time to speak out

i have remained silent about the news this week, but after having a few days to digest the way the story is headed, i find i must speak out. the report this morning that some want to put ronald reagan's face on our money makes me livid.

i lived in nyc from 1983 to 1988 and was a firsthand witness to the explosion of the AIDS crisis in the gay community there. after the diagnosis of a close friend, i chose to get involved in the People with AIDS Coalition. they operated a "living room" drop-in center where folks come come and hang out, share a meal, play cards, watch tv or just talk. i cooked for these men and women and became friends with some of them. as the months went on, i attended one funeral after another. this was the time before effective treatment was available...the time when a diagnosis was a death sentence. surviving more than a year was the exception rather than the rule. i stopped counting the friends who had died when the number reached forty. i eventually had to leave the city as it was just too much to bear. dealing with so much death in my twenties was not something i did gracefully. but then we're not supposed to face that much death at such an early age, are we?

much of our grief became anger during that time, and much of that anger was directed at a president who refused to even say the word AIDS. while we were experiencing a plague in our daily lives, he was sitting in an ivory tower, ignoring the whole thing. the following piece presents many of the facts of that time. i present it here as a reminder of what happened and when. the media seems determined not to let this be a part of this week's presentations. i feel compelled to post this so that we might never forget how dangerous ignorance can be.

8 June 2004
by Keith Griffith

For Jay. For all the many tens of thousands of men, women, and children
who are gone and seemingly forgotten to revisionist history, I write these
words. For them and my own personal sanity, I feel this need to recall
historical facts.

Jay Rindal was my partner, boyfriend, lover. Jay died of AIDS in
September 1987 and I can still remember standing there, alone in the
hospital room, talking to his dead body one last time. Standing over his
lifeless body, I raised my fist and swore to him I'd never forget the
people responsible for this. All those who looked away, all those who
could have or should have done something, but didn't. The one person I
called by name was President Ronald Reagan.

This may sound like so much drama to many people today, but for Jay and I
and for many, many other people living in the 80s in San Francisco, AIDS
was extremely political, the battle of our lives and one we rose to and
all too often, lost. Jay and I had been arrested together in a protest at
the California capitol building in Sacramento. We'd even gone on trial
together for allegedly halting the business of the California governor
over his steadfast denial of the existence of AIDS as a real emergency.
I was far more political and outspoken when compared to Jay, but this shy,
reserved man, an accountant by trade, never hesitated to support me in my
actions and to volunteer himself when it came to pushing for recognition
of the gravity of AIDS in those darkest, desperate days. We both felt
abandoned by the institutions and the country that we had been raised to
respect.

I have been dreading this week for years, hoping that I'd be lucky enough
to be out of the country or in some remote location too busy to notice.
It was all so predictable: the media, the politicians, and the American
public have decided to do one more for the Gipper. We are witnessing the
revision of history, perhaps only unusual in how blatant it is. But I am
still here and so are many of us who survived to see the other side of
this epidemic and we will speak the truth to make sure our memories are
not washed over as people plan on putting Reagan on $10 bills or Mount
Rushmore.

Ronald Reagan came to power at the precise moment that AIDS was taking
hold in select populations in the USA. It had already been a killer
elsewhere, but never had it shown up in North America, nor had any area of
the world seen the full extent with which AIDS could and would ravage
populations when Reagan was sworn into office in January, 1981. Even if
you grant Reagan some allowance that AIDS seemingly came from nowhere, his
administration had ample time to gear up the country to deal with the
disease. Every victory that did come about came in spite of Reagan and
because those who controlled the purse strings on Capitol Hill were held
accountable by small bands of activists who popped up in cities hardest
hit including San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

The facts are so clear and obvious that not much more need be stated than
what we know to be true:

1. Ronald Regan becomes the 40th President of the United States in
January, 1981.

2. The first reports of a disease that would come to be known as AIDS were
reported in Americans in March 1981 (see Hymes, K.B., Greene, J. B.,
Marcus, A., et al. [1981] 'Kaposi's sarcoma in homosexual men: A report of
eight cases', Lancet 2:598-600).

3. By the end of 1981, 323 individuals had been diagnosed with AIDS in
the USA, and 122 died. At no point in the year did Ronald Reagan issue a
statement nor was he asked to comment on the new disease by any member of
the news media.

4. By June 1982 speculation was gaining among doctors with large
practices of gay men that the disease was likely sexually transmitted.
(see MMWR weekly [1882] 'A Cluster of Kaposi's sarcoma and Pneumocystis
carinii Pneumonia among homosexual male residents of Los Angles and Orange
counties, California', June 18/31 [23]; 305-7)

5. By the end of 1982, 1,170 individuals had been diagnosed with AIDS in
the USA that year, and 453 died. Reagan remained silent about AIDS and
the news media continued to not ask him about the disease.

6. In early 1983, it was confirmed that heterosexual transmission of AIDS
was being seen in the USA. (see MMWR Weekly [1982] 'Epidemiologic notes
and reports immunodeficiency among female sexual partners of males with
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)- New York' [1982], January 7,31
[52]; 697-8.)

7. By the end of 1983, 3,076 individuals had been diagnosed with AIDS in
the USA that year, and 1,481 died. Reagan remained silent about AIDS and
yet again, the news media asked him no questions.

8. In April, 1984 US Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler
called a news conference to report that HIV was the cause of AIDS. She
added, "We hope to have a vaccine [against AIDS] ready for testing in
about two years."

9. By the end of 1984, 6,247 individuals had been diagnosed with AIDS in
the USA that year, and 3,474 died. Reagan remained silent about AIDS and
of course the news media did not hold him accountable.

10. In 1985 reports became more and more common about persons with AIDS
being denied services. Probably the most famous example was Ryan White, a
13-year old haemophiliac with AIDS, who was barred from school.

11. In April 1985 a small group, calling themselves Lavender Menace
disrupted a meeting of the first international Conference on AIDS held in
Atlanta.

12. In San Francisco, in a single act of civil disobedience, John
Lorenzini chained himself to the Federal Building in that cities UN Plaza.
Months later, on October 27 Steve Russell and Bert Franks along with a
team of supporters chained themselves to the Federal Building at UN Plaza
and refused to leave. This protest action would continue uninterrupted
for years to follow.

13. On September 17th, President Reagan publicly mentioned AIDS for the
first time, when he was asked about AIDS at a press conference. Reagan was
asked whether he would send his children if they were younger to school
with a child who has AIDS. His response, "It is true that some medical
sources had said that this cannot be communicated in any way other than
the ones we already know and which would not involve a child being in the
school. And yet medicine has not come forth unequivocally and said, 'This
we know for a fact, that it is safe.' And until they do, I think we just
have to do the best we can with this problem. I can understand both sides
of it." (Reagan R. [1985] 'The President's News Conference', September 17,
www.reagan.utexas.resource/speeches/1985/91785c.htm)

14. By the end of 1985, 11,794 individuals had been diagnosed with AIDS
in the USA that year, and 6,877 died, among them Reagan friend Rock
Hudson, the former movie and TV actor.

15. In 1986 Citizens for Medical Justice was formed in San Francisco,
carrying out the first organized protest actions to enlist large numbers
in protest. The first act was to close down the office of the California
governor, followed soon by a miles long march to protest the high cost of
AIDS medicines, among other actions.

16. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop issued the first report about how to
prevent the spread of AIDS in 1986. Knowledge of how to prevent AIDS had
been known among doctors, researchers and government officials as early as
1982.

17. By the end of 1986, 19,064 individuals had been diagnosed with AIDS
in the USA that year, and 12,016 died.

18. In 1987 Reagan made his first ever voluntary public statement about
AIDS in a public address, calling for abstinence as the way to stop the
spread of AIDS. In another address, he would call for mandatory AIDS
testing.

19. In March 1987 ACT UP New York goes public for the first time with a
high profile disruption of business on Wall Street.

20. In April 1987 a White House official admitted that President Reagan
had never discussed AIDS with his own Surgeon General Koop.

21. By the end of 1987, 28,599 individuals had been diagnosed with AIDS
in the USA that year, and 16,194 died.

22. In May 1988 the United States finally launched a coordinated AIDS
education campaign. The distribution took place of 107 million copies of
"Understanding AIDS", a booklet by Surgeon General Koop.

23. On October 11, 1988 the Federal Drug Administration was shut down by
demonstrations from various activist groups convening on Washington.

24. By the end of 1988, with only days left before Reagan would leave
office, 35,508 individuals had been diagnosed with AIDS in the USA that
year, and 20,922 died.

25. In January, 1989 Reagan leaves office.

In a 2001 speech at the Kaiser Family Foundation's National Symposium on
U.S. AIDS Policy, former Surgeon General Dr. Koop acknowledged that due to
"intradepartmental politics" he was effectively out of the loop on AIDS
discussions for the first 5 years of the Reagan presidency. Quoting Koop,
"Because transmission of AIDS was understood primarily in the homosexual
population and in those who abused intravenous drugs, the advisors to the
President took the stand, they are only getting what they justly deserve."

Those first five years, also the first years of the epidemic in America,
would have been critical in saving so many lives had only the word been
allowed to spread about the existence of the disease and how it might be
transmitted. Basic information such as how AIDS might be transmitted, and
how condoms might help prevent it were withheld from widespread
circulation because the Reagan presidency felt it was either inappropriate
or unimportant, but more likely for both reasons. Reagan is being
remembered now for having led us into so many policy decisions that, at
the time, seemed ridiculous (most famous being his belief that the Soviet
Union could actually be defeated without going to war), but when it came
to leading the nation and the world on AIDS, he couldn't be bothered to
even mention the name of the disease in public until well after it had
taken hold in the USA.

61,539 Americans died of AIDS (all statistics supplied by the Federal
Centers for Disease Control) during the Reagan presidency. Even now,
after living those years and helping many people die, it still seems
unreal that this many Americans could die in the prime of their lives in
the most medically advanced nation in the history of the world. How could
it have happened? Even now, have you heard one commentator mention this
fact about the Reagan legacy? The largest public health crisis the world
has seen since the Plague began under Ronald Reagan, but you¹d never know
it by watching TV or reading newspapers this week. For Jay and all the
others, these are the historical facts.

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