Just thinking of all those beautiful young gay men I used to know and love, they would get sick and suddenly old and then just ... die. I didn't understand it back then, I didn't believe such cruelty could exist
My uncle is on that quilt. He died when I was 14. A genius who developed sound technology which is still used today. I wonder constantly what else he might have invented had he had a chance to live past 32. He left the multimillion biz he made to his employees so they could still work after he died
I see you, I hear you, I witness. So is mine. A brilliant photographer, he managed to get a photo on Time magazine and I never did find out which one. I only have one photo left of him and I can't bear to look at it...he's so sick already in it.
Yeah there's a lot, A LOT, of people who died needlessly directly because of Reagan. Not to mention his disastrous policies. Reagan was my first political disappointment, I thought how could anyone re-elect this guy?? I was very young.
So much of my community didn't survive Reagan. He let a plague ravage us. And that's just the most obvious of his many crimes against humanity. No hell is hot enough.
Anyone who says "We survived Reagan" doesn't know shit about LGBTQ people.
Throwing people out on the streets to die became core values. We were told it would build character and make us stronger and more responsible. We're still footing the bill for Reaganomics.
That's because they were known as "bums" and "winos." A lot of them stayed in SRO boarding houses, which were basically all gentrified beginning under Reagan. So it wasn't just closing mental health facilities, not by a long shot.
No. The '60s were both terrifying & hopeful, but the war on poverty, & voting rights helped.
Reagan gutted housing & compassion, raised the national debt, strengthened "Christian" disdain for the needy. Killed millions via militarism & AIDS denial.
Unhealed wounds there yet.
And women's rights, too. Read "Backlash" by Susan Faludi - why do you think sky high heels and starving one's self to be thin are supposed "empowering" when all they do is strip women of their health and strength?
One of the most pernicious things about Reaganism is that the ever-moving Overton window means that the last GOP overlord doesn't look so bad compared to the next one; plus, Reagan getting credit for "winning" the Cold War. (And people forgetting about Iran-Contra.)
My uncle didn't. His name was embroidered on a square of a quilt draped across the steps of the White House while the murdering bastard was in office. May he burn.
I've listened to so many podcasts and read so many books and watched so many documentaries that, in their own ways, basically point to either Reagan or Nixon when everything began going to shit.
Even then, Nixon actually had some good ideas (like the EPA).
We really shouldn't have survived Reagan; it seemed inevitable that we'd all go down in a blaze of radioactive glory. Instead, the Cold War ended, but once America's right no longer needed to stand with moderates and liberals against the Soviets, they began chipping away at the social contract. 1/2
The end of the Cold War seemed at the time little short of miraculous, and today it's pretty clear that the USA and the "free world" didn't "win" it so much as they lucked out. Surviving a second Trump administration - as individuals and as a society - would be an even greater miracle. 2/end
The appropriate answer to that one is always a photo of the San Francisco Gay Chorus highlighting the 2 or so dudes who survived AIDS. And that's just a small subgroup of the man's victims.
It's been crystal clear for forty years that Reagan was a disaster. The "we survived Reagan" talk was solely because it was finally possible to get a a good night's sleep on Election Night in 1992. Twelve years of Reaganism was awful.
