Nancy Reagan Stamp Release During Pride Month Gets Roundly Blasted
The Advocate’s Christopher Harrity wrote in 2016. “On advice, Reagan promptly fired all the men involved. Reagan trotted out the standard ‘abomination in the eyes of the lord’ tropes. … Even worse was Nancy being quoted as calling homosexuality a ‘sickness’ and an ‘abnormality,’ fresh from a gay date with Jerome Zipkin.”When Ronald Reagan ran for president, he courted and won the support of the Christian right.
Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority group was then the leading force in that movement, and Falwell, the organization, and the movement as a whole were intensely homophobic.Another friend of the Reagans was closeted gay movie star Rock Hudson.
In 1985, when Hudson had developed AIDS, he wanted to be admitted to a French military hospital that was believed to have special treatment, but he needed the Reagans, then in the White House, to intervene on his behalf to be admitted because he wasn’t a French citizen.
Nancy Reagan declined, ostensibly because using her influence would be inappropriate. But still, the Reagan administration was infamously slow to respond to AIDS, with Ronald Reagan not giving a formal speech on the crisis until 1987 when his presidency was almost over.Ronald Reagan died in 2004 and Nancy Reagan in 2016.
