The Reagan Years: When Aids Was Funny

Watch this on The Scene.

One of the most prominent stains on the reputation of the much-mythologized Reagan administration was its response, or lack of response, to the AIDS crisis as it began to ravage American cities in the early and mid-1980s. President Reagan famously (though, not famously enough) didn’t himself publicly mention AIDS until 1985, when more than 5,000 people, most of them gay men, had already been killed by the disease. Filmmaker Scott Calonico’s new documentary short, When AIDS Was Funny, exclusively debuting on VF.com, shows how the Reagan administration reacted to the mounting problem in chilling fashion. Not even Reagan’s appointed mouthpiece, notorious press secretary Larry Speakes, had much to say about the crisis beyond derisive laughter.

Using never-before-heard audio tapes from three separate press conferences, in 1982, 1983, and 1984, When AIDS Was Funny illustrates how the reporter Lester Kinsolving, a conservative (and not at all gay-friendly) fixture in the White House press corps, was consistently scoffed at when he posed urgent questions about the AIDS epidemic...

What Calonico has compiled, juxtaposing the deeply troubling audio with images of AIDS patients at Seattle’s Bailey-Boushay House in the 1990s, is an infuriating summation of the Reagan administration’s fatal inaction in confronting a generation-defining tragedy... 

Vanity Fair.

Keith Haring: The Political Line

Andy Mouse, 1985.

“Haring understood that art was for everybody—he fought for the individual and against dictatorship, racism and capitalism. He was no utopian, but he had a dream that ‘nothing is an end, because it always can be the basis for something new and different.’” – Dieter Buchhart, guest exhibition curator

The Political Line will feature more than 130 works of art including large scale paintings (on tarpaulins and canvases), sculptures and a number of the artist’s subway drawings, among other works. The exhibition will create a narrative that explores the artist’s responses to nuclear disarmament, racial inequality, the excesses of capitalism, environmental degradation and others issues of deep personal concern to the artist. Learn more.

Please note that the exhibition contains certain artworks that are adult in nature; images included on this site may be violent, sexual, and/or political in content.

This exhibition opens on Saturday at San Francisco's de Young Museum of Fine Arts - if you're passing.

If not, there's plenty to see and read - and, sadly, fittingly with the commercial whoring of Haring, buy - on their website.

A prophetic Reagan: Ready To Kill, 1980.

Update: Guardian review of the show.

Ronald Reagan: Fingered After Death

'A pair of gay rights activists who were invited to the White House for a first-ever gay pride event last Friday stirred a controversy after being photographed giving President Ronald Reagan’s official portrait the middle finger.
'The guests, among them Philadelphia activists Matthew Hart, Zoe Strauss and Mark Segal, traveled to Washington, DC, on President Barack Obama’s invitation to observe Gay Pride Month.
'The event also came on the heels of Obama's recent declaration of support for same-sex marriage...'

Daily Mail. 

The bastards!!!

• The Mail finally let on the reason for the ad hoc protest in their last paragraph with a recycled quote from Matthew Hart (above, left); "Ronald Reagan has blood on his hands. The man was in the White House as AIDS exploded, and he was happy to see plenty of gay men and queer people die. He was a murderous fool, and I have no problem saying so. Don’t invite me back. I don’t care."
For more see Reagan's Aids Legacy: Silence Equals Death.