Reply #56: My city... [View All]

I live in San Francisco and was here for the AIDS crisis.

I can't tell you how many I know who were taken by that disease, and how many more are friends who are now living with it.

Living in SF given me an unusual, first-hand view of Ronnie's policies.

San Francisco took the brunt when, as Governor, he closed down the state mental hospital system. We saw mentally ill people wandering the streets here, most of them sleeping on the sidewalks in puddles of urine.

How compassionate.

The City had to step in and try to provide services to them. It's something we struggle with as a City to this day.

San Francisco was an epicenter for the victims of the "Communist purge" down in Cenral America. We offered sanctuary and were flooded with refugees trying to escape the death squads and the fighting, and we heard the horror stories. Two of my best friends, both boys at the time, were smuggled here by their families to get them away from the danger. Hector's memories of Reagan was of being attacked in his village by Contras and barely escaping with his life.

And then there was the 80s and AIDS.

God, what a time.

Funerals or memorial services just about every day. Walking skeletons with KS shuffling through the Castro and Polk Street. Death everywhere. AIDS wards at SF General, AIDS walks in the park.

Did Reagan invent AIDS? No. Was he complicit in its spread and the damaged it caused? Absolutely.

His utter lack of leadership and his refusal to view it as the major health threat that was at a time when we KNEW it was big, we KNEW how it was spreading, and we KNEW what needed to be done to prevent it and to take care of those suffering from it.

And Reagan and his administration did DICK for years. For YEARS.

If Reagan didn't start AIDS, or couldn't control personal behavior, just how could he have helped, you ask?


Let's start with funding into understanding, treating and preventing the disease. Much too little, much too late on his part.

Let's start with going before the nation and telling his countrymen that AIDS isn't a punishment from God, but a disease whose victims deserve our support, our compassion, and our understanding. When Princess Diana sat there in an AIDS ward in England and held the hands of a man suffering from AIDS while the cameras clicked away, she changed the world. For that, she will always have my undying gratitude.

Let's start with offering the support services and legal protections HIV/AIDS sufferes needed. Everything that was done for them at the time, everything, was generated by the community around them. The hospices, the meal and pet services, the funding walks, the educational and awareness programs, the needle programs -- these things all grew out of a need that only the community, not the government, responded to.

As I mentioned on another thread about Ronnie and AIDS, my only hope is that from his death will come a karmic penance for his inaction on AIDS, in the form of stem cell research.


As for those "promiscuous" gays, I'm old enough to remember the 70s and the het herpes plague that hit those sexual revolutionaries. I hope folks hold those hets to as high a behavioral standard as they do gay men. :eyes: