We Are Greater Than AIDS

Philanthropist (and famous husband!) David Furnish reflects on three decades of life around the world with HIV/AIDS.

By David Furnish

This year marks 30 years since the discovery of the first case of what was later identified as AIDS. With that news, our lives and relationships as gay men were forever altered. We witnessed an unthinkable tragedy that has taken the lives of more than a quarter million of our gay and bisexual friends and lovers.

In the face of this devastation leaders emerged. The crisis helped to shape our community's political agenda, and it provided a platform around which gay leaders could advocate for rights and equality. We realized that if we informed ourselves and acted on what we learned, we could be greater than the disease. Thanks to the efforts of gay men and our allies, our community saw a dramatic decline in new infections by the late 1980s.

Many of us can look back with immense pride at the collective response in those early years. The availability of effective combination drug therapies in 1996 fundamentally changed how we thought about HIV. No longer was HIV the death sentence it had once been. We had new hope. For many, HIV was a manageable chronic disease. Many of us turned our attention to marriage equality, adoption rights, the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and other pressing issues facing our community. While we broadened our focus, AIDS did not.

When we become complacent, HIV thrives. New HIV infections among gay and bisexual men in the United States are on the rise. Yes, on the rise. We are the only risk group for whom this is the case. According to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in five of us – that is gay and bisexual men – in some of the largest U.S. cities today are living with HIV – and half of those who are positive do not know it. Unless we act now, we will see these numbers rise even higher, and quickly.

My partner, Sir Elton John, often talks of his friend Ryan White – a boy whose tremendous courage in the face of AIDS forced our leaders to take action and inspired many of us. Today, Ryan's story continues to remind us that just as HIV began one person at a time, it will end one person a time.

Elton and I recently had a baby boy. Becoming fathers has given us new perspective on what it means to take care of one another – as parents, as partners, and as members of a community. And, it reminds us that we cannot be complacent in helping to create the kind of society in which we want our son to grow up. In short, we must take responsibility and each do our part to create a future free of HIV – by being informed, using protection, getting tested and treated, and getting involved.

And so, as we mark 30 years of this disease, Elton and I have recommitted ourselves to being greater than AIDS. As chairman of the Elton John AIDS Foundation, I'm proud of the community organizations with which we are working to fight stigma and prevent the spread of the disease. And, I'm proud that leading LGBT companies, like Here Media, Logo TV, and the Bay Area Reporter, are refocusing attention on this epidemic, and I hope more will join us.

As a community, we once showed that we could be greater than AIDS. Now is our time to do it again. Visit GreaterThan.org to get started.


David Furnish is chairman of the Elton John AIDS Foundation. The Elton John AIDS Foundation is a supporting partner of Greater Than AIDS, a national movement organized in response to AIDS in America with a focus on the most affected communities.


ORIGINAL SOURCE

Why Ronald Reagan’s legacy should be vilified, not sanctified

By Brody Levesque

1987: 41,027 persons are dead and 71,176 persons diagnosed with AIDS in the U.S.

After years of negligent silence, President Ronald Reagan finally uses the word “AIDS” in public.

He sided with his Education Secretary William Bennett and other conservatives who said the Government should not provide sex education information. (They are still saying it!)

On April 2, 1987, Reagan said: “How that information is used must be up to schools and parents, not government. But let’s be honest with ourselves, AIDS information can not be what some call ‘value neutral.’ After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons.”

Today would have been Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday.

The American ultra right and Christian conservatives, along with nearly all of the GOP are singing his praises, and in the case of the politico’s, either trying to emulate the “Gipper” or at least live in the long shadow of his career and life’s accomplishments.

I’m not, and not just because I’m Canadian.

No, I think that Reagan was despicable on numerous social issues that have left a legacy of hatred, disdain, and hypocrisy on anyone who was not lily white, christian, and upper middle class to wealthy. In particular, nearly everyday as I hear more vilification being heaped on the LGBTQ community, I deem that the true legacy of Ronald Reagan.

Frankly? I have zero sympathy for the suffering he endured at the end of his life with Alzheimer’s disease as I see that as “biblical” amends for the suffering he caused towards tens of thousands of his fellow Americans who suffered from AIDS — most dying — and the legacy he left that allows so-called christian organizations like Focus On The Family, Family Research Council, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, and the American Family Association, to name a few, who parade never ending streams of hate towards gay persons and hold Reagan up as their shining example of a good and decent American president.

In a word? Bullshit. As events proved last fall in this country with American teens taking their lives, words from these Reaganesque organizations are deadly. I’ll even take that one step further — it spread overseas to Uganda where hate of gay and lesbians is codified, and thanks to American Evangelicals, led to the death of LGBTQ equality rights activist David Kato.

Let’s review shall we?

LGBT Rights

No civil rights legislation for LGBT individuals passed during Reagan’s tenure. On the 1980 campaign trail, he spoke of the gay civil rights movement:

“My criticism is that [the gay movement] isn’t just asking for civil rights; it’s asking for recognition and acceptance of an alternative lifestyle which I do not believe society can condone, nor can I.”

Civil Rights

Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Reagan gave a States’ Rights speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964, when running for president in 1980 (many politicians had spoken at that annual Fair, however). Reagan was offended that some accused him of racism.

In 1980 Reagan said the Voting Rights Act was “humiliating to the South”, although he later supported extending the Act.

He opposed Fair Housing legislation in California (the Rumford Fair Housing Act), but in 1988 signed a law expanding the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Reagan was unsuccessful in trying to veto another civil rights bill in March of the same year.

At first Reagan opposed the Martin Luther King holiday, and signed it only after an overwhelming veto-proof majority (338 to 90 in the House of Representatives and 78 to 22 in the Senate) voted in favor of it.

Congress overrode Reagan’s veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988. Reagan said the Restoration Act would impose too many regulations on churches, the private sector and state and local governments.

Response to AIDS

Perhaps the greatest criticism surrounds Reagan’s silence about the AIDS epidemic spreading in the 1980s. Although AIDS was first identified in 1981, Reagan did not mention it publicly for several more years, notably during a press conference in 1985 and several speeches in 1987. During the press conference in 1985, Reagan expressed skepticism in allowing children with AIDS to continue in school, stating:

It is true that some medical sources had said that [HIV] cannot be communicated in any way other than the ones we already know and which would not involve a child being in the school. And yet medicine has not come forth unequivocally and said, ‘This we know for a fact, that it is safe.’ And until they do, I think we just have to do the best we can with this problem.

The CDC had previously issued a report stating that “casual person-to-person contact as would occur among schoolchildren appears to pose no risk.” During his 1987 speeches Reagan supported modest educational funding on AIDS, increased AIDS testing for marriage licenses and mandatory testing for high risk groups.

Even with the death from AIDS of his friend Rock Hudson, Reagan was widely criticized[citation needed] for not supporting more active measures to contain the spread of AIDS. Until celebrity Elizabeth Taylor spoke out publicly about the monumental amount of people quickly dying from this new disease, most public officials and celebrities were too afraid of dealing with this subject.

Possibly in deference to the views of the powerful religious right,[citation needed] which saw AIDS as a disease limited to the gay male community and spread by “immoral” behavior, Reagan prevented his Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, from speaking out about the epidemic.

When, in 1986, Reagan was highly encouraged by many other public officials to authorize Koop to issue a report on the epidemic, he expected it to be in line with conservative policies; instead, Koop’s Surgeon General’s Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome greatly emphasized the importance of a comprehensive AIDS education strategy, including widespread distribution of condoms, and rejected mandatory testing. This approach brought Koop into conflict with other administration officials such as Education Secretary William Bennett.

Social action groups such as ACT UP worked to raise awareness of the AIDS problem. Because of ACT UP, in 1987, Reagan responded by appointing the Watkins Commission on AIDS, which was succeeded by a permanent advisory council.

The Failure to Act: The Reagan Administration’s Deliberate Failure to Address the Aids Epidemic — watch:



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Kramer: AIDS was Allowed to Happen

By Advocate.com Editors

"AIDS was allowed to happen," writes Larry Kramer in an article for CNN that lists "10 Realities About AIDS" the activist says he has learned the hard way. "[AIDS] is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning."

In his intro, Kramer writes, "I want this article to break your heart. But it deals with a subject that has had a tough time of it in the break-everyone's-heart department. I'll bet that a number of you will be more angry at me than sympathetic by the time you finish reading it. If indeed you finish reading it.

From its very beginning, most people have not wanted to know the truths about AIDS. This is an indisputable fact that continues until this very minute. I have been on the front lines since Day 1, so I know what I'm talking about."

"Too many people hate the people that AIDS most affects, gay people and people of color" Kramer says. "I do not mean dislike, or feel uncomfortable with. I mean hate. Downright hate. Down and dirty hate."

He also calls AIDS "a plague that is not going to go away. It is only going to get worse."

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