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I broadly agree with what you're saying, but I guess I was making a different point: if the government had done something like close the bathhouses, the activists would not be happy that something was done. I think they would be furious, and call it a proof of oppression. My experience is that older gay men refuse to think of AIDS as "just" an STD. And if you suggest that the gay community perpetrated the disease through risky sexual behavior, they can become furious. I don't think they can distinguish something like that from the idea that Christian evangelicals are saying they deserve to die and AIDS is the proof. I don't think they can be rational on this topic. If you broach these ideas to the younger generation, they'll just roll their eyes and refuse to hear what you're saying, in the way that people today internally cancel you for breaking a social taboo. But the older generation will understand what I'm saying, and immediately shut it out.
I don't think there's anything the government could have done that could have solved the AIDS crisis, and I don't think there's anything the government could have done that would have assuaged the gay panic at being outcast and broken and dead. Reagan is a convenient scapegoat.
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