I carried one of those pink and black "SILENCE = DEATH" posters at a march in D.C. to protest Reagan's absolute refusal to speak of the AIDS crisis, let alone do anything about it.
My father, a Navy veteran, had recently died of cancer in a VA hospital. In catching up with an old high school friend of mine who I ran into months after his funeral, I found out that she had been working as a nurse at that same hospital. She had pulled blood for my father and dealt with his charts.
She told me with heavy heart how my father also had HIV, but she was forced by higher-ups to remove any HIV references from the bloodwork records because of Reagan's edict to not acknowledge the crisis.
Thus, the doctors only treated him for cancer. Inevitably, it was the radiation that killed him because of his suppressed immune system and it happened very quickly, within a few weeks of being zapped.
By the time I had run into my friend, she had gotten a job at a private hospital, leaving the VA because she just couldn't take the lines they were being forced to cross back then.
To this day, whenever someone mentions Reagan, my first thought is, "That son-of-a-bitch killed my dad."
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