As the world knows by now, Hillary Clinton lit her credibility on fire last week in an interview with Mrs. Alan Greenspan:

“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about H.I.V./AIDS back in the 1980s,” Mrs. Clinton, who was attending Mrs. Reagan’s funeral in Simi Valley, Calif., told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular, Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.”

She then tried to minimize the furor her outrageous lie caused by claiming she “misspoke,” and pretended she had meant their work on Alzheimer’s disease and stem cell research. Which she also mentioned in the interview, unfortunately for her.

“While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, I misspoke about their record on H.I.V. and AIDS,” she said in a statement about two hours after her interview had been shown on MSNBC. “For that, I’m sorry.”

Sec. Clinton has been widely criticized for this statement, as well as for the “apology.” She has been predictably defended by her partisans, citing irrelevant Clinton Foundation work, making insulting false equivalency charges against her opponent, claiming that the problem is really sexism (the last refuge of a cornered Clintonite), telling us we just mustn't speak of it, pleading for sympathy because she must have been "tired," and of course by simple head-up-the-ass denial. Outraged commentary is appearing in many quarters, elsewhere we find mystification. And of course some concerned folks are advising us to get over it.

Well, we will not just get over it.

Back in the Day

In 1987 the late investigative reporter Randy Shilts published And the Band Played On, a comprehensive account of the AIDS crisis to that point from his gay male perspective. (He did give short shrift to Haitians and heterosexual IV drug users, but the book was partly personal testimonial in addition to reporting.) It is still perhaps the best single account of the horrors of the day, the malevolent political response, and the sometimes heroic and sometimes venal medical community response. The teevee movie was nice, but if you really want to know what it was like you should read Shilts’ book. It gives a true picture of what it was like to live in his home of San Francisco in that day. I know, I was a part of that community.

I was born in San Francisco and grew up in a suburb 20 miles away. When I was a child, gay men were ostracized and persecuted, subject to arrest merely for gathering, and often hounded to suicide. They had no voice and no political agency. But San Francisco offered a haven of sorts in those days, as it did to many outcast communities. In the latter 1960’s the changing culture crystallized in the Haight-Ashbury, where social prejudices and restrictions were joyfully burned in a counter-cultural explosion. One of the residual effects of that brief detonation was a new community of out gay men and Lesbians, determined to live their lives in the open and to refuse to accept the oppression of straight society and religious authorities. It started slow, but it gathered pace. By the mid-1970’s the Castro was one of a few locations (“ghettoes” in our parlance of the day) where this new gay consciousness was aborning.

I moved there as a fresh faced college grad in 1977 after many previous dabblings, eager to escape my suffocating suburb and closeted fear. It was a magical time, when the world was fresh and new. It was our own Summer of Love. Gay men and Lesbians flocked there from across the country, as they also flocked to Greenwich Village and West Hollywood and a few other safe zones. We began to find political voice under the leadership of the flawed but brilliant Harvey Milk. We built community. I joined a short lived National Gay Educational Switchboard to give gay people from across the country resources, advice and counseling. Cleve Jones was one of my coworkers. One of our most important services was suicide crisis counseling. We saved many lives. Then shots rang out. Harvey Milk and our ally Mayor George Moscone were dead. The phone rang. “Come to the Castro. We’re going to have a memorial for Harvey and George, and walk to City Hall.” So I went, bringing a candle without thinking twice. That night was one of the most moving events of my life.

Not long after that night I was accepted into medical school, and moved a couple of hours away. My carefree gay life was over, and I went into what I referred to as the nunnery. Shortly after starting my studies, a very disturbing issue of the New England Journal of Medicine arrived, detailing an unusual cancer and a rare pneumonia in gay men and IV drug users. “Uh oh,” I thought. The nightmare of AIDS had begun. I watched with horror as my friends started to die, and lay awake nights wondering if I would be next.

The press of studies left little time for reflection or fear, and far too little to be there to help my friends who needed so much help. I attended memorial services when I could, and talked on the phone to panicked friends, offering what little knowledge I had and what little comfort there was. I began talking to professors, and found interested ones in the head of our Infectious Disease department and the director of the primate research center. I’d already made friends with a couple of gay downtown docs who were the go-to guys for scared gay men and local IV drug users. I helped bring all these parties together, and spoke with the school administrators. Together we established the first AIDS clinic at my medical school. It was the first time I’d ever made the local news. My studies continued, and I planned to come back to join my downtown mentors once I finished training.

I went to Boston for medical residency, where the environment was different. An academic center, Boston was full of researchers jostling to get in on the hot new topic, eager for patients for their studies. Nothing worked, but the focus was on statistics and papers. The human response was not the same as I’d remembered from my days in San Francisco, although there were many heroic volunteers and friends doing their best to help the sick and dying. So in 1987 I went back to San Francisco for 3 months in my senior residency year, to work and learn at San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 86: the AIDS ward.

In San Francisco the community had rallied unbelievably. Gay men were spending most of their time caring for each other. Lesbian women were central to the response, although the communities were previously not that close. The hardened opposition to the gay community in the police department, the Catholic church and the conservative neighborhoods was even beginning to soften. But only because of the unspeakable, overwhelming horror of a deadly plague. I met gentle geniuses like Paul Volberding. Driven egomaniacs like Don Abrams. The most dedicated nurses and hospital staff I have ever seen anywhere. And volunteers who seemingly had descended from heaven to help. It was, as the gay writer Richard Rodriguez once observed, a medieval Procession of the Saints. There was also the chance to catch up with old friends, the few who remained. The hollow eyes, the bone-weary exhaustion, the chronic debilitating fear, the weight loss, the purple spots — all these things told me what the war was like. I realized how very lucky I had been to be called to the nunnery when I was. It was a city under seige, the enemy at the gates and going nowhere, with the residents dying and starving and coming very close to losing hope.

I went on with my career, which was rocky at the start. My mentors from medical school had both died themselves, and there was no office to join. I drifted for a while, until I moved to Cape Cod where AIDS was a real and present threat. I interviewed there, and met and fell in love with a man with AIDS. So instead of working I stopped to take care of him. A year or so later, he stopped breathing in my arms. There was a large memorial service in Boston — his brother was #3 in the Boston Fire Department, so everybody from the mayor and the Speaker of the State House on down were there. I gave the eulogy, and left not a dry eye in the house. At the Irish wake afterward, my dead lover’s fire chief brother brought me over to meet his best friend. They had been in Vietnam together. His friend had a question:

"Have you lost a lot of friends to AIDS?”

“Yeah. I stopped counting years ago at 65. I didn’t want to count anymore.”

“I don’t mean this to sound insensitive, but does it ever get any easier? Not when it’s your lover, I mean — please forgive me. But do you ever find it gets easier?”

I looked at his eyes and saw in them genuine curiosity and empathy. “No,” I said. “It gets harder. Everybody you lose takes a piece of your heart with them, and after a while your heart gets so tattered and threadbare it’s hard to hold together anymore. That’s one reason why I loved Brian. I wanted to try to patch my heart together again.”

He looked at me for a long moment. “Yeah, I thought so. That’s what it was like in Nam.” He gave me a big hug, we cried some, and in the best Irish wake tradition we downed a pint together.

I then took that job and started caring for the community, and did so for 11 years. During that time the first (sort-of) effective treatments began to emerge, and suddenly my patients weren’t dying at the rates they had been. There was hope, though it was often illusory for people who had gotten too sick. And the battle began to turn.

During these years the Reagans had ruled in Washington, presiding over the Return of the Billionaires. Greed was good. The country was in self-congratulatory mode, and the Reagan prosperity was heavily propagandized. But I knew — all of us knew — that Ronnie was ignoring our plague. He and his cronies laughed at our deaths. Liz Taylor shamed him into uttering the word “AIDS” only in 1985, after over 20,000 people had died. He didn’t give a speech on the subject — inadequate as it was — until May of 1987. Imagine if Barack Obama had presided over 7 years of an Ebola plague which killed over 40,000 Americans without giving a speech on it — even now. Research budgets were promised and cut. Rich people needed their tax cuts, after all. Nancy Reagan was commonly understood to be Ronnie’s Svengali, as everybody with eyes to see knew he was demented. We knew exactly where she stood.

In the years since those days things have gotten slowly better. I survived. I have a wonderful husband now. And Brian’s ashes still sit in a tasteful red art glass urn on the mantel — the ones we didn’t scatter on a beach in Provincetown, anyway. Life has gone on, for me. But the losses and the scars and the fear and the malign neglect of the powerful from those days are right under the surface of my daily reality. My friends are still gone. Brian’s still on the mantel. And my heart still feels like it’s going to come apart sometimes.

I remember. Many of us remember. We will not forget. And as long as power tramples the powerless, and people die of neglect while champagne glasses clink in the halls of the powerful, we will not forgive. And when any try to minimize or deny what the powerful have done, you damn well better believe I’ll be there too. I owe it to my departed friends, and to their suffering.

[Reposted from Daily Kos, 3/12/2016]