But the desire to avoid an informed discussion went event further. In 1987, when he finally established a Presidential Commission on AIDS, he specifically excluded his own US Surgeon General C.Everett Koop and stacked it instead with those who supported his pro-family, anti-condom line, such as Catholic Cardinal John O’Connor.*

Koop had been appointed as US Surgeon General because, at the time of his nomination, he was an outspoken opponent of abortion and intensely homophobic. However, once he finally took up the role he looked at the evidence – and drastically changed his views. Among other things, he argued for sex education in schools and the provision of needle and syringe exchange programmes.

This ran completely counter to Reagan’s moralistic agenda and, in consequence, he did everything he could to exclude Koop from the public arena. As well as his exclusion from the Presidential Commission, he was also forbidden from talking to the media. Not the sign of a President keen to start an HIV/AIDS debate with America.

Nor was Reagan interested in hearing what Koop actually had to say. In April 1987 Reagan gave a speech to the Philadelphia College of Physicians. In it he claimed he was determined to find a cure for AIDS – because he had recently learned about a heterosexual man and his wife who had died from the disease. There were 47,000 diagnosed AIDS cases in the USA at the time.

Koop later described what happened after the event. As Reagan arrived at Philadelphia Airport for his flight back to Washington:

“… he was crowded by reporters who kept asking him question after question [about AIDS] to which he replied nothing at all until he got to the top step, just about to enter Air Force One, and he turned and said, “Just say no”.

And that night Tom Brokaw reported in his evening news hour that the President had never read The Surgeon General’s Report on AIDS.”

There is a detailed study of the Reagan administration’s response to both LGBT rights and HIV/AIDS in my eBook Gay in the 80s. Further information is available here.