There are a lot of reason why I am totally appalled at the new media's gushing reports on the death of Ronald Reagan. Other than NPR, I have seen few, or heard few, commentaries on many of the evils that his administration perpetrated on the poor, the disadvantaged and, of course, on the environment. Throw in Iran-Contra and you see a president that if not totally detached from what was going on around him, certainly would fall into the category of one of our worst presidents.

There was also one other aspect abot him that I also have not seen mentioned, and frankly, I had forgotten or repressed. But a gay friend forwarded me an Agente France story about Reagan and his administration's approach to AIDS, one of the great horrors of the last century and one that persists as a major problem today. Here is the story. Read it, and then remember the real Ronal Reagan.

BYLINE: GILES HEWITT

DATELINE: NEW YORK, June 8

The death of Ronald Reagan has gone largely unmourned by America's
gay community, which still harbours bitter memories of the former
president's indifference to the emerging AIDs epidemic in the 1980s.

Even as the eulogies poured in at home and around the world, gay
activists offered a sharply divergent verdict on the Reagan
presidency, which they see as tainted with the blood of thousands of
victims of the HIV scourge.

"It wasn't just that he ignored the AIDS crisis," said Mark Milano,
an HIV treatment educator who has been living with the virus since
1981. "What was so unconscionable was that he and members of his
administration actually took a pro-active decision to do nothing
about it."

Initial public awareness of AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency
Syndrome)dates back to the early days of Reagan's first term, with the publication of a New York Times article in 1981 that detailed a rare cancer being seen in the homosexual community.

The acronym AIDS was first used in 1982 when more than 1,500
Americans were diagnosed with the disease.

Reagan, as gay activists still angrily point out, never mentioned the word in public until 1987, by which time some 60,000 cases had been
diagnosed, of whom half had died.

The lack of major federal funding to combat AIDS as the disease took
hold is cited by many as a major factor behind its dramatic spread.

In the critical years of 1984 and 1985, according to his White House
physician, Reagan thought of AIDS as though "it was measles and would go away."

Lou Cannon, one of the most respected of Reagan biographers, wrote in his authoritative "President Reagan," that the president's response
to the epidemic was "halting and ineffective."

And in a 2001 speech at a national symposium on US AIDS Policy, C.
Everett Koop, Reagan's surgeon general, said that due to
"intra-departmental politics" he was cut out of all AIDS discussions
for the first five years of the Reagan administration.

"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," Koop said.

Many gay activists refrain from labelling Reagan as personally
homophobic, focusing instead on the record of his administration and
the conservative agenda of the "New Right" and "Moral Majority" that
flourished under his presidency.

"The government's response was dictated by the grip of evangelical
Christian conservatives who saw gay people as sinners and AIDS as
God's well-deserved punishment," said Matt Foreman, executive
director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

"I don't think that Reagan hated gay people," Foreman said. "But I do know that the Reagan administration's policies on AIDS and anything
gay-related resulted -- and continue to result -- in despair and
death."

Others voiced irritation with the media reaction to Reagan's death,
arguing that the former president's inaction on AIDS had been
forgotten in the rush to praise the victor of the Cold War.

Christopher Babick, a former executive director of the People with
AIDS Coalition, wrote a letter published in The New York Times on
Monday, sharply criticising the newspaper for failing to mention the
AIDS epidemic once in its front-page obituary of the president.

"For years, we begged, we pleaded, we lobbied and we marched in the
streets to get the attention of the 'Great Communicator'. Alas no
support came," Babick said.

"AIDS, not the fall of the Berlin Wall, may very well be the marker
by which Ronald Reagan's presidency is judged," he added.

But criticizing Reagan was a tough course even before the outpouring
of emotion that followed his death.

In November, the CBS network was pressured into pulling a
controversial mini-series about his presidency. The original
screenplay quoted Reagan in a private conversation about AIDS as
saying: "They that live in sin shall die in sin."

The series was finally aired on the pay-cable channel Showtime, but
without the controversial line which, while almost certainly
fictional, was seen by many in the gay community as an accurate
representation of the Reagan adminstration's stance.

"I shed no tears at the passing of Ronald Reagan," Philip Hitchcock,
an openly gay sculptor from Venice, California, wrote in another
letter published Monday in The Los Angeles Times.

"My tears are and were for the hundreds of thousands of Americans
with HIV on whom Mr. Reagan turned his back," he said. "I weep for
the scores and scores of men whose names, one by one, I blacked out
of my address book."