From the photograph, former US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop looks like a cross between an Amish minister and some kindly old uncle. In reality he was a man who managed to get himself despised by both sides of the American political spectrum – although, thankfully, not at the same time.

When Ronald Reagan was elected as President in 1980 he wasted no time in filling his administration with people who held extreme Right-wing views. For example, his Director of Communications, Patrick J. Buchanan called AIDS, “nature’s revenge on gay men”. ‘Domestic Policy Advisor’ Gary Bauer was active in the Family Research Council – an organisation that claimed homosexuals wanted to “recognise paedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order”

But most of these were political lightweights when compared with Koop. He was fiercely anti-abortion, anti-women’s rights, anti-welfare (which he likened to Nazi ideology) and, of course, anti-gay rights. He was particularly active in his campaign against abortion; writing a number of books, producing five films then giving up his medical practice to travel around the USA on an anti-abortion crusade. He wasn’t exactly quiet on gay rights either; he defended anti-sodomy laws on the grounds that sodomy was “...repugnant to the moral sensitivity of the American people” and declared that gay rights encouraged “anti-family trends.”

He was Reagan’s dream candidate!

Unsurprisingly, not everyone was as keen to have him as Surgeon General and his confirmation hearing went on for eight months. This degree of opposition was unheard of at that time. Nonetheless, Koop survived it and was appointed in 1980.

And then AIDS came along. The Reagan administration’s response was characterised by silence and inaction. By May 1982 – with more than half of the two thousand reported AIDS cases dead – the Centers for Disease Control had spent less than $1 million on AIDS research. At the same time $9 million had been spent on Legionnaires Disease, which had caused less than 50 deaths.

Reagan himself used the word for the first time in 1985, and even then that was in response to a question at a Press conference. This was four years after the first AIDS diagnosis in the USA and at a time when there were now 15,948 cases. (There is a detailed study of the Reagan administration’s response to HIV/AIDS in my eBook Gay in the 80s, which can be downloaded here.)

But while the majority of the Reagan administration was using AIDS to make moral capital, Surgeon General Koop was actually looking at the facts. Reagan must have suspected something was up because he forbade Koop to talk to the media about AIDS. But then, in an unguarded moment, Reagan announced that he had asked Koop to prepare a report on AIDS.