Quote

Certainly the support for research in HIV/AIDS was good in the Clinton administration, good in the Bush administrations. It just was.

I think these last 10 years have seen just a huge shift in the psyche of this country as regards gay people. I think AIDS had a lot to do with it. So many families who really believed they'd 'never met one' were suddenly confronted with their sons becoming ill, and friends of sons. I think that brought a lot of it into the open.

Early in 1986, the World Health Organization in Geneva still regarded AIDS as an ailment of the promiscuous few.

You've got to watch the politics of AIDS. The politics of AIDS can work both for and against the victims of AIDS.

I have been hung in effigy by the gay community for a long time, from when I was on President Reagan's first AIDS commission.

I don't think President Bush is doing anything at all about Aids. In fact, I'm not sure he even knows how to spell Aids.

If Carter had been there when the AIDS crisis came up, it would have been a whole different story. It could have been treated like a legitimate disease.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

In the '70s, the gay movement was really making strides. Huge strides. And then AIDS came along and slapped a judgment on it all and the Right Wing religious movement was like, 'See. This is why, we told you.' And it pushed back the movement 30 years.