On the left, there’s plenty of free-floating reasons to have hated Nancy Reagan: her preoccupation with fashion and decor, for one, as her husband was enriching the rich and cutting social programs, or her simple-minded and puritanical approach to drug policy (“Just Say No!”).
But among queer folks, perhaps especially gay men, special vitriol is reserved for Nancy Reagan because – even though it was well-documented that she (and Ronald) had close gay friends dating back to their Hollywood years, even letting one such couple stay overnight in the White House – she publicly did or said nothing to stop the AIDS crisis as it erupted in the Reagan era, taking those friends’ lives one by one.
Yes, reportedly, she privately urged her husband to talk about the disease publicly and open up funding – which he finally did, in 1985, four years after the crisis began and after more than 12,000 had already died. But given the immensity of the crisis, and presumably how many gay men Nancy must have known who were affected by it – actors, hairdressers, designers, decorators, and their friends and lovers – and how much proxy power she had, she did next to nothing.
It even emerged last year that she declined to help her old Hollywood friend Rock Hudson when, suffering from AIDS, he requested special White House intervention to be moved to a hospital in France where he could get cutting-edge treatment.
But I don’t particularly see Nancy Reagan as a witch. I imagine she even felt affection for these men. Instead, I’d rather celebrate her death as the death of a certain era that she reflected: an ugly, closeted one in which society women in New York, DC and Hollywood used gay men as their personal prettifiers, unthreatening party escorts and gossip companions but more or less regarded them as less than fully human, as eunuchs whose lives were expendable.
That trivializing sentiment goes back at least as far as the mid-sixties. Jacqueline Susann’s pulpy society bestseller Valley of the Dolls, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, is full of female references to gay men – or “fags,” as Susann blithely calls them, as in (to quote a notorious line), “You know how bitchy fags can be.” In Susann’s world, gay men were simply part of the urban landscape, indispensable for designing dresses and rooms, and for a laugh. But they were also contemptible, predatory, nasty creatures, standing bitterly and jealously outside the circle of normal heterosexual relations.
At the time, it was common for gay men of letters such as Truman Capote and Gore Vidal to run around in society circles. Capote would spend days gossiping with his so-called “swans,” fashionable haut monde women like Babe Paley, Slim Keith and Gloria Vanderbilt. They all turned their backs on him in in the mid-seventies, however, when Esquire published his “La Côte Basque 1965,” a thinly veiled takedown of their every dirty secret, which goes to show that the nastiness between the era’s society dames and their walkers could go both ways.
In 1979, one such dame, Lee Radziwill – sister of Jackie Kennedy – refused to go to court to defend Capote in a lawsuit that Vidal was filing against him. According to the (bisexual) gossip writer Liz Smith, Smith begged her to stand up for Capote, to which Radziwill replied, “What does it matter, Liz? After all, they’re just a couple of fags.”
Such was the casual disregard for gay men on the eve of the Reagan Revolution. Yet it was also a moment when gay people, as a bloc, were becoming more political than ever, taking the streets en masse in 1978 in San Francisco, after the assassination of Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected official – and in Atlanta, to protest a visit to the city by the antigay spokeswoman Anita Bryant (who also had a pie thrown in her face by gay activists). Not entirely stereotypical depictions of gay people began emerging in popular culture, including Billy Crystal’s sympathetic character, Jodie, on the hit TV comedy Soap.
AIDS set all that progress back. Political activism was diverted into triage and caretaking. Religious conservatives seized on the idea that the disease was God’s punishment for sinful behavior – an idea that, in polls, at least a third of Americans supported. And as badly as Nancy Reagan might have felt about Rock Hudson and her other gay friends, she wasn’t going to cross her beloved Ronnie and publicly go to bat for them.
No, that would take another high-profile dame with many close gay male friends: Liz Taylor, who in 1985, with Dr. Mathilde Krim and others, cofounded the American Foundation for AIDS Research – and became, at that time, the first megastar to take on a major public role against the disease. (Many would follow.)
Thankfully, the era of society women using gay men merely as arm candy – and of gay men cravenly relishing that role at the expense of their full humanity – has mostly passed. The shows Sex and the City and Will and Grace put a face on something that had previously existed but never been given much airtime on the pop-culture landscape: genuine friendships between women and gay men, based on reciprocal support for each other’s lives. Today, millennials, teens and even pre-teens take these relationships for granted, they seem so natural.
For all we know, maybe that’s something Nancy Reagan really wanted, deep in her heart of hearts. Too bad she didn’t have the character or the courage to stand up for it. Sure, you can say, “Oh, but that was another time.” But in history, it’s always “another time” until somebody brave decides that, well, it’s time for a change.
Nancy Reagan, gay men and the end of an ugly era