Ronald reagan on gays
These Ultraconservative Brothers Pulled Strings in Reagan’s Washington. Then One of Them Was Outed as Gay
In the new publication Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, storyteller James Kirchick exposes how fears and prejudices around homosexuality shaped presidential politics for decades, from the Cold War-era purge of gays and lesbians from every level of government to the rise of the conservative movement.
This exclusive excerpt goes behind the scenes of Ronald Reagan’s Washington to meet the powerful Dolan brothers: Terry the fiery founder of the notorious National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), which pioneered the 30-second charge ad; older brother Tony the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist turned chief Reagan speechwriter.
But one of these fierce pillars of the conservative collective had a secret: Terry was homosexual — a truths his fellow Republicans could no longer ignore after he died of AIDS a few days after Christmas, 1986.
Here, Kirchick traces the story of Terry Dolan’s posthumous outing in a Washington Post obituary, and Tony Dolan’s outraged response — including an allusion to Post editor Ben Bradlee 5 days from today will be February 6th- the 113th birthday of the 40th President of the United States, the late Ronald Reagan. Around this time every single year there are always reflections in the media about President Reagan’s legacy and how it relates to the current political situation here in America. Conservatives will talk about Reagan’s virtues and the ways they believe he positively benefited this country while in office; liberals will converse about the ways they notice he ignored the problems of the nation and allowed many of them to fester into the stew of political messiness we face today. I also contend with this subject, not just around February 6th but on a fairly regular basis. After all President Reagan played a large role in the history of my family; my father was a close comrade of his and worked both on his 1980 campaign for the White House as adv as in the administration. It also is personal for me because of my identity as a gay man and the unique, often contentious and resentful relationship my community has had with the late president. Most of the gay community has felt for a long period that Ronald Reagan was personally responsible for the ten The legacy of The Normal Heart, Lopez contends, is not “just as theatre, but of history; it’s living history, as rarely contemporaneous as you ever get” – while, 35 years on, it also acts as a crucial reminder of the continuing battle not only against viruses, but also political neglect, he suggests. “I think we’re evolutionarily conditioned to have a thoughtful of amnesia about things,” Lopez continues. “And it seems as though the impulse is to soften memory; memory starts to soften focus over period. What the wonderful value of that play is, it will forever remind us of exactly what the crisis was.” It’s a text, Lopez believes, that is key to understanding Reagan’s political legacy – a subject on which he does not mince words. “I think the Aids crisis was a genocide of neglect. It was the central story of his presidency, nothing else.” Reagan’s defenders can indicate to the reality that, when he did come to speak out about Aids, he asserted it was one of his administration’s highest priorities on more than one occasion – while by the closing year of his presidency in 1989, the federal government was putting $2.3 billion into HIV/Aids research and preve When it came to AIDS, Ronald Reagan was far too late and billions of dollars short. That much is clear, as even a charitable rear-view-mirror-look at the history of the epidemic would present. No question that many of Reagan's top political aides held an animus for gay people. As the new documentary history of the ACT Up movement makes clear, a lack of political leaders was only one of the reasons why it took the medical society to take the "gay plague" so seriously. But Reagan himself was not an instinctive homophobe. While not a gay rights activist, he was ahead of many in his party in attempting to deal with the gay men that he knew with dignity. This I learned from a great and overlooked manual about the great politico-journalistic rivalry between Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson. Tag Feldstein's Poisoning The Press is a good reminder for those of us who hold Anderson as a hero muckracker. He paid his sources. He took bribes not to print stories. He knowingly advanced the causes of his allies. And he hated homosexuals. Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus examination from multiple perspectives. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Duke’s Download
The drama that raged against Reagan’s America
Subscribe to The Week
Sign u