Get ready for more of the same if she gets the nomination. The Clintons never met a group they wouldn't throw under the nearest bus for a handful of imaginary conservative democratic voters.

OMFG. This is profoundly disturbing. What a fuck-up.

It is well documented that, although the first cases of AIDS were reported before Reagan took office, he said nothing until well into his second term.

Jayzus freakin' ker-rist. Think of the countless beautiful men and women who died in pain while the Reagans mocked them, allowed their confidants to make AIDS jokes, and refused to address this public health disaster.

Now Clinton wants to rewrite this despicable history. Has she no decency?? How can anyone stand her?

Huge liar.

And if she doesn't walk this back she can can kiss my vote good bye: it'll go to the green party candidate after I move to Ohio.

What the hell, why even go there? Say what a fine first lady she was and what a role model he was in helping Hillary define her role or some innocuous crap like that. That's all she needed to do.

Great job, Human Rights Campaign. Semper HRC.

Hillary needs to apologize. That's ridiculous. I was there. I know.

As a courtesy to your fellow citizens/mourners/queers, Dan: Transcript of Clinton's actual words, please.

I know how you feel, I feel that too, and now I'd like to know exactly what she said so I can demand a walkback/burn her in effigy.

The Stranger has been pretty friendly to Hillary...practically declaring her the winner last week. This is who she is. She won't unequivocally state that Reagan completely failed in handling the AIDS crisis. She tries to have it both ways with this bullshit, mealy-mouthed crap about a "conversation." I hope you'll realize that she does this all the time, on every topic. By itself this kind of statement probably won't change anyone's mind who's committed to Hillary. But I hope you'll look at her statements and record on a raft of other issues that are completely consistent with this kind of triangulation and which ultimately fail Democratic constituencies.

Such a weird fuck up. Conservatives don't give a shit about AIDS, so you're not bringing people to the center with this bullshit. Totally bush league—either tell the real story or don't bring it up at all.

Would be kinda fun if there's a Michelle Obama face palm picture of this.

If you care about issues that affect the gay community, why would you vote for Hillary over Bernie in the first place?

I agree, Hillary needs to take back her statement or at least clarify that she meant that R & N's failure to acknowledge the plague made people talk about why the fuck they wouldn't talk about it.

And the Reagan corpse-humpers to whom she's pandering would never vote for her in a million years anyway. Gawddammit!

My Clinton Derangement Syndrome is causing a(nother) rage blackout.

it is hard, to be sure, as the days pass, to feel that a real human being resides in Hillary Clinton.
I am so sorry Dan and others, that she has stirred deep feelings of loss and rage for you.

Come on over from the dark side, Dan,. Support Bernie!

I was going to vote for her if bernie loses, but this tempts me not to. Seriously, tempts me NOT to. If she's the nominee and trump were not the front runner I'd be abstaining from the election entirely.

@ Doug: (I didn't want to call you 0) What gets me is the self fulfilling prophecy that "Sanders can't win" so people should vote for Clinton, does anyone really expect me to believe that Clinton supporters would vote for Trump or Cruz over Sanders?

Of course its also likely that Sanders supporters will vote for Clinton, but who would you rather have in the White House?

@20.. she's fucking TWEETING ?...

Next question: What did the First Lady of Arkansas and her husband say and do during the same decade? When?

The details of Nancy Reagan's death are actually really sad...

She and Phyllis Schlafly were scissoring, and when the moth balls mixed with the Pine-Sol, it created an even more noxious cloud.

"Hillary Clinton needs to walk this back immediately or she risks losing the votes of millions of queer Americans who survived the plague years."
May be the tipping point indeed.
First time I've heard Ronnie talk about AIDS was after failing to kill Qaddafi in early 1986. Our beloved folksy American hero said something like, "Maybe we should send him to San Francisco instead."

@24 Gotta connect with the youth, I guess.

Hillary Clinton...working hard to make sure Donald Trump is our next President!

Now we know what her Sister Souljah moment is going to be about. She jumped the gun a little bit, though...

Annual AIDS related funding was $44 million when he (Reagan) took office and was $1.6 billion in 1988 (when he left), an increase of over 1000 percent. In 1985, Reagan called for a massive government research project into the disease. Reagan got the message, and then did something about it. Reagan literally ordered the US Government to spend over a billion dollars on research, and that research has HELPED people with AIDS. The idea that people are dying from AIDS right now, in 2016, because of Ronald Reagan (as this author suggests), is just silly. Somehow, I don't think this author will ever be reporting what I just wrote. The intellectual dishonesty of the assertions in this article are profound. Run of the mill for this author, though. The author's writing style is crass and unprofessional (at best).

@26) Is that what happened? I thought it was something more mundane like how she finally ran out of demon blood.

@26) Is that what happened? I thought it was something more mundane like she finally ran out of demon blood.

@32, 33) Jinx!

@32-33

WHen you run out of demon's blood, you simply move to the Devil’s chowder (aka Satan's smegma.)

@31--and what did he say in years 1981-1985, when presidential leadership would have helped designator the disease, and given hope to thousands? I will now quote him, verbatim: " ."

Destigmatize--not designator. Dann auto correct!

@31: Nice cut-and-paste. Your entire post is bullshit. Hell, the funding increase you state is over 3500 percent, so if you're going to lie, you might as well lie in your favor!

@31. Reagan had to finally do something. And my fading memory tells me, and I'm not an American, Reagan did fuck all for a long time to help his fellow Americans, who were going down with a mystery illness. Maybe by the end of his tenure he finally moved, after a lot of noise and pressure from the public.
Fuck off with your unprofessional put downs. Dan Savage is rightly admired and loved by many, many people.

She may be the next Bush 2 on the Dems side. Did she Misremember the 80's? Are people misunderestimating her is some way???

Craven politics from a Clinton? Shocking!!

So, what is life going to be like under President Donald Trump?

This was a huge and inexcusable fuckup. But Ms. Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian, has found the silver lining:

"Hillary Clinton praising Nancy Reagan AIDS advocacy has everyone talking about what a bad person Nancy was on her funeral day! Well played!"

https://mobile.twitter.com/BettyBowers/s…

@31

"In 1985, Reagan called for a massive government research project into the disease."

Yeah - $12 million for a disease with 12,500 dead and 250,000 known infected. That's $45 per person. Thanks, Reagan.

"... [research funding] was $1.6 billion in 1988 (when he left), an increase of over 1000 percent. ... Reagan literally ordered the US Government to spend over a billion dollars on research."

Uhhhh, no. ACT-UP likely had far more to do with it than Reagan.

The AIDS amendments of 1988, better known as the Health Omnibus Programs Extension (HOPE) Act of 1988 was introduced in the Senate as S. 2889 by Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) on October 13, 1988. It also established the National Commission on AIDS.

As required by statute, the commission released its first major report called "America Living with AIDS" on September 26, 1991 (under Bush - when people call George C- Bush "the idiot son of an asshole," this is that asshole's (aka Babs) husband) . Its overall assessment said:

"Our nation's leaders have not done well. In the past decade, the White House has rarely broken its silence on the topic of AIDS. Congress has shown leadership in developing critical legislation, but has often failed to provide adequate funding for AIDS programs. Articulate leadership guiding Americans toward a proper response to AIDS has been notably absent."

This is honestly the most baffling unnecessary gaffe of her campaign. I can't even imagine what motivated her to make a statement at all, let alone one so absurdly untrue.

At about 17:30 EST, on FB, Hillary Clinton admitted her error:

"While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease, I misspoke about their record on HIV and AIDS. For that, I'm sorry."

The very idea that the Reagans did absolutely anything for HIV/AIDS would be laughable if their legacy weren't so tragic. Having lived through the whole thing as a young adult, I can't believe that Hillary Clinton would be so dumb as to say that. What was she thinking?

If one has to say something nice about some awful person who is dead, stick to generalities. Although I don't know what you can say about her that was nice. Even her china was ugly, and that creepy official portrait of her makes her look like a thermometer that is boiling over.

(Although Clinton does make a good point about Nancy Reagan and Alzheimer research. in her walk-back. But isn't it funny how Republicans only become advocates for something after it impacts them? I'm sure that before Ronnie got diagnosed they thought that it was something that only happened to "those people")

And yes, MiscKitty, Mrs. Bowers is spot-on on that one. I'm glad it came up on this day we're all supposed to be "mourning" someone who really was a dreadful person.

Oh Bernie. With one small change, you could have gotten it right. You just needed to end the memorial w/ something like: "Nancy Reagan had a good heart some small bit of goodness within her blackened and twisted heart, and will be dearly missed."

@46: All the Republicans who came around to gay marriage and other gay rights after their kids came out to them make me kind of ill. "Oh, gay people ARE people! Huh! I had no idea!"

Side note: I had some Mormons over the other night, after I called out their church on their "atrocious human rights record", one of them mentioned that he thought gay marriage was genetic suicide. I was probably too polite in response.

Ergh my post had a strikethrough over 'a good heart' which showed up in the preview but apparently got pulled from the post.

Hillary realized what a shitstorm she stirred up and has now apologized:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post…

@ 51 no..no, i want to know the how and why of this. a ' what the fuck was i thinking ?' is a start.' i was wrong ' doesn't explain this unnecessary lie. this lie calls for an explanation.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/…

Select quote:
[Dr. Marcus Conant's] first bird’s-eye view was a 1983 meeting about the Aids epidemic in Washington DC, with the White House liaison for medical care. Conant and his colleagues “were going on and on about how this was a disease, an infectious disease”, he recalled. Reagan’s representative wasn’t buying it.

“Her response was [that] this was a legal problem, not a medical problem,” Conant said. Simply because of who gay men with Aids were and who their sexual partners were, she told him, “these people were breaking the law”.

She has apologized, she made a mistake, move on. I really hope we don't condemn people this fast and this hard all the time...sad how quickly we jump on her. Or anyone for that matter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MudnsExy…

People keep asking how she could make this mistake, my response: It's called balancing encyclopedic volumes of information in your brain across every possible category of human knowledge while speaking eloquently about it. None of us could do better.

Dan, this post of yours is indicative of that.

I think it's a helluva lot more important that we don't jump right on her back and proclaim her statements in such absolutely terms, not recognizing that we make mistakes, that forgiveness is one of the most important things we can offer each other, and that by god, we are more than just the sum of one single moment, one single gaffe, or one single missed opportunity.

We owe each other this type of compassion, which Dan, given her support of LGBT, I'd expect you to be a little bit more willing to give before you write another salacious blog post.

You training for the priesthood or similar, raindrop?
Bless me Father, for I have sinned by remembering a time in our cultural history when a plague visited the earth. And nobody in charge much cared.

y'all are commenting on what Ronnie did about AIDS: fuck all until he was forced to.

but what did Nancy do? I honestly don't remember anything; comments, actions, anything. did she convince Ronnie to finally act because it was hurting his polls? I guess that's something.

Seems, like with Trump, there is nothing Clinton can do that her "faithful" won't forgive her for...
This is the danger of forming an opinion of who you want to be your president a decade early; then ignoring her actions ever since.

So nice of The Stranger's editorial staff to notice Clinton's duplicity. Y'all gonna stop shilling for her now?

It seems like in that audio you posted, it's members of the press at the time who were laughing at prospect of "gay plague." From the way you set it up, I was expecting the laughter to come from officials at a cabinet meeting or something. You can't really hold the Reagan Administration responsible for the reaction of the media, however disturbing or inappropriate it was.

@24: http://i.imgur.com/VAeA885.jpg

Ask and ye shall receive:

After swift backlash from LGBT activists, the Democratic frontrunner apologizes for saying Ronald and Nancy Reagan ‘started a national conversation’
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/…

Of course, this whole AIDs brouhaha changes nothing for me. I've known for some time that what Hillary says bears no relation whatsoever to what Hillary might believe or what she might do if elected. In view of her husband's record as governor and President, and her own record as Wal-Mart director, First Lady, senator, and Secretary of State, large contributions to her campaign and allied Super PACs, large gifts to the Clinton Foundation, and large speaking fees to her and Bill personally strike me as the most reliable indicators of her true intentions. She could go on national TV and swear she was in favor of free education, free healthcare, free housing, free food, free pot, free electric bicycles, free public transportation, world peace, an end to poverty, free LGBTQA polyamorous open marriage, and a free pony for every child, and I'd still peg her as yet another agent for Wall Street, Big Health, Big Oil, and the Military-Industrial Complex.

"...she was an outspoken advocate for stem-cell research to find a cure for Alzheimer’s."

So, as per usual, a conservative is only capable of empathy when it affects them personally. Otherwise she might have been an advocate of stem-cell research in general, given how many advancements they might unlock.

“Marching in Gucci Memoirs of a Well-Dressed Activist.” BY FORMER ACT-UP NY MEMBER A multimedia solo performance premiering March 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20,

in Seattle and as part of Gay City Arts. At times funny, biting, and somber, Marching in Gucci chronicles my coming-of-age as a black gay AIDS activist in the nineties in New York City. While exploring the paradoxical relationship between fighting to save lives of the unknown while simultaneously engaging in multiple self-harming behaviors.

https://www.strangertickets.com/events/3…

The Hillary didn't mean what she said is just as much bullshit as those who say Trump doesn't mean the shit he says.

Saying what you don't mean is a fucking sign of mental illness.

I will vote for the Democratic nominee in the general election. The lesser of two evils is still less evil, and even with this baffling, inexplicable fuckup Clinton is a far better choice than anything under the GOP banner. But damned if I'm not voting for Sanders in the primary.

Also: that update quoting Bernie's obligatory banal platitudes re: the late Nancy Reagan as if they're worth mentioning in comparison to HRC's remarks today was just bizarre. Including it implies some kind of equivalence.

Still trying to figure out what the hell Clinton was thinking.

@63 "So, as per usual, a conservative is only capable of empathy when it affects them personally."

I dare say that it sounds a little similar to someone noticing that Clinton is an opportunist only when she plays with historical facts concerning their gender ID, race, etc

I wonder how she made the mistake. Maybe she confused George W. Bush with Reagan. That sounds crazy, but think about it. If someone told you George W. Bush was dead, your first thought would be respectful sadness (sorrow for the family) but you would soon have a very hard time coming up with anything positive to say about the person. In the case of Bush, after some thought (or digging) you would mention his work on Aids in Africa. If Reagan (or in this case, his wife) died this week, you would probably go through a very similar thought process. I really have trouble thinking of anything positive Ronald Reagan did (although I'm sure there is something).

Just to be clear, I'm going to vote for her, as I think she has the best chance to beat the Republican nominee, and in general believe she will be a fine, upstanding, liberal President. But if she makes this kind of fuck up, I wonder if she is losing it. Or, more likely, she just needs better fact checkers. Either way it is not a good sign (if her staff can't stop her from saying stupid things, then she will say them, and get very little done).

@46 - this is another example of why I think you're wonderful. (From the guy who said "I love you like the Australians love the royal family" awhile back, with regards from today's 2 glasses of red wine on an empty stomach after work)

Yes they sat in the White House silently….but the only silence was when this topic came up. Other wise they were loudmouths who thought they were living out "Dynasty," wearing evening formal wear to breakfast. I still get so angry about those years. They were horrible.

@69. We don't love the Royal Family!
Better get another line to show your loving.
I love you like the Australians love their Friday Night Football..

Dan, why are you letting yourself get sucked in by the Republicons? Surely you know as anyone else should that she had been talking about the one good thing Nancy Reagan did with respect to stem cell research. Can you imagine how exhausted she is after the decades of lies thrown at her and the b.s. phony moral superiority of Bernie Sanders, and to try and find something nice to say about a former First Lady only to misspeak? You and the others who are going batshit crazy about this need to take a few steps back to rationality.

Looks like you haven't always been compassionate about HIV/AIDS, either...

http://www.jiveinthe415.com/2014/07/dan-…

@31, you say" Annual AIDS related funding was $44 million when he (Reagan) took office " Reagan took office in January 1981. There was no funding then because AIDS was completely unknown. That's a pretty egregious error, and makes me doubt the rest of your post.

I'm real glad to have caught your article, Dan. As a brand spanking new 18 year old freshly out in 1982 boy in NYC I had a front row seat to witness my friends and acquaintances dropping like flies. She certainly did tear open an old wound with her careless words; not only was it an epic gaffe, her chance at winning the nomination is compromised. And that, just might be for the better of everyone.

@SteveXS, I don't think you need to be telling anyone how to feel, brother. I was there, standing there, in Greenwich Village, in the clubs and in the bars wondering why all of a sudden my friends were going missing; there, watching it all happen. I am beyond outraged at this gaffe; I'm glad to have found this article this evening; it's sort of a comfort to know that I am not alone in my experience with Clinton's words. May Nancy Reagan rest with all the peace she inspired. They were dreadful.

I remember the aids crisis as a elementary school girl. I remember the marches and the quilt and the fear but it was very remote to me.

I am sorry Clinton did this. I am deeply sorry for the old wounds she has reopened. I am sorry that "walking it back" as she tried to do didn't take away the pain she caused. I readily admit I was not on the front lines of this so can't really put myself in the shoes of those who watched their friends die, back turned by a cruel nation.

But unless you want to go back there, we have to put a Democrat in the whitehouse. Or else another Scalia will be there - with an entirely republican congress, whitehouse, and judiciary, and with many of the states in republican hands, we will find ourselves turned back to Reagan's era. Never again.

She shouldn't have your vote even if she walks this back.

She is a political opportunist who is perfectly content to sidle up to repressive governments that are terrible for gay people when it serves her aims. There's only one candidate in this election who is the ethical choice for humanists, and it's not the pandering Kissinger acolyte.

Hey, wait a minute: I thought the Stranger writers were too intellectually superior to consider anything else but a Clinton nomination. Sanders is just a big joke, right, for all you smart people. I mean, *you're* not going to vote for him, so jokes about people who will vote for him, or his campaign, or the possibility of him getting the nomination are fair game.

I get it, Dan, you and your staff are still clutching your pearls over Nader, despite the fact that Sanders has been working constantly in DC for progressive policies his entire career and Nader, to put it mildly, was not. But every time you and your staff write something snide about Sanders, have that laugh track from Larry Speakes play in response, because that's who you sound like.

I guess no one will offer what to me is an obvious, and the only possible, explanation for Hillary’s distorted memory of Nancy's and her husband’s deliberate absence in dealing with the AIDS crisis: — She never really left her conservative world view behind. Memory is a tricky thing; we remember things based on the way we experience events, from our frame of reference. A person could only remember what happened in the 1980s vis-a-vis the AIDS crisis in this way UNLESS, at the time of the events, they had a conservative mindset. Only a conservative might remember Nancy as courageous for addressing the crisis at all, while forgetting the five years of silence, the mockery within the White House and the way she ignored pleas from her best friend Rock Hudson who was dying at the time, because he got the disease early on. I guess to a conservative, for a conservative to address the epidemic at all was "heroic." That’s the way Hillary apparently remembers it. Any progressive or mainstream liberal for that matter, could only remember it as it actually happened: Deliberate silence and indifference until the chorus of death and anger got so loud no President, not even the monster Reagan could ignore it. That’s what actually happened; Hillary doesn't remember it that way because she apparently views the world through a conservative lens. There is no other explanation that makes any sense.

This "memory lapse" does help explain a few things about Hillary and the Clintons. It places in stark relief her position on DOMA and her coming so late to the table on LGBT rights and gay marriage. More imporantly, it may offer insight into why the Clintons were so willing to move the Democratic Party to the right. At the time, they asserted the country had moved right so the Democratic Party had to move with it. This insight into Hillary's values illustrates that the "Third Way" move by the Clinton had far more to do with Hillary stands than where the country stood. And the loss of the majority of elective offices by the Democratic Party since the Clintons bears this out.

Oh, and by the way, as an aside, I think I have figured out how Gloria Steinem developed her views on how twenty-something women evolve their political leanings. She must have observed how Hillary Clinton moved from a supporter of Goldwater in 1964 and an attendee to the Republican Convention in 1968 when Nixon was nominated (Kissinger's President) to working for the liberal George McGovern in 1972. She fell in love with a liberal young man named Bill Clinton in 1970. Clearly, in her heart, Hillary has remained a “Goldwater Girl.”

Dan,

Can you, in good conscious, honestly give Hillary your endorsement? Please think about this.

No more liars.
No more chicken hawks.
Bernie Sanders / Tulsi Gabbard 2016.

You have a powerful tool at your disposal here, Dan:

Have The Stranger endorse Bernie in time for the Washington Caucuses on March 26th.

That's the way to make Hillary pay for this.

Ah Chicago. I remember hearing of the fallout from the Convention, forget the year. It was ugly and some deaths,I think.
Hope Bernie comes out against it continuing.
Cause it would become tit for tat.
Peaceful demonstrations against the rise of fascism.
Using violence is just being like them.

I find it instructive (and very Hillary) that her actual apology was contained in a image attachment, and not the tweet itself.

@86, pansack. Too true. I've been reading a collection of gay short stories published in the early 90's. Fiction.
Some of the stories are by men who were witnesses to that time in the 80's.
Truly a tragic tragic time. I was many degrees removed, yet when I think of that time, my heart starts to beat faster.
What I feel those men taught all of us, was about deep love and compassion. After we all saw how the gay community looked after their own, I think it humbled many of us. Brave, strong and loving men. Many women were also part of the supports and love and care when those boys got sick and died.

I like Bernie but I live in a red state. If he gets the nomination, I will vote for him. But he is a socialist and he isn't carrying southern minorities. That voting group is instrumental in putting a Democrat in the Whitehouse. Those minorities are what makes Virginia purple. My brother lamented when they stayed home during the mid terms because Obama wasn't on the ticket.

Here is what I over heard in a doctor's office:

"That Bernie is a socialist." - a dad.
"What's that?" - his 18 year old daughter.
"A communist."

No, words have meaning and a socialist is not a communist, but that is how he's viewed.

I think Bernie is a man of ethics, a man of principles while hillary is a politician. But show me how he wins in a national election.

That said, I love Tulsi. She is amazing.

Hillary Clinton, full of shit? Who could have known? What a shocker!

If liberals want a liberal, why not vote for the one who is running, instead of the conservative war hawk running against him for the nomination? Seems an easy choice; one has actual liberal values, and one pretends they do whenever it is convenient.

Also funny to not see any of the "you have to vote for Hillary because she is a woman" commenters on this post. Shocking.

@86. That is my impression as well. My first introduction to the concept of homosexuality was through the AIDS epidemic news stories. This was later 80s. At that point, most media portrayed the gay community with compassion. While I grew up in rural area and did not know any out individuals, I was inoculated against the faith based hate.

Maybe Dan needs to get his emotions into check. Just because the President did not talk about it , doesn't mean nothing was being done. Money was always already being allocated to research on the disease. The reason, " What this might do if it got into our military". In the 90's we came up with AZT, but it had terrible side effects, later with the advancement of new drugs we now have treatment options that make AIDS no longer a death sentence but a manageable disease. I wish some of my friends had this option in the late 80's and 90's. But instead of throwing blame on the Reagan's, lets be honest and throw the blame where it really belongs..on the gay community. This is not a disease that is caught by air, water, saliva, casual contact, like other major diseases that we see today, this is a disease that is only brought upon oneself by either sharing dirty needles, or having unprotected sex. For over 25 years we have spent billions on education and research and people still go out and have unprotected sex, and the worse crime, the brag, they admit, and they enjoy and advocate it. There are gay clubs,magazines and film companies that promote bare-backing, How are we ever going to put an end to this when we have our community promoting this crap. When do we take responsibility for our own actions, instead of throwing the blame onto others. Let the Lady rest in peace, our your forgetting if it wasn't for her friend that died from the disease the administration would never had acknowledged it to the american public on TV..

Hey Frank, I guess all those hemophiliacs and people that contracted through the blood supply had it coming. All those unsuspecting monogamous partners, kids born to infected mothers, and victims of sexual assault got what they had coming too. And, while were at it, I guess it was wrong of the courts to strike down most of our sex laws, like Georgia's law against fornication which came down in 2003. The punishment for fornication should be death, a slow, painful, wasting death. And while you're dying, expect your government to make jokes at your expense.

@93 .. you mean that friend of hers who died after he asked for direct help from her and didn't get it ?
that friend ?

@93 is like Seattleblues-lite.

Shit, Dan. Thank you for this. I hope things aren't too virulent at home.

@90 despite the media black-out and misinformation on all sides about Bernie Sanders, it's possible that he will win the Democratic nomination. the younger people and net-savvy citizens aren't paying attention to the mainstream media but rather organizing and creating a movement the likes of which we haven't seen since Civil Rights days. I'm sure it goes without saying, but Bernie never needed to 'evolve' on gay rights - was advocating for equality since the '80s and voted against DOMA, unlike Hillary. the 'socialist' thing doesn't hold water with the MIllennials, who consider 'capitalist' a bad word - don't worry about the old, conservative guard in this country. I think staying with principles rather than the bad, lying deal that is the Clinton machine will bring real light, and real progress in our country.
oh, and Dan Savage is an angel. (just had to say that.) =)

Most of the people dying in 85' got it between 75 and 80 so why not blame Jimmy carter for not outlawing disco and closing down bath houses?

@100 Dancing and meeting in bath houses is a lot older than Carter will ever be. What matters, obviously, is the lack of timely response to a humanitarian crisis during the Reagan years. I mean beside the ever present pandering to haters and xenophobes that conservatives do so well.

Will Clinton apologize to Hondurans? Hillary Clinton's Response To Honduran Coup Was Scrubbed From Her Paperback Memoirs

@89 pansack; the book is called,
The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories.
Editors; David Leavitt & Mark Mitchell.
1994.
There are only a couple that I've read that are AIDS related.
It includes stories by E.M. Forster. Christopher Isherwood. Edmund White
and many others.

DarkHorse@90; yes. I looked up Tulsi after someone upthread mentioned her name. She does look amazing.

So... where does RESPONSIBILITY enter this conversation??? It took over 92 comments but thank you @93, though I think there is a lot of room after 'the gay community' for many others who acted irresponsibly. And @94, you are almost right - not ALL of the people you mention would have been spared but a vast majority would still be alive had the idea of responsibility entered the minds of those practicing unsafe sex and/or intravenous drugs.

I believe one thing is fairly certain though, ALL of Dan's friends and lovers would still be here if they had done one simple thing - worn a condom. Maybe he could have mentioned that in his diatribe. I also take from his 'lovely guys' comment that he is blessed none of his female friends died of AIDS or he would have mentioned them as well.

I'm not trying to be dispassionate, but I hate a hypocrite on a soapbox criticizing another hypocrite on a soapbox as he/she rails against other hypocrites on soapboxes...

That was a pretty dumb thing to say, but thank God we've moved on.

Shades of Mr Bush pere not recognizing a scanner in a grocery store.

@103 madcaver; Many diseases people develop are a result of those people's behaviour, lung cancer from smoking, different cancers from bad food habits, etc. These diseases, though cause and effect is talked of, where is the same moral tone?
AIDS was riddled with moral judgement, fear and inaction for fucking years.

I sure hope you don't call yourself a Christian@107.

Welcome back, Dan! Hillary has been telling offensive lies like this the whole time... this one woke you up.

Consider supporting Bernie. If he loses the nomination, you can still hold your nose and vote for Hillary as a least-worst candidate for president. But stop this "I support both candidates equally!" nonsense.

To help you think about this, here's what Bernie was up to in the 80's during the AIDS crisis. http://www.sevendaysvt.com/OffMessage/ar…

Uh oh... did I miss the part of the article mentioning cancer or just post in the wrong comments section again? My apologies, I certainly didn't mean to insinuate condoms would save anyone from lung cancer, diabetes or any malady other than what the writer was railing about. RESPONSIBILITY would though...

How about @110 & 111, do a little history reading, before you open your ignorant mouths. @111. You have comprehension problems?