The Ronald Reagan Centennial and a Contrarian Gay Perspective
According to conventional wisdom, most gays loath Ronald Reagan and cheered his physical decline before he died. Yet, as the nation celebrates the Reagan Centennial, and it becomes increasingly clear that many gays can be either Republican or conservative, perhaps it is appropriate to re-evaluate Ronald Reagan from a different, more objective prism.
Mr. Reagan is credited with winning the war against communism and revitalizing American capitalism to the point where nearly the entire world promotes freer market economic policies. His achievements are said to have liberated every continent and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in China, India, the old Soviet Union and throughout South and Central America.
But to the predominant Gay “activist class” of the last 30 years, Ronald Reagan allowed thousand of Gay men with AIDS to die on his “watch, unleashed racism, eliminated the middle class and created the homeless. While chanting Gay activists reflexively assure you that they are experts on Reagan atrocities, they seem more like experts in unfounded and undeserved Reagan hate.
Currently, many in the gay community quietly continue to beg to differ. They realize that Reagan moved about as fast as any other American regarding the AIDS epidemic in the US in the 1980’s. In fact, the entire scientific community, health care industry, and society in general are said to have mobilized at the fourth quickest rate in the US history of epidemics, according to one source.
And the great wave of Reaganite-inspired homophobia and AIDS-hysteria never did take root. American insensitivity to people with AIDS, or the widespread heterosexual AIDS epidemic never occurred, as had been predicted by HIV/AIDS activists. On the contrary, America was largely compassionate, and even gay publications atoned that AIDS was largely a gay male disease. That view was even echoed last year by Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sibelius
While Mr. Reagan’s government did not find immediate life-extending drugs for AIDS sufferers, the AZT anti-viral drug was developed on his watch! Moreover, his Administration sent out the most sexually-explicit safe-sex manual to over 110 million households in his last year in office. Simply put, the idea that Ron and Nancy Reagan were “over-joyed” to see thousands of gay men dying is a “psychotic and malicious canard” that is deeply rooted in the political psyche of the activist Gay male culture.
Furthermore, there is a an even greater reason for Gays to celebrate the Reagan Presidency . The vast impact the “freedom revolution” had on the world following his triumph over communism liberated people of every continent. And while not every country enjoys a perfect democracy under which to live, most people are simply freer to choose their destiny in life. And that fact absolutely exists for many more Gay people around the world.
Since the collapse of international communism, more and more openly Gay people, organizations, publications, Gay Pride events and media have emerged in Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia, Latin America, and to some extent the Middle East.
Prior to Reagan’s America winning the Cold War, we never heard about gay people in communist run societies. And that’s what comes to light when one tries objectively to scrutinize Gay hostility to the Reagan legacy. He, more than any recent President in the last century, did more to advance human rights for all people of the world.