One of the blackest stains on former President Ronald Reagan's soiled legacy is his administration's years-long silence in the face of perhaps the greatest public health crisis of the late 20th century: HIV/AIDS.

The facts are well-known but bear repeating: many of Reagan's advisors -- along with the new religious right that got him elected -- believed that the disease was God's punishment for the gay community, so he and his administration ignored the problem, even as the scientific and medical communities begged for funding. The Surgeon General of the United States was frozen out of all AIDS-related discussions for the first five years of Reagan's administration.

President Reagan didn't personally address the issue of AIDS until May 31, 1987 -- more than six years into the epidemic and near the end of his second term as president. By the time Reagan finally got around to talking about it, AIDS had spread to 113 countries and almost 21,000 Americans had already died from it. Their blood, and the blood of thousands of others who died because of the administration's lack of funding for HIV/AIDS research, is on Ronald Reagan's hands.

But as Chris Geidner at BuzzFeed notes, for at least one Reagan administration official, AIDS wasn't something to be ignored, but rather something to be laughed at.

Details, after the jump.