COLUMN: Reagan's birthday gives LGBT community little to celebrate
I am fed up with the talk about former President Ronald Reagan's supposed greatness.
His presidency was not all that. During his administration, many died of a disease that still devastates the lives of millions around the world today.
Larry Speakes, Reagan's deputy press secretary, joked about the AIDS epidemic during a press briefing on Oct. 15, 1982. That was because the great conservative man who brought values back to government distanced himself from this plague.
Reagan, who created the conservative movement Sarah Palin and other cronies bellow about today, could not show compassion to men dying because of their "immoral" lifestyle.
If we talk about the man's presidency on his 100th birthday, let's talk about every aspect.
I am not out to dishonor the name of Reagan. I am here to shine light on a moment in history. If Reagan would have acted sooner this moment might not have been as dark to me.
It was a time when a small-town teenaged boy dealing with homosexuality believed because he was gay his future meant a terrible death.
It was a time of fear. It was bad enough believing I was not normal. Then I had to watch news reports come in around the country about gay men dying from this disease no one seemed to know much about.
The lack of knowledge bred a fear in me and from that my closet became even more secure. I listened to parents and relatives laugh and joke about the gay disease.
Family members and people throughout the small town talk about rounding "those people" up and placing them on an island to let them die. With that the secret went deeper inside a kid in school struggling to understand why God created him this way.
I ask myself when I look back, "Where were you, the great Ronald Reagan, where were you then?"
Not a single peep from him publicly as people continued to die in the gay community.
In fact, Reagan did not publicly speak or mention the word AIDS once, even when the annual death toll in the U.S. rose from 234 in 1981 to 5636 in 1985.
In 1985, film star Rock Hudson dies of AIDS and Reagan mentions the disease in public for the first time in response to a reporter's questions on Sept. 17.
So, pardon me if I don't get all excited when it comes time to remember the presidency of Ronald Reagan on his 100th birthday.
He did nothing for the LGBT community and that is his legacy to me — a legacy that produced one terrified kid growing up in the `80s.
