In his 1987 book about the AIDS crisis, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, journalist Randy Shilts recalled the incident that made him want to write about how the biases and indifference of different parts of society had made the situation with AIDS worse. During a 1983 awards ceremony where Shilts was being honored by the San Francisco Press Club, TV host and announcer Bill Kurtis, who at the time was the anchor for the CBS Morning News, delivered the keynote address, during which he made a joke: “What's the hardest part about having AIDS? Trying to convince your wife that you're Haitian.”
Shilts described what he thought was significant about the episode by writing the following.
[It] says everything about how the media had dealt with AIDS. Bill Kurtis felt that he could go in front of a journalists' group in San Francisco and make AIDS jokes. First of all, he could assume that nobody there would be gay and, if they were gay, they wouldn't talk about it and that nobody would take offense at that. To me, that summed up the whole problem of dealing with AIDS in the media. Obviously, the reason I covered AIDS from the start was that, to me, it was never something that happened to those other people.
A new documentary short by Scott Calonico called When AIDS Was Funny unearthed new audio which further proves Shilts’ point. It shows that on at least 3 different occasions in the early 1980’s both the Reagan administration and the supposedly “liberal” Washington press corps literally treated HIV/AIDS as a joke.
From Richard Lawson at Vanity Fair:
Using never-before-heard audio tapes from three separate press conferences, in 1982, 1983, and 1984,When AIDS Was Funny illustrates how the reporter Lester Kinsolving, a conservative (and not at all gay-friendly) fixture in the White House press corps, was consistently scoffed at when he posed urgent questions about the AIDS epidemic. With snickering, homophobic jokes and a disturbing air of uninterest, Speakes dismisses Kinsolving’s concerns about the escalating problem. “Lester was known as somewhat of a kook and a crank (many people still feel the same way),” says Calonico. “But, at the time, he was just a journalist asking questions only to be mocked by both the White House and his peers.”
The existence of these exchanges between the White House press corps and Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes have been known about for a while, with Mother Jones having run a story about it almost a year ago and Jon Cohen’s 2001 book Shots in the Dark: The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine chronicling the transcript of it as well. However, Calonico was able to find the audio tapes of the press conferences in the archives of the Reagan library and juxtaposed what was being said to the spread of the virus.
From Harmon Leon at Vice:
“Because I've done so much research with presidential libraries, I started wondering if there was any videotape coverage. So I consulted the Reagan library and started speaking to the archivists there. It turns out there wasn't any video footage—but there was audio... and a lot of it.” … To obtain this never-heard-before audio from the Reagan library, Calonico simply filled out a standard form and paid for the copy. "I knew I was onto something when the archivist told me that he had to digitize the tapes for me—which means nobody had requested them in a while."
The result was chilling. It's eerie enough to read the transcripts, but to actually hear the recordings is infuriating.
"As the newspaper clipping in the film shows, one of the ways [the press] were referring to this epidemic was 'the gay plague,'" says Calonico
It should be noted that President Reagan would not utter the word “AIDS’ until 1985 after over 5,000 AIDS deaths in the United States, and most of the mainstream media ignored the story and treated HIV/AIDS as a gay disease until the death of Rock Hudson in October of the same year put a celebrity face on the disease. It’s been argued the revelation that Hudson was gay and had AIDS made people aware of "children with AIDS who wanted to go to school, laborers with AIDS who wanted to work, and researchers who wanted funding."