... It's a pretty frustrating story. It was definitely... Yeah, I mean, let's just get into it. I've got it all broken down here from time or by time. So, 1978 is the first year that gay men in Western countries, Sweden and the United States, were the first countries where Westerners started to get sick with what would become known as AIDS. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter, only about a couple of dozen Americans,

less than 30, had perished. Quote-unquote beat Jimmy Carter. Well... Wasn't there some like... I mean, he did, but like the whole October surprise BS? Yeah, there was a lot of shadiness that was done during the election, some of which we're going to get into in a little bit. But it was a pretty clean sweep.

AIDS? Oh, we're going to... One of the things that's exciting to me about this episode is the numerous opportunities we'll have to do are Reagan voices. Well, can you read the whole thing in a Reagan voice? That might get a little bit old, but I definitely... Within two sentences, completely old. I think I've picked the right moments to try my Reagan voice out,

but maybe we'll have us a Reagan on Reagan conversation, because there's two sides of Reagan that you're going to see in this episode, one of which is pretty sympathetic and seems like a guy who could have dealt with this crisis in a reasonably woke manner, and one of which is the Reagan that was actually president. Sure. Reagan isn't the guy that he betrayed everyone in SAG during the McCarthy hearings and everything.

Yeah, yeah, but I mean, a lot of people did that, including Roy Kahn, who was also a gay man. Yes, but also a piece of shit, if I remember. Total piece of shit. Isn't he a character and angels in America? Well, he was one of the guys who, when McCarthy was doing the House and Un-American Activities Committee, was asking people, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

So he was a... Anyway, we're getting so far ahead of this group. But I'm just saying you can trace the darkness back decades in these monsters. You can trace the... And I think the darkness that you can trace back with Reagan to that period is his... Not willing to take any risks that hurt his career, because I really do think that comes down to it more than ideology in Reagan's case. But we'll see how you feel at the end of this.

I'm going to present all the evidence I have. So on June 5th, 1981, the CDC reported that five young homosexual men in Los Angeles had been treated for pneumocystis carini, which is a fungal lung infection that's life-threatening. And it's only really found in people with very compromised immune systems. And we know now that this is one of those... AIDS isn't what kills you when your immune system gets destroyed. These little things that are always around us that normally we don't get sick from, that's what gets you.

Right, and they're in LA, which is a filthy town, so... Well, I mean, that's one of its charms, but yeah. You want to call it a charm? Two of these men had died by the time the CDC reported it, and on July 4th, the CDC reported eight more gay Los Angelenos had been treated for caposi sarcoma, which is a rare form of cancer that, again, only strikes people with crippled immune systems. So no one knew what it was at this point, really, but doctors start to recognize in 1981 something really weird is happening specifically in coastal cities and specifically to the gay populations.

What's going on culturally in 1981? What movies are hot? Shit, this isn't that far from Red Dawn, wasn't that 1985? Yeah. Yeah, something like that. I said yes, I have no idea. I didn't prepare anything on the movies that were ready, but I'm guessing... When's Indiana Jones? Indiana Jones, it was what, 82?

Star Wars was hot. People started dying from immunodeficiency. It was that beautiful era when we thought, boy, if we get three good Star Wars movies, I don't think anyone will ever ask for any more Star Wars movies. That'd be swell. Yeah, what a time. Anyway, doctors around the country gradually started to realize that something was wrong. 234 people died from AIDS over the course of 1981.

When do they, like, name it? 81, like they said? No, it starts in, like, 82. So, like, in 1981, 231 people die. The president doesn't say anything, but at this point, it's small enough that, like, most presidents probably wouldn't have addressed a thing that's still really little at this point. But on May 11, 1982, doctors identified the blood-borne pathogen behind all these deaths. So, they realized that they're not, like, a bunch of different things.

There's one thing connecting these all. And they call the new disease, as you mentioned, gay-related immune deficiency syndrome. So, grids. 853 Americans died during 1982. And a couple of months after that, in June of, June 27, 1982, is when the term AIDS came into use. So, the medical community corrected pretty quickly. They started off, you know, with the definitely bigoted position of, like, well, let's just lock this down as a gay disease. But within a couple of months, doctors were like, well, okay, that's not what's happening.

We've made a mistake and they corrected. But at this time, the more common names that were used were, yeah, people called it the gay plague or gay cancer. So, that was the more common term. And grids definitely reinforced that attitude. Yeah. That's always my go-to reference for a character who's a disgusting homophobe and also old. Hmm. He's got the gay plague.

Yeah. Well, this plague just came sweeping through the coasts. By the way, not a lot of opportunities to riff on. No, no, not really. People dying of what turned out to be a horrific disease. I mean, it doesn't, we don't have to riff. This can just be like a heartbreaking conversation where we're both emotionally exhausted at the end of it. Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's life at this point, right? Yeah. The guiding principle of this podcast is that, like, you have these horrible stories that are important. Nobody's going to, like, after a week like this week where, like, you hear about all this shit going on in our actual government right now, very few people are going to sit down and be like, well, I'm going to read about, you know, how the government ignored the AIDS epidemic. But it's important that people know this. So, maybe if you put a little bit of frosting, make a couple of Reagan jokes and whatnot, do some accents and stuff, then people hear the story and it sticks in their head and they don't go home and drink bleach because they're just so sad.

Yeah. That's the goal. My mind is Reagan sitting in his chair in the Oval Office just, like, shoveling jelly beans into his mouth as his mind just deteriorates. And then a jelly bean today. Like, you can see the pieces of his brain, like, as dust, like, fly out of his ears in a trail. That's the picture in my head right now. Well, now that we've lost the conservative listeners. No, no, I mean, this was never going to be the episode that they grabbed onto.

Conservative listeners? I assume so. They leave really angry reviews whenever we talk about the Reagan's. Oh, okay. I'll give a real message to conservative listeners. There is an example in this podcast we'll be talking about, about a Christian, very far right-wing conservative who was a legitimate hero of the AIDS epidemic. So, we're going to be giving his story alongside Reagan's. So, we're not biased on this.

You're not biased. Yeah. We're all biased, but you can talk about how the Reagan's act and you can talk about how other people who were even more extreme in their beliefs still did the right thing during the epidemic, which I think is important because, like, people are going to believe things that I don't like no matter what. It doesn't mean you have to ignore hundreds of thousands of people dying of a disease. Well, I think what's interesting is there is a time in our country where conservative people, there was some kind of moral compass attached to their existence. Whereas now, if you are on the right wing, I really do feel like at this point, you knew who Trump was when you voted for him. He was not unapologetic about being a racist and a white supremacist and a monster.

He announced his candidacy by calling Mexicans rapists. You knew who he was when you voted for him. I don't think you have an excuse anymore. Maybe during the Reagan era. Yeah. Well, the Reagan era was really the first time we start to see a number of things that are now sort of hallmarks of the right wing. For one thing, it was the first time that conservative evangelical Christians voted as a group for a conservative candidate. Because most evangelical Christians had voted for Carter in the election prior.

And Carter had disappointed them mainly by the fact that he kind of, he governed as more of a moderate because he's the same guy. He didn't, like, you know, he opposed abortion personally, but he didn't, like, push against it or anything like that. He's an empathetic person. I mean, he... He builds houses as a 92-year-old. He spends his time building houses for Habit-F for humanity. So they backed him, but they wound up going with Reagan during the 1980 election. And so it's one of the things that I think is important to recognize now, since we're talking about, like, the past, is how weird Reagan's campaign was for the time.

Because, again, for most of American history, different Christian denominations had voted for different parties. Yeah, was that like the first, like, big tent kind of Republicanism? Yeah. Catholics voted one way. Protestants voted another way. Nobody really cared what the Quakers did, but, you know, they made really good butter. And that was politics for a couple hundred years in America. But this is the beginning of, like, that idea, and this is the beginning of the Christian right voting with the Republican party.

So, yeah, Ronald Reagan was this guy who was the first conservative to really effectively reach out to the evangelical right, but he was also a TV and movie star and a former governor of California. He spent most of his life in Hollywood around Hollywood movie stars. Those are the people he socialized with. And so he and Nancy Reagan had numerous gay friends in their early life, including the closeted film star, Rock Hudson. During the Kennedy years, California Republicans started preparing Ronald Reagan for his first political foray. They kind of picked him before he was even governor and were like, this guy is someone who we can wedge into power. Since Ronald Reagan was going to be getting into politics, the people sort of grooming him for this knew that Nancy Reagan was going to need a very carefully crafted look

if she was going to be eventually a first lady. So she wound up hiring a bunch of fashion designers and whatnot to kind of help her craft a look. And one of them was a very famous gay fashion designer named Jimmy Golanos. Working with Jimmy thrust Nancy deeper into Los Angeles's homosexual community, and she made a lot of friends. She was regularly seen, quote, on the arm of a guy named Jerry Zipkin, who is a gay real estate heir and socialite. News clippings at the time refer to him as a... Is it Jewish? Zipkin? I don't know. Just trying to put a picture in my head of like...

You know, it's weird. I tried to research this guy because like you can't find out much about him. Articles at the time will refer to him as a popular social escort, which is apparently a thing that used to exist to where like women would want to go out and go to parties and events and their husband wouldn't be available. And Jerry was a prominent guy that everybody knew was gay, even though it wasn't really talked about. So like if he's with your wife at the opening of a gallery or a movie premiere, it's fine. You know, it's Jerry. He's with Jerry. I'm imagining like thick glasses frames with like tinted lenses. The thick frames are what I get from the name Jerry. The tinted lenses are all Zipkin.

It's both parts of his name complete my belief of his look. We're not going to look that up. We're just going to keep that in our heads. So Nancy and Ronald also became friends with Roy Kohn around this time in the 60s. Kohn was, as we said, kind of a fiercely anti-communist lawyer. Is he like a fixer? Yeah, he was a big fixer. He was a big influence on Donald Trump in the early 1980s. They were very close and he was also a close advisor to Ronald Reagan. Is fixer just a phrase for someone who gets people murdered and blackmailed and all that kind of stuff?

No, I've used a number of fixers in my career when I've been working in war zones. They're people who basically know wherever you are better than you and help you do. I have this goal in Los Angeles and he's like, oh, we're going to need to talk to this person, this person, this person. They can help you out or like in DC, it's the same thing. Like, oh, well, we can make this happen. Fixing is a morally neutral term. We're talking about Trump's fixers in the news right now, so it's very shady,

but there are just fixers whose whole job is like, oh, you're trying to accomplish this goal. These are the people you need to meet. Or who's the early MGM fixer guy? I forget his name. I don't know. There's a lot of fixers throughout history. Sometimes they're just called advisors or aides or whatever. Fixers throughout history. Yeah, that would be a fun thing to do. So Roy Kohn was a famous fixer in this period and he was a closeted gay man.

It's impossible to say one way or the other if the Reagan's knew about his sexuality. We do know they went to a ton of parties with Roy Kohn, and we do know how Roy Kohn behaved at parties, because some of his friends wrote about those nights. So I'm going to quote now from a life article titled, The Snarling Death of Roy M. Kohn. Spoilers. At his parties, he'd haul people up to their feet to sing God Bless America, evidently his favorite song, even though he was a lifelong opera-goer. Roy's idea of a good time was to sing patriotic ditties at a piano bar in Provincetown on Cape Cod.

A friend recalled going home early one summer evening, Ann, on inquiring the next morning about the rest of the night being told, we all stood around the piano, Roy sang three choruses of God Bless America and got a heart on and went home to bed. What is he, the founder of the Capitol Steps? He's just a good American singing the national anthem at drunk as hell with a really big erection. And that's Roy Kohn. How big? I mean, they noticed it, and they commented on it in the 60s. So I'm going to guess.

Significant. I feel like there may be like, you know, you know, like people never speak ill of the dead. Like when Nixon died, everyone was like, what a great guy, even though he was just this like rat fuck little creature. He was a drunk man with his hand on the button. Yeah. Screaming the n-word regularly. Yeah. So I bet like, they're like, well, he's dead.

Let's just talk about how big a dick he had. I don't think he was dead when this story was related, but I don't really know. The snarling death was after he was dead, but like this anecdote, I think, came from an earlier interview. It was hard to tell. Can you imagine in an interview where you're just like, and man, the size of that guy's cock? Well, let me tell you about the time I saw this man's erection. Roy Kohn was hard for America, okay? That's the point of that tale.

That was his slogan when he was trying to like, when he was running for office himself. Hard for America. Hard for America. And it was like a penis shaped thing with like the American flag. I was going to say the lyrics of God bless America written on the shaft. But different, you know, honest men can interpret that differently. Or like a constitution with someone writing on it, like, you know, instead of a quill, though, it's a penis. If that's how they'd sign...

No, no, no, we're getting the family podcast. Oh, is it? No, it's not at all. It's not in any way, shape, or form. Don't let your kids listen to... Well, listen to some of this. Let your kids listen to the one about the East India Tea Company. That's important.

Okay. Nancy Reagan also desperately wanted Billy Haines, a gay home decorator, to decorate her home. He had decorated the home of some other favorite socialite who was sort of like... He decorated the home of somebody that Nancy really admired. And so she wanted this guy to do her house. But Nancy and Ronald did not have enough money at this point to hire the guy. So they had... What?

They weren't that rich. Huh? This is like 68, 69, something like that. Does they have bedtime for Bonzo money? Or 65? No, that's not that much money, man. Bedtime for Bonzo. They were just low enough on the told him poll that he could be convinced to go into politics.

He was not that big a star. Should have gotten a better business manager. Well, that's a fair point. So yeah, she wanted this guy to decorate her house, but they couldn't afford it. So they hatched a cunning scheme to get the next best thing. So here's a quote from an article in The Advocate called Nancy and the Gays that talks about how Nancy kind of finagled her way into kind of having this guy decorate her home without paying for it. She and Ronson began socializing with the gay couple in 1967 when Reagan became governor of California. The victory party was held in the home of William Haynes and Jimmy Shields.

Haynes is the guy that she wanted to decorate her house. Soon Nancy used Jimmy Shields as partner as her shopping buddy, still unable to afford the high prices and super swank of the Haynes look. She would take Jimmy along on a shopping junket and get his advice and use his articulate tastes. So she basically befriends the husband of the guy that she wants to decorate her house and just takes him shopping with her to get advice on stuff. She's too cheap to hire the guy. So there's a history of them exploiting gay men. Yeah, but in a friendly way. I don't know.

Friendly exploitation. It may be exploitation. They may have actually been buddies. I've read different things on it. Some of them say these people were pretty close to them. I don't know. It does seem like they had some legitimately close gay friends in this period. From what I can tell, I will say this. I can't find any evidence of movie star-era Ronald Reagan pre-politics expressing publicly any homophobic views. In fact, it seems that prior to the fall of 1967, a lot of people might assume he was kind of your best case scenario for a Republican. If you were like a gay person looking like, okay, a Republican is going to win.

What's the least offensive one? Well, it's this guy who's already kind of plugged into the gay community in LA and has shown willingness and like open-mindedness, at least in his personal life. So that's how people might have felt in 1967. Now, 1967 is the year he took office and in fall of that year, there was a big series of news articles about a, quote, homosexual clique in the Reagan administration. Because it turned out that a lot of the guys he had high up in his governor's administration were gay men. This was exposed by the news and was seen as a big deal because Reagan had campaigned on ending California's moral decline. So it was not taken well with his conservative base and he fired all of the gay men in his administration. He'd been happy to work with them earlier, obviously. He only jettisoned them because they threatened his career.

Oh, sure. Might as well, you know, dump your morals as well. Well, see, but this is what's interesting to me because when I got into this, I had thought, okay, he was probably just a really conservative homophobic person from the beginning. And I don't think that's the case. I don't think he personally had much of an issue one way or the other. I think he just... This seems worse. There's a problem. It is worse. That's what I'm saying. Instrumentally homophobic as opposed to just like... I mean, all of it is terribly awful, but...

It's all bad. I think it is worse, though. If he knows there's nothing wrong with it, really, he doesn't actually care what these people are doing in their private lives. He just wants to stay in power and win more elections. Yeah. And so he'll jettison whoever he's got a jettison. Now, the Reagan's did begin after this period to take stronger public stances against gay people. Nancy still went on her dates with Zipkin, but she would also in public call homosexuality a sickness. She called it an abnormality also in interviews. She asked him to stop using tinted lenses in his glasses.

That's the worst yet. Jerry, please. Hi, I'm Nancy. This is... Well... Well... I love that if you're going to do the Nancy voice, you're always going to go back to doing the Ronald voice because nobody knows what Nancy Reagan sounded like anymore. Don't use drugs.

I don't even remember if that's accurate. I think I can remember Barbara Bush's voice, but only because I can remember Barbara Bush on The Simpsons. What do, like, uptight socialites sound like? I don't know. They're all dead because we don't have socialites anymore. Hold on. Let me, like, tighten my butthole real tight and then... Well, this is my...

Hello. You're just doing Lady Reagan. Lady Reagan, my favorite Beatles song. All right. Now, we have to break for some ads right now, but when we get back, we're going to talk about a legitimate stance Reagan took in Facebook. Reagan took in favor of gay people while he was governor. And then we're going to talk about the death of tens of thousands of Americans. So that's all coming up.

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Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. Nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're talking about the Reagan's. We just talked about their history, their friendships with gay people. Quote-unquote friendships. I'm pretty sure they really liked Roy Kohn. Oh, sure, because he's a vicious monster. They seem to have been good friends with Rock Hudson, too. There's nothing to do with his homosexuality. In 1967, of course, he fires all of the gay people in an administration.

In 1978, so near the end of Reagan's time in office, What movies are out? Star Wars was a year before. Star Wars, I'm thinking, right? Yeah. A conservative lawmaker named Briggs proposed a California ballot initiative that became known as the Briggs Initiative. If it passed, it would have banned not only all gay people, but all people who supported gay rights from teaching in California schools. So this wasn't even saying you can't talk about homosexuality in school. This is saying if you personally support gay rights, you can't be a teacher in California. So anyway, the initiative was really popular when it started out.

It was the focus of one of the first major gay rights campaigns in California, I think, or American history. Harvey Milk was a big part of it. It involved a lot of gay men going door to door and talking to people and just being like, hey, we exist in this law sucks. And Reagan took a public stance against the Briggs Initiative, along with a number of other people. President Carter did as well. The advocates in this case were very successful in turning public opinion around before the vote and obviously was defeated. So that's good. And so this is where the Log Cabin Republicans come from.

They were formed in order to fight this initiative. And then other things have happened since. And then, yeah, what happened? Why are there still Log Cabin Republicans? They started out trying to stop a thing that needed to be stopped. So in this case, they're on the right side of things, although this is a really hard thing to be on the wrong side of. Like, you're really a pretty big piece of shit if you're in support of the Briggs Initiative at this point. Again, even Reagan was against it prior to running for president.

So yeah, this is where I started to realize that, yeah, I'd gotten something wrong about the Reagan's and started to realize that the real story is much darker. He's literally capable of being convinced to give a shit about gay people because it happened once and he has all these friends. So yeah, this is kind of the high watermark morally that we're going to get into here in the story. And it's all downhill from here. Great. Yeah. In 1983, three years after taking office, Ronald and Nancy hosted interior decorator Ted Graber and his partner Archie Kase at the White House. What's Reagan's shot, 82?

I think 83. 83? So it's right around the corner. Yeah, right around the corner. So they have Ted Graber and his partner Archie Kase over to the White House. They celebrated Nancy's 60th birthday and stayed the night. And Ted and Archie were probably the first same-sex couple to room together at the White House. So again, we're still at the high-moral watermark.

I teased that just a second too early. But this is the best part of the Reagan's morally. So him standing up against the Briggs Initiative and having one gay couple at the White House. I want to make sure I'm being fair here. The bar is set very, very low. I mean, the sad thing is that's actually not a low bar for 1983, especially after what we're going to get into here. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. When AIDS became a very public and prominent problem in 1982, the Reagan should have known it was serious.

They had friends who were members of the gay community that were clearly plugged into Los Angeles. You would have expected something from this administration on the fact that hundreds of Americans were now dying from AIDS. Instead, here's what happened. I'm about to play you audio of the Reagan administration's first official response to the AIDS crisis. This is a clip from a 1982 press conference. Reagan's press secretary, Larry Speaks, is asked about AIDS by a- Wait, what's his name? Larry Speaks with an E. Yeah, I know.

It's even weirder- It's my press secretary, Larry Speaks. This is- Larry Speaks? Well, you're getting the job clearly. Your name Speaks. This is my defense secretary, Tony Bombs. It's almost like a Dick Army kind of name, like it really is, if only they'd all been in the same administration.

And then, yeah, he's being asked a question about AIDS by a reporter named Lester Kinsolving. So, all right, let's play it. The announcement of the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta that AIDS is now an epidemic, over 600 cases, and that over a third of them have died. It's known as gay plague. No, it is. I mean, it's a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died, and I wondered if the president is aware of it. I don't have it, do you? Do you? I don't have it. Well, I'm relieved to hear that, Larry. Do you?

You didn't answer my question. How do you know? Because the president doesn't work. The White House looks on this as a great joke. No, I don't know anything about it, Lester. Because the president, does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry? I don't think so. I don't think- Nobody knows. There's been no personal experience here, Lester.

No, I mean, I thought you were- I checked thoroughly with Dr. Rugi this morning, and he's had no patients suffered from AIDS or whatever it is. The president doesn't have gay plague. Is that what you're saying, or what? Nope, didn't say that. He's fucking an idiot. Yeah. I thought I heard you on the State Department over there. Why don't you stay over there? Because I love you, Larry.

Oh, I see. Well, I- Let's go put it in those terms, Lester. Oh, I retract that. So, I just love how, like, smirky these fuckers are, and, like, smug. I mean, it's exactly the same today. Like, nothing has changed about these elite sons of bitches. Well, I'll tell you what's changed. I'll tell you what's changed. Because what this is, and what this is usually when you-

This is from, like, a vanity fair, put all these together in a short little documentary. Yeah. You can find a lot of it linked on the site. This will usually be framed as, like, listen to the Reagan administration, the laughter and stuff that they had over this, which is obviously Reagan's spokesman is laughing about this. And basically, his response to this guy bringing it up is, Why do you care? Are you gay? I'm not gay. I don't have it.

Yeah, it's like gay panic. It's like that. And also, like, I like how they didn't know how to use acronyms. Yeah, yeah. A-I-D-S. By the way, are we gonna get any information about how much money we're giving to N-A-T-O? Yeah, it's-it's-it's-it, but, like, what's notable to that to me is that this is not just Reagan people. These are journalists, presumably people who are more, like, to the left of the spectrum. They're all laughing at it.

Like, it's not just the Reagan people, which is something that has happened. I don't think if a disease were to inflict the gay community today, I don't think you'd have the press box all making fun of it. Like, that- I don't know. They're a bunch of elite shitheads, too. I don't know. I feel like, uh, it's shocking to me, then, that you could have, and I-I-I think Lester Kinsolving is not a left-wing journalist. He's actually a conservative right-wing guy.

He's a pretty homophobic dude. But at the same point is, like, a third of the people who have this have died. Thousands of Americans are sick. You have to say something. That's one of the things that's interesting to me about this, is that you have a number of people who, by-certainly by our standards, are really homophobic people, like Lester, who are still like, but something has to be done.

It's not entirely a matter of people's morality was different then, because some people who were still pretty bigoted at least did something. He's not using the terminology that you'd want anyone to use today, but he's trying to get the White House to address a plague that's killing people, which is not nothing. And it's interesting to me that he's the only one in that room taking it seriously. Is-I mean, sure. Okay. I-I don't-I-I just, like, I guess it's his job, too, in some way.

But it's all of those journalists' job, too, and he's the only one. That is something that's worth noting. It's both worth noting because everybody's really fucking homophobic in that video, but it's also worth noting because it's not just the Reagan administration's falling down on this. Mainstream journalism in 1982 considered this worth laughing over. Lester was a kook and a crank for talking about it at all. That's worth noting to me. We shouldn't just be attacking the Reagan administration

because it was homophobia at every level of our nation's culture that allowed AIDS to get as bad as it got. I think that video is emblematic of it. Lester obviously wanted the White House to address this in some way, and they don't. Like, there's no, He just wanted a scoop. I mean, at least he keeps it up. He keeps doing this for years. Like, he's trying to get them to say something, and they were a few-

Like, that is important to note. The Reagan administration refused to even address it, to even say as much as we're aware that there's a problem we're monitoring it. They wouldn't even say that much at this point. Part of why they weren't willing to say that much is that 12 days before the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan had received the endorsement of a group called Christians for Reagan. Now, Christians for Reagan, or C for R, as I'm going to call him to be cool and hip,

was an ostensibly politically independent Christian fundamentalist lobbying group. So, C for R paid for what Slate describes as a barrage of ads attacking President Carter for catering to gay people. On one spot, an announcer intoned, the gays in San Francisco elected a mayor. But the hard-hitting TV spots were extremely effective, and they helped Reagan carry every southern state except Georgia, where Carter had been governor. Partly because the commercials never aired in New York or Washington,

most people outside the South were never aware of them. So, this is part of, I think, why the Reagan administration won't even say, we're aware that there's a disease, because they got elected off the back of people who were able to shift support away from Carter via homophobia. So, Reagan knows that's part of his foundation. Hey, Republicans, wait, we needed racism for the Southern strategy, now we need homophobia so we can keep the evangelicals in line and abortion. We take that for granted now, but this is the start of that.

This is also really the start of abortion being a major factor in American politics. That was not always. You go back to the 1940s, that wasn't a wedge issue. It wasn't even really on most people's radar. It's during the Reagan era that both of these things really kick off as major aspects of Republican strategy. So, whenever the question of homosexuality came up in Ronald Reagan's political life, he was harsh when it was a public statement. He was asked on the campaign whether or not his ballet dancer son was gay,

and Reagan replied, he's all man, we made sure of that. How these fuckers, I'm sorry, I have nothing funny, they're just like all fuckers. No, I mean, I think that means Reagan was hitting this kid, but... But just... The first couple continued to socialize and work with gay people behind the scenes. The publicly homophobic Roy Kahn was a close advisor to the Reagan White House. Ted Graber, who spent the night at the White House, also got a contract to do a $1 million renovation job of the family quarters in the West Wing.

So, clearly Ronnie and Nancy weren't above throwing a friend a bone even if that friend happened to be homosexual. Is it a taxpayer money? Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that'll be noteworthy in a minute here. According to Steve Weissman, a journalist who covered Reagan's first term for the New York Times, quote, the White House wasn't that homophobic because Nancy had friends who were gay, but it was definitely a place where you would hear one staff member call another staff member a fag behind his back.

Jesus Christ, I just love the fact, like, you know, I can't be racist. I have a black friend, or like, that kind of justification is... Yeah, it's a pretty remarkable quote, because it's like you just described a pretty homophobic office. Like, it's not that sex is a place, we just, you know, do a lot of pinching. Like, well, okay. At this point, federal action to actually stop the spread of AIDS had only been taken by a handful of scientists at the CDC, and at this point being 1982. They in a small caucus of New York and California congressmen lobbied to get additional funding to fight AIDS.

It's worth noting that these congressmen got involved because they all had openly gay staff members who begged them to do something. So these are democratic congressmen who have gay people on their staff who are like, well, you've got a gay problem, you've got to do something. And so that's why the first real political action starts getting taken. It's because straight lawmakers have gay people who work for them who are like, dude, shit's fucked up. Which is why it's important all of the gay people who were in Reagan's political orbit got excised in 1967. That is a factor in this.

So one of the books I did read to prepare for this episode was After the Wrath of God. It's an Oxford University Press textbook about how American religion impacted the AIDS crisis. It's very interesting. It tides much of the Reagan administration's failure to the fact that gay people didn't have any access to administration officials. Quote, The Reagan era ushered in not only a new national leader but also a new White House staff that included a number of anti-gay conservatives. Chief among them Pat Buchanan, Gary Bauer and William Bennett. The shift consequently curtailed the already limited access that gay and lesbian leaders had to AIDS within the previous administration.

As historian William Turner puts it, rather than having highly sympathetic White House and executive agency staffers serving under a largely indifferent president who supported the basic logic of civil rights, suddenly activists faced hostile staffers serving under a largely indifferent president who opposed the basic logic of civil rights. So one attitude on this is that the Reagan's didn't make a huge difference. It was the fact that their staff had zero people who gave a shit about the gay community. They had no control over their staff. Well, I mean, they did control their staff. I know. I was being sarcastic.

I love how there's maybe one or two sentences in the entire Bible that are like that. Even vaguely tied to it. Vaguely tied to it. And somehow those two outweigh all of Jesus' discussion of loving thy neighbor and turning you to the cheek and all this other kind of stuff that is about love. And I don't know like what is it with like Christian conservative, what is with their brains where that somehow those two little sentences or whatever somehow warps the rest of it. I think it has very little to do with the Bible. I think it has much more to do with the fact that a lot of these people grew up in a culture where like that was the thing that you made fun of. That was the thing you attacked.

It was seen as immoral. They didn't really know much about these people. There's a great quote from Senator Henry Waxman, who was like one of the congressmen in a health subcommittee who was like really active in early fighting back against AIDS. And in 1982, he wrote, there is no doubt in my mind that if the same disease had appeared among Americans of Norwegian descent or among tennis players rather than gay males, the responses of both the government and the medical establishment would have been different. Yeah. And it's a marginalized group that people are used to making fun of. So no one treats it seriously. Like that's the initial response of the administration.

You heard it in that audio. It's the press secretary joking that a journalist is gay for asking about gay people. I think that's why it was so ignored because they're just seen as this subcategory of humanity that they don't like is so far beneath their concern. I really think that's most of what it is. Yes. No, I get that. But I'm just saying that like the thing that's supposed to define these Christian conservatives is the Bible and most of it's about loving everyone. Well, we're going to get into the Bible in a little bit because there are a couple of different ways different Christian conservatives take the Bible as relates to the AIDS crisis.

So we're seeing one right now. When we get back, we're going to talk more about the Reagan administration's fuck up of the AIDS crisis. That's what we're going to talk about. Will. Will. The Bible. Time for some ads. Jesus, Nicaragua.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

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And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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And we're back. 1982 was the first year that something should have been done by the Reagan administration, vis-a-vis AIDS. It was also the year that very little was done vis-a-vis AIDS. Well, the National Institutes of Health spent $36,000 per toxic shock death in the U.S. in 1982. They spent only $8991 per AIDS death in 1982. Toxic shock as in keeping in a... There's a number of things that can cause it, but yeah, keeping it a tampon can cause it. It's a less common cause of death than AIDS was by this point, but it was getting a lot more money.

And so was Legionnaires' disease. Did you want to soak it? Legionnaires' disease, which killed about 50 people in 1982, got way more funding. Between June 1981 and May 1982, the CDC spent less than a million dollars on AIDS and 9 million on Legionnaires' disease. Well, there's a big lobby. There's a Legionnaires' lobby. Well, yeah, there had been 50 people killed in that time from Legionnaires' disease and 1,000 from AIDS. AIDS gets a million dollars and kills 1,000 people. Legionnaires' disease kills 50 people and gets 9 million dollars in federal funding. So yeah, there's not a lot of money being devoted towards it at this point.

Here's a quote from an advocate article I found. Congressional staffers joked that the NIH really stood for the National Institutes of Health, really stood for not interested in homosexuals. Republican priorities were perfectly clear right from the start of the Reagan government. One of the administration's first official acts was to propose a cut of nearly 50% in the appropriation for the CDC. From 327 million to 161 million. So one of the first things the Reagan administration does as a plague is starting to take off is cut CDC funding in half. At the same time, Reagan asked for an immediate increase of $7 billion in defense spending and an additional increase of $25 billion for the following fiscal year for a total of $220 billion spent on defense when we cut $150 million out of the CDC's budget.

So again, you've got like a perfect storm here, not all of which is related to homophobia, but certainly all of which is related to not really giving a shit what happens to gay people. Sure, where did that money go to like arming to mining? Oh yeah, yeah. Mining the harbor in Nicaragua? No, it was the Star Wars and stuff like that. Oh yeah. We had to get lasers in space that we still don't have. Hey, Space Force.

And? Biggers crossed. We get it in 2019. We helped out some nice boys in Afghanistan. Look at how my checked, that place has been sailing pretty smooth since the 80s and good times in Afghanistan. So in 1983, the CDC warned blood banks that it believed the blood supply may have been contaminated with HIV. Blood banks would be a good name for a rich person who owns Peter Thiel. That is happening right now.

Peter Thiel, his name should be Unformally Blood Banks. Yeah, or just Dracula. I mean, the HIV virus was identified and named for the first time in 1983. Ronald Reagan did not say the words AIDS in 1983. As far as we know, he had never uttered the word in his life at that point, even though 2,304 Americans died in just 1983 from AIDS. On June 13, 1983, after roughly 1,911's worth of total American deaths due to AIDS, the disease finally came up in a second press conference.

You got any predictions about how this one's gonna go? My guess? Longer peels of laughter. All right, all right, let's see. Like when you peel an orange or something and you use the thing to get the whole peel off into one little strand? I've never had the patience. That. A leading environmentalist described the President's speech on Saturday as a fairy tale. Is there any answer to that?

Not true. Fairy tales are not true and this one's true. Lester Zayers perked up when you said fairies. Yeah, that's pretty bad. The President has been involved in briefed on the AIDS situation a number of months ago in a cabinet meeting and ordered that a high priority be given to research matters on it. The Center for Disease Control has been involved for some time. The President will continue to be updated.

We have recently asked that $12 million be re-programmed for research on AIDS. That's the extent of the President's involvement, which has been... Larry, does the President think that it might help if he suggested that the gays cut down on their cruising? Yeah. Told you. I didn't hear your answer, Larry. I just was acknowledging your interest in this subject. You don't think that it would help if the gays cut down on their cruising?

We're researching it. If we come up with any research that sheds some light on whether gays should cruise or not cruise, we'll make it available to you. The one legitimate piece of progress we've seen there is that they use the acronym now. Right. Yeah, now they understand. You've got to give them credit for that. It took a year. They had an English teacher come in and teach them something.

They are still laughing every time anyone says the word fairy. By the way, is everyone in the press pool a 12-year-old boy? Yes, this was a time when everyone in the press pool was a 12-year-old boy. Well, that makes more sense. That was a Reagan-era policy, which we should go back to, actually. If you've watched Newsies, you know how funny kids can be with the news and cholera. I've never watched Newsies. I assume they all die of cholera.

Kids die from the darkest things. That was the most popular show in 1919. The Reagan administration's first official meeting of the AIDS crisis with representatives of the gay community was held on June 23, 1983. It included two members of the National Gay Task Force, a special assistant to the president and staff members from Health and Human Services. The members of the Gay Task Force, which was essentially like a gay advocacy group. I wish it was like a gay assassin group. It was made up of all gay men and women, and they just murdered homophobes. I will tell you, Strom Thurmond would not have lived to be 116 if that task force had been doing its job.

He's still alive, by the way, somewhere. That kind of hatred never quite does. No, no, no. I mean, do you think when he died, the molecules in his body just like floated off and has infected? Much like in the return of Optimus Prime with the hate virus. I think molecules from him disintegrated off of his body and formed a new hand, a vestigial hand on the spine of Roger Stone. So now he can jerk himself off with both of his hands. That's my theory.

Roger Stone can present a pantsless photo of himself to prove it wrong or not, but I believe he has a vestigial hand growing on his thigh. Like Kwado. Like Kwado, exactly, but just a hand. But just a hand for jerking himself off constantly, Roger Stone. The Babadook himself, Roger Stone. By the way, at this point in time, it's helping Paul Manafort establish the first lobbying group explicitly for dictators, which is pretty cool. Progress. There are progressives involved in politics at this point.

Okay, great. We should point that out. So the Gay Task Force people asked for things from the Reagan administration, like more money for sex ed at the state level. They wanted a national conversation about condom use and the destigmatization of AIDS as a gay disease. By the way, where did you grow up? Texas. Texas. I grew up in Pennsylvania. The sex ed in fifth grade was basically like a nervous gym teacher being like...

Oh, we just got a video. Testicles? They just started the video, walked out of the room and came back in when it was done and everyone was very uncomfortable. It was terrible sex ed. But it was Texas. So I'm surprised they let us know penises exist. Yeah. They really like to keep that under wraps in Texas.

So yeah, what the Task Force wanted was pretty minor and a big thing for them was just like, tell people condoms work to prevent AIDS. They should know that. Maybe give out some condoms. The Reagan administration was not a big fan of this advice. So they had a second meeting about AIDS in August. No representatives of the gay community were invited this time. Instead, Reagan representatives met with the national director of the conservative caucus, Howard Phillips, who thought any information about AIDS had to be delivered under a blanket condemnation of homosexuality as a quote, moral wrong. Another attendee, Dr. Ron Goodwin of the Moral Majority, suggested that the administration should close gay bathhouses and require blood donors to give their sexual histories.

Historian Jennifer Breyer notes that when the CDC officials pushed to take effective steps against the disease, they struggled against the fact that, quote, many of Reagan's domestic advisors in AIDS wanted to bend what they called AIDS education to fit the model of social and religious conservatism that posited gay men as sick and dangerous. By the way, more like the moron majority. Oh, nice. You really told that one in time. Guys, I am professional on some t-shirt. Professional comedy writer. We get that on some t-shirts from the 84 election. I think we can really make a difference.

There's got to be like some village in Sub-Saharan Africa where everyone's either wearing a moron majority shirt or a Hillary for prison shirt. We're still fighting your political battles from 10 years ago here in t-shirts. Yeah, and also they've got like, Shaq t-shirts. Yeah, a lot of Shaq t-shirts. It's going to be fun. A lot of Kazam. Whatever movie was it. Kazam was the real one.

Shazam was the fe- I forget. Shazam was the Mandala Effect one. So late in 1983, nine Republican congressmen wrote a letter to the president. One of these congressmen was Newt Gingrich. Here's Jennifer Breyer. Gingrich argued that closing bathhouses or mandating reporting of AIDS was a more reasonable policy than trying to provide sex education at bathhouses or keeping the names of people who tested positive for HIV anonymous. Here the common sense arguments portrayed a particular stance on AIDS. One that sought to make the public healthy by restricting the civil rights of those believed to be sick.

So you'd certainly never hear about anything like that happening again. One of the doctors working tirelessly to treat the epidemic was Marcus Conant. This is Newt Gingrich, the guy who served his wife divorce papers while she was in the hospital, right? Yes, yes. Moral paragon, Newt Gingrich, yeah. All these fuckers, like, to a man, there isn't one of them that isn't just like a dark Cthulhu-like beast in their brains. Like, they're all these kind of like non-Euclidean garbage creatures. No, which is why I think, really, if you want to reform politics in this country, one of the laws that you pass is that in order to be an elected politician at the national level, you wear a camera at all times while you're elected.

Everybody sees you go to the bathroom, everybody sees you fuck, everybody sees every conversation you say. You can just log into a stream, you can watch Rand Paul do whatever the fuck Rand Paul does at 11.30 at night. Zero privacy for you. Yeah, exactly. And once you've got a full look at these people, you decide I want to keep supporting them, I think they're in line with my moral values. Why is Rand Paul hollowing a six inch hole out of a copy of the fountain head? Oh man, you hope it's a copy of the fountain head. Shuffling all that vaseline in there. I don't know why, but when I imagine the thing that Rand Paul has sex with that's not a person, I was imagining like a decorative gourd.

Oh, yeah. I was imagining like he gets- Bruce was more on brand- He gets a real doll of Ein Rand. You're my mommy. You're still doing a Reagan voice. We're stuck in it. Well, Ein Rand's my mommy.

One of the doctors working tirelessly to treat the epidemic in 1983 was Marcus Conant. He was among the first physicians in the country to treat or diagnose AIDS and patients due to his work in UC San Francisco. Dr. Conant met with the Reagan administration three times, first in 1983. Here's the Guardian. Conant and his colleagues, quote, were going on and on about how this was a disease, an infectious disease, he recalled. Reagan's representative wasn't buying it. Her response was that this was a legal problem, not a medical problem, Conant said, simply because of who gay men with AIDS were and who their sexual partners were, she told him. These people were breaking the law. So, 1983, that's the Reagan administration's stance to doctors. Gay people are breaking the law, the problem is their law breaking, not the fact that there's a disease. Ronald Reagan did not address the nation about AIDS.

Remember when we locked up all those people with typhus? Yeah. Yeah, that was a good time. Oh, man. That one lady got out. It was a real problem. We had tiny handcuffs made for all the lice in the late 1800s. I thought you were talking about tiny handcuffs for children. And I was thinking that's an industry that had to have taken a hit since the 1800s. Oh, yeah. Whenever the labor movement started kicking up in the teens or whatever.

So, if we have a children's uprising today, the police are not prepared to deal with it. Which, kids? Hey, look, they can't cuff you. If you're a business person looking forward to the future, we are going to need children-sized cuffs at some point. Children-sized cuffs, children-sized cages, all sorts of little cute little children-sized prison paraphernalia. Guys. Guys. It's a growth industry. Capitalism works.

Oh, man. A little children's guard uniforms too. We could have all child prisons. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That would be so cute. Yeah. Little Angedis calendars. And little German shepherd puppies, like just ripping people apart on the ground. Yeah.

Oh, man. Oh, what a time it's going to be. Anyway, Ronald Reagan did not address the nation about AIDS in 1983. As far as we know, at that point, he still had not himself said the word. He certainly hadn't said it in public. His communications director, though, Pat Buchanan, wrote an article for the New York Post. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Quote from Pat Buchanan.

The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children. And among the revolutionary vanguard is gay rights activists. The mortality rate is highest in climbing. The poor homosexuals, they have declared war upon nature. And now nature is exacting an awful retribution. Here's how Randy Schlitz, author of the band played on, sums up Pat Buchanan's article's conclusion in his book. Buchanan concluded by saying that no homosexual should be permitted to handle food and that

the Democratic Party's decision to hold their next convention in San Francisco would leave delegate spouses and children at the mercy of quote, homosexuals who belong to a community that is a common carrier of dangerous, communicable, and sometimes fatal diseases. Pat Buchanan, everybody. Is he still alive? I think so. I know my dad probably voted for him for president at one point. Oh, God.

Yeah. He was a perennial candidate guy, kind of like a fringe right dude. We always run. Oh, you're from Texas again, right? Yeah. I have to remember that. Yeah. 4,251 Americans died from AIDS in 1984.

President Ronald Reagan still said nothing. He did, however, invite his buddy, Rock Hudson, over to the White House. Check this out. Oh, yeah. Look at that. Hudson was really keeping it together at 59. Now, he has HIV in that picture. He's starting to get sick, but you can't really tell yet.

He's handsome. He is a handsome guy. Very good looking man. He's almost 60 in this picture? 59, I think. That's almost 60? Why are you quibbling with me? Well, you were asked and I was giving you specifics.

He died about a year after this picture was taken, but we'll get to that. In 1984, the Democratic National Convention was held in San Francisco as part of an attempt to get the Reagan administration to give a shit about the disease that was sweeping through the country. More than 100,000 people marched from the Castro in San Francisco to Moscow and Center. On December 11th, 1984, with more than 4,200 Americans dead from AIDS, the disease came up in another press conference. Any guesses about this one?

I'm going to guess a two minute applause break. Just for AIDS? Yeah, just imagine like, you know, when Louis C.K. came back and the seller and he got a standing ovation, something that, that dark will happen in this press conference. Okay. Lester's beginning to circle now. He's moving in front. Go ahead.

It's the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. It's an estimated 300,000 people have been exposed to AIDS, which shouldn't be transmitted through saliva. Will the President, as Commander-in-Chief, take steps to protect armed forces from medical services, from AIDS patients or those who run the risk of spreading AIDS, in the same matter that they forbid typhoid fever of people from being able to go for food. Is the President concerned about this subject, Larry? I have an early expressed concern reaction here.

I'm pissed. You know, it isn't only the jocks, Lester. Has he sworn off water pluses? No, but I mean, is he going to do anything, Larry? Lester, I've not heard him express anything. I'm sorry. You mean he has no, no, expressed no opinion about this epidemic? No, but I must confess, I haven't asked him about it.

Would you ask him, Larry? Have you been checked? I didn't hear the answer. So it's interesting. Lester is clearly angry in that. And this is part of why I think he deserves a lot of credit for his act in this, because he's a homophobic, he's a conservative guy. He's stuck with the questioning.

He kept for years trying to bring this up. And by that third video, he's not laughing anymore. The first couple he chuckles a few times, he's really pissed now. He's like, fucking a couple hundred thousand people are infected, thousands are dead. You have to say something. That's worth something to me, the fact that like, even though this guy had his biases, he understood the severity of what was happening. And you get credit for doing that when nobody else does.

All right, he got me. Yeah, he did something. It's not nothing. All right, I won't hate him as much as I did. Everyone else in that room deserves to be hated. Because also, that is representative of what the kind of White House press feels like. It's a bunch of like elite fucks who like going to pool parties with politicians and then ask them mostly softball questions or like laugh at things that are affecting,

you know, large swaths of the populace. They're not talking about things that are as real to them as they are to the people who actually need the news. Yeah, because they're totally separate. It's like why so much of television is bad is because it's a bunch of rich people trying to write about what they think normal Americans or whatever people around the world, but mostly Americans, right, are like, and they have no idea because they've been wealthy for so long, possibly for their entire lives.

Yeah, because they've been living in the hills for the last 35 years. Yeah. And their slumming is going to Trader Joe's on a Wednesday. So I always respect it when people are able to take a step outside of their own beliefs and biases to understand something that is a problem for people that they don't like and take it seriously. It's better to just be a person who's open-minded and believes everyone is a human being, but if you've got those biases and you're able to do what Lester does and still take it seriously,

that's better than everyone else. I hope that guy got the Pulitzer for not being a piece of shit. No, he did not. No, I mean specifically the Pulitzer for not being a piece of shit. That would be a good award, Pulitzer Prize for not being a sociopath. Very few people would get it. Very few people qualify in the field. So in July of 1985, Rock Hudson flew to France to take an experimental AIDS treatment,

HPA-23. It hadn't yet been approved for human use in the United States. He never quite made it to the hospital. Here's a quote from The Guardian. He collapsed at the Ritz Hotel and was taken to the American hospital in the French capital. His publicist contacted the White House. The Reagan's were old friends in an attempt to speed up a transfer to a military hospital to be seen by Dr. Dominique Dormont, a French army doctor who had previously treated Hudson in secret.

So he needs approval to go to this French military hospital. Hello, it is me, Dominique Dormont. You just sound like French Reagan. Well, it is me, Dominique Dormont. I have some jelly beans for you, maybe. So they wouldn't let him into the hospital because it was like a French army hospital and they were like, you're just some guy, like we can't let you into this hospital. So Hudson's publicist telegrammed the Reagan's and basically said like,

this is the only hospital in the world that can do what's necessary to save Rock's life or at least make him more comfortable. Please intervene because you're the fucking president. You can do something. You call France and say, let this guy into their hospital. They'll do it for you. According to a note written by an aide at the time who delivered the message to Nancy Reagan, quote, I spoke with Ms. Reagan about the attached telegram.

She did not feel that this was something that the White House should get into and she agreed to my suggestion that we refer the writer to the U.S. Embassy, Paris. Now BuzzFeed actually talked with this aide once they found the telegram in the Reagan Library archives. He claims he advised the First Lady that they had to be fair and not treat Rock different just because he was their friend. She agreed. The Reagan's were very conscious of not making exceptions for people, he said, just because they were friends of theirs or celebrities or things of that kind.

They weren't about that. They were about treating everybody the same. Unless you're gay. Well, there's a lot of reasons that's bullshit. One of them is, of course, we just talked about the fact that they paid one of their gay friends a million dollars to redo the residence at the White House. Clearly, they're not above doing a favor for a friend. Ronald Reagan had intervened personally like a year before to help his friend Bob Hope with a fundraiser.

And in 1982, when Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan's dear friends, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, were having a little bit of trouble clamping down unrest in the Philippines, caused by the fact that they tortured and killed thousands of people, Ronnie did his friend a solid and invited Ferdinand Marcos to the White House. Now, there were big protests at the time. It was a political risk to invite a fascist to the White House. But Ronald Reagan did it. He stood by his friend and he gave him tens of millions of dollars in covert military aid,

which really is what friendship is all about. Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, it's why, you know, the Clintons were fans of what's his name, the Egyptian dictator. Oh, C.C.? Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things like they were clearly not above doing things for their friends. This would not have been, they wouldn't even have had to publicly call the thing. Look, we love...

They just were willing to take the risk. Dictators. Hey, if you murder tens of thousands of people or disappear them, you're our friend. As long as you don't like commies. Right. Order Islamic terrorists. Right. Yeah.

And even then, it might be okay as long as you're okay with our business interests. Well, yeah. That rock Hudson got no special treatment from the Reagan White House. Sure. On July 25th, 1985, Hudson announced that he had AIDS. This also served as his first public announcement that he was a homosexual. Paul Bonberg of the Mobilization Against AIDS campaign begged President Reagan to speak up. Surely now that a man who had been his friend for decades had the disease, the president would finally do something.

By the way, that's kind of on rock also for still being friends with him. Maybe they were fun at parties. I never got to drink with Ronald Reagan. I don't know. None of my family members, but family friends that voted for Trump I have cut out of my life. Certainly none of my friends ever did, but it's pretty easy to cut out the pieces of shit in your life. I think this was an age before that really happened in politics. Because even if you're talking about like, it's not like the gay community had a lot of play in the Democratic Party in 1985, right?

This was the first life and death political issue other than just discrimination and what not, and the deaths that result from that for gay people. And it was the first one where there was a clear difference between the Republicans and Democrats. Because if you're talking about like, the deaths that result from social isolation and discrimination, I don't really think the Democrats in 85 are much better than the Republicans. But if you talk about AIDS, the Democrats are directly dealing with AIDS. They're holding their convention in San Francisco. They're making a march part of it. They're taking some actions.

This is the first time where it becomes a life and death thing. Who knows what Rock would have done if he'd lasted another couple of years, but he died very soon after this. On September 17th of 1985, the same year Rock was sick, a couple of months after he made his announcement, Ronald Reagan finally, for the very first time, said the word AIDS in public. Oh! Yeah! Wow! Ronnie!

Finally! The great communicator made a surprise visit to the Department of Health and Human Services and said, quote, one of our highest public health priorities is going to be continuing to find a cure for AIDS. He announced that C. Everett Koop, the Surgeon General, was being pulled in to write a report on the disease. Hudson's death changed the national conversation about AIDS. This is seen as like the major dividing point and the national attitudes towards AIDS. A lot of people say there is AIDS before and after Rock Hudson comes out about it. It is like the equivalent if there was some weird disease in a marginalized community and then fucking George Clooney dies of it.

Like, it catalyzed the nation and the world, because he was a big star. President Reagan finally acknowledged the disease's existence, but he still had not actually addressed the American people about AIDS. So he'd never given a speech about it, he'd never talked about it in the other context. 5,636 Americans died of AIDS in 1985. What's the grand total so far? I think we're going to get to that in a second. One of them was Rock Hudson. So we're definitely above 10,000, like 15,000, 13,000, 14,000, something like that right now.

Rock Hudson died on October 2nd, just a few months after coming out. Ronald Reagan kept quiet about his homosexuality and the advocate named Reagan homophobe of the year, that year. Representative Henry Waxman from Los Angeles said this. It is surprising that the president could remain silent as 6,000 Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic's existence. Perhaps his staff felt he had to, since many of his new right supporters have raised money by campaigning against homosexuals. President Reagan continued to not address the nation about AIDS in 1986, as another 16,301 Americans died from the disease. That year, Transformers of the movie came out? It might be. Optimus Prime kept quiet too.

Just to give you guys some context. Megatron donated a lot of money to AIDS trade. I don't actually know anything about Transformers. That year, 1986, was the year that 21,000 total Americans had died. That was the total at the end of 1986. Do you think Reagan sent a representative to the advocate to collect his homophobe of the year award? Oh, I hope so. I mean, you really want that trophy. On his mantle?

Yeah. So 21,000 deaths into the AIDS crisis. Dr. Conant, one of the first doctors to treat it, sent a letter to Ronald Reagan. He recalled its contents to the Guardian. Dear President Reagan, I have all these patients and they are dying and no one's doing anything. It is incumbent on your administration to direct the Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health to begin efforts to find the cause and treatment for this disease. Now, the Reagan's responded to this letter. It said... Fuck off!

No, no, no. It just said, Nancy and I thank you for your support. You got a form letter. Yeah. 21,000 Americans dead. Which is, I think, more than the total Americans who have died in the entire global war on terror. So yeah, that's where we are. That's where we are at the end of part one of this episode. It is 1986, 21,000 Americans have died.

Ronald Reagan has said the word AIDS once and not in a public speech. So, that's where we are. When we come back for part two, we're going to talk about Reagan's eventual acknowledgement of the epidemic. And we're also going to talk about one of the AIDS crisis's unlikeliest heroes, a surgeon general with a ridiculous name, C. Everett Koop. C. Everett Koop. Yeah. He actually does the right thing with this. But yeah, that's all coming up.

So that's the end of part one. Do you want to plug some plugables before we get into that? Oh, well, subscribe to Couples Therapy. If you want to hear me talk about politics in India... Actually, we don't talk about politics at all. It's a thing we try to offer you some respite from this nightmare. And then my dear love, Naomi, who is the... I'm the weirdo. She's the populist.

So, let's take some respite from the madness over the next day or two. And on Thursday, Andy and I will be back. It just makes me want to vomit. Yeah. Hearing all of this. We will continue to make Andy want to vomit. So, that's part two, the vomiting. We've got a cup here on the table.

I think that's about one vomit's worth of cup. So, we'll be fine. We'll see how much comes out of me. Until Thursday. And until we all learn how much comes out of Andy. I am Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK.

I have a book on Amazon, a brief history of vice. You can also find this podcast on the internet behindthebastards.com. We'll have pictures and sources up there. You can find us on social media at BastardsPod on Twitter and Instagram. So, come and check us out. And come back Thursday to learn more about AIDS and Ronald Reagan. Bill, it's time for you to go now. I love about 40% of you.

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