It’s one of the few diseases where behavior matters. And I once called on somebody, “Well, change your behavior! If the behavior you’re using is prone to cause AIDs, change the behavior!” Next thing I know, one of these ACT UP groups is saying, “Bush ought to change his behavior!” You can’t talk about it rationally!

– George “I don’t know what a social determinant of health is” H. W. Bush

Pappa Bush passed the day before World AIDS Day, so I had some thoughts about him and his mixed-bag legacy on HIV.

H.W. Bush was deservedly booed onstage at the 3rd International Conference on AIDS because he supported compulsory testing of teh gayz, so the government would know who you were. This move fucked up HIV testing for decades. I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve had someone refuse a test because they thought the government would know their status and come after them. Even so, this malignant form of testing expansion was an early effort to expand testing; it was a completely toxic way to go about it, drenched in homophobia, but it was, at least, an effort.

At the same time, it took years and lots of corpses for the guy to say the word “AIDS” in public when, in 1985, he joined Reagan mentioning the word. They both get a huge “fuck you” for a homophobic public health response that cost a lot of lives.

Bush gets a big thumbs up for supporting anti-discrimination protections for those living with HIV even while he supported that fucked up travel-ban that tried to stop people who were HIV+ from entering the country (BTW, Clinton supported this, too). At the same time, he removed the anti-queer “sexual deviation” travel ban; but then again, he also cut funding for HIV research.

By the end of Bush’s presidency, there was only $135 million being spent for HIV efforts globally by US AID. Nobody was getting treatment for opportunistic infections — it was primarily being used for condom distribution. Not only did Bush allow the epidemic to rage to over 110,000 people here in the United States on his watch, but globally, there were over 1.5 million cases. There were also around a half a million cases being diagnosed every year, in an environment where the majority of AIDS cases were going undiagnosed, because there was no testing or collective reporting of AIDS deaths. The real number is thought to have probably been 10 times what was reported, since there was so little funding and research to adequately report what was going on. – Eric Sawyer, ACT UP!

Bush is sort of a mixed bag where, in hindsight, the bad outweighed the good. He supported really bad legislation (that some Democrats also supported), but then, he also supported some good stuff that helped establish the groundwork for a more robust (future) response to the epidemic.