As the nation mourns the former first lady’s death, those on the frontline of the 1980s Aids crisis remember something else: a couple who turned a blind eye

The first lady who looked away: Nancy and the Reagans' troubling Aids legacy

Between Nancy Reagan’s death and her funeral on Friday 11 March, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence reached out in their own wimpled way to share their pain, their anger and, occasionally, their sympathy.

The activists, in trademark Catholic drag, spent the Aids crisis fighting on behalf of infected friends and lovers – and for dying men they would never know. As much of the nation mourned the former first lady’s passing this week, their email anguish underscored the Reagan administration’s darker legacy.

Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, was president for nearly five years before he said the word “Aids” in public, nearly seven years before he gave a speech on a health crisis that would go on to kill more than 650,000 Americans and stigmatize even more.

In recent months, published reports have revealed an administration that laughed at the scourge and its victims and a first lady who turned her back on Rock Hudson, a close friend, when he reached out to the White House for help as he was dying from an Aids-related illness.

“If there is a hell both Ronny and Nancy are Roasting,” wrote one Sister.

Nancy Reagan, who died at 94, will be laid to rest beside her husband on Friday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in the Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley. Michelle Obama, Laura and George W Bush, Hillary Clinton and Rosalynn Carter are scheduled to attend the 11am ceremony, along with a list of Hollywood bold-face names including Anjelica Huston, Katie Couric, Wayne Newton and Mr T.

But as the Los Angeles area grieves the death of its famous resident – a woman lauded for her support of stem cell research and Alzheimer’s sufferers – the San Francisco Bay Area still seethes with memories of a terrible time made worse by what many consider the first couple’s calculated coldness.

That brand of homophobia lasted because Ronald and Nancy Reagan enabled it Kenneth Bunch

“Nancy and Ron Reagan were a functional team in the Presidency,” wrote Kenneth Bunch, aka Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch, one of the order’s co-founders. “They are both responsible for the death of thousands from HIV in the LGBT community due to their inaction in the 1980’s. So I understand the anger in the LGBT community toward Nancy. I feel that anger as well.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kenneth Bunch aka Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch, founding member of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, at his San Francisco apartment. Photograph: Ramin Talaie/The Guardian

The order’s core mission is community service, and its first fundraiser was a 1980 bash in support of refugees from Fidel Castro’s Mariel boatlift.

“Cuban refugee bingo was our first big event,” said Bunch. “After that, it was all Aids … we held the world’s first Aids benefit before the acronym was even invented.”

The early years of the Aids crisis – when the Reagans were silent and the White House spokesman, Larry Speakes, joked about the epidemic during regular briefings with reporters – were “what the plague in Europe must have felt like.

“We were terrorized,” he said. “Something was killing people. We’d see 25-year-old handsome young men waste down to where they looked 95. It was like the walking dead, and there was so much of it … We’d spent so much effort building the gay community, and we thought it all would disappear.”

Between 30 and 40 Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have died of complications from Aids since 1980, said Bunch, who is HIV positive. They are called Nuns of the Above.

“I don’t know how much of the Moral Majority stuff the Reagans believed,” Bunch said “but they didn’t fight it … That brand of homophobia lasted because Ronald and Nancy Reagan enabled it.”

Dr Marcus Conant got a closeup view of the Reagan administration’s beliefs about Aids and the gay community, not once, not twice, but three times. Conant, who is a clinical professor of dermatology emeritus at UC San Francisco, was one of the first physicians to diagnose and treat Aids.

His 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”.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Performing an ‘exorcism’ in Union Square San Francisco during the Democratic National Convention. Photograph: Courtesy of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

Incident number two was a meeting with Dr Edward N Brandt Jr, the Oklahoma physician who oversaw the first federal response to Aids as assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Virginia Apuzzo, who was executive director of the national gay and lesbian taskforce during the early days of the epidemic, arranged the meeting.

“[Brandt] said to us, and there were five or six of us there, ‘You are the first homosexuals I’ve ever met,” Conant recalled. “He was suggesting that the gay people in America were such a small minority that people in authority didn’t even run across them. That’s the mindset of the administration at the time.”

And then there was the letter from President Reagan.

Around 1987, Conant wrote to the president. By that time, about 21,000 people had died of the epidemic in the United States alone.

[Reagan] was doing exactly what his constituents wanted – look the other way – and he did it with great finesse Marcus Conant

This is more or less how Conant remembers his letter: “Dear President Reagan, I have all these patients and they are dying and no one’s doing anything. It is incumbent on your administration to direct the Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health to begin efforts to find the cause and treatment for this disease.”

Reagan wrote a letter back, Conant recounted: “It said, quote, ‘Nancy and I thank you for your support’.”



At the time, he said, he was furious. At so much death, so much wasted humanity, so much government foot dragging. But these days, he realizes that “Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States in more than just name.”

“He represented the view of the majority of the American people,” Conant said. “‘We’re going to look the other way.’ If you say to me, what do I think of Ronald Reagan? He was doing exactly what his constituents wanted him to do – look the other way – and he did it with great finesse.”

Dr Paul Volberding, an oncologist at UC San Francisco, saw his first Aids patient on 1 July 1981. Six months later, he and his colleagues opened up the first Aids clinic in the country.

His patients would come in, he said, strong and optimistic in those early days. “I’m going to beat this,” was the common refrain.

“They never did,” Volberding recalled. “This is the most fatal infectious disease ever seen. Without treatment, 98% die. More than Ebola. More than smallpox.”

He avoided most funerals during that time. He couldn’t bear it otherwise. There was so much death, he said, so much pain. The people dying were his age. Funerals were everywhere, he said, and he couldn’t have survived.

“At the end of the day,” Volberding said, “the president should have shown more leadership. We shouldn’t forget that … What we know now of Nancy and Ronald Reagan, as a couple everything was done in a collaborative way – including saying nothing about Aids.

“There is no question that they knew many people with Aids and were probably very close friends with them,” he continued. “I haven’t heard anyone say the Reagans were homophobic. But it was a political calculation. This wouldn’t sell to Republican voters.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marcus Conant, left, and Paul Volberding, pictured in 1981, were among the first doctors to diagnose and treat Aids patients. Photograph: UCSF

In 1990, Tom Ammiano won a seat on the San Francisco school board in what has been dubbed the “Lavender Sweep” of gay and lesbian elected officials. In 1994, he was re-elected, just days after his longtime partner died of complications from the Aids virus.

Tim Curbo and Ammiano, both school teachers, were together for a decade and a half before Curbo’s death. Ammiano, who won posts on the county board of supervisors and state assembly, can still call up images of Curbo standing in their kitchen and taking his initial dose of AZT. It was the first hoped-for Aids miracle drug, but it caused serious side-effects and fell into disfavor.

Attitudes at the time were as bad as the disease, Ammiano said: “They called it the gay cancer, that it was deserved because of the perversion involved.” That mindset hit the couple hard at a moment when they most needed support.

“When Tim got very, very ill, he said, ‘I’m not going to do this any more. I want to say goodbye to the students,’” Ammiano recalled. “He was a good Texas boy. He called this gay guy who was in charge of [school] programs. Tim said, ‘I want to tell my students. Do you have any tips?’ The asshole said, ‘You can’t do this.’ I still hold it against that guy. Tim went anyway, and it was very moving for everybody.”

Ammiano, who attended more than 100 funerals in the first 10 years of the epidemic, sees that mindset writ large in Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

“The response of the Reagan administration was very, very slow,” he said. “There’s a very bitter taste that won’t be forgotten.

‘‘All the sugar coating about her death and her funeral and her contributions, all that means nothing when you look at the price people are still paying.”