Here’s a short film the documents the Reagan Administration making jokes about gay people and the AIDS crisis.
Imagine last year, when the nation was on edge about Ebola entering the U.S., if the White House press secretary had made off color jokes about Ebola victims. Or imagine if HIV/AIDS had initially been seen as affecting any other group of people besides gay men, what the national response would have been.
The truth is that under President Ronald Reagan’s White House, HIV/AIDS was a joke. Literally, a joke, as a new short film that premieres at Vanity Fair today makes clear. Filmmaker Scott Calonico reveals in “When AIDS Was Funny,” (above) that the White House press secretary, Larry Speakes, engaged with reporters in homophobic jokes and innuendo, and clearly treating the LGBT community as inhuman, something to mock and steer clear of.
The transcript of one encounter was published a few years ago in the Washington Post, you can watch the film above and read along. The reporter asking the questions of the press secretary is now a WorldNetDaily White House correspondent, the very anti-gay Lester Kinsolving.
Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement—the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?
MR. SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?
Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.†(Laughter.) 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?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)
Q: No, I don’t.
MR. SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question.
Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President—
MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)
Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.
Q: Does the President, does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any—
Q: Nobody knows?
MR. SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here, Lester.
Q: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping—
MR. SPEAKES: I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he’s had no—(laughter)—no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is.
Q: The President doesn’t have gay plague, is that what you’re saying or what?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I didn’t say that.
Q: Didn’t say that?
MR. SPEAKES: I thought I heard you on the State Department over there. Why didn’t you stay there? (Laughter.)
Q: Because I love you, Larry, that’s why. (Laughter.)
MR. SPEAKES: Oh, I see. Just don’t put it in those terms, Lester. (Laughter.)
Q: Oh, I retract that.
MR. SPEAKES: I hope so.
Some say that if President Reagan had actually responded to the new disease – that was killing hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of people on his watch – the way we might expect today, countless, maybe hundreds of thousands of AIDS deaths worldwide could have been prevented.
Watch the film.
And remember.
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