Tom Shales is a tad upset about all the badmouthing of Merv Griffin going on amongst the gay hoi polloi …

It took only a few hours after news circulated that entertainer and entrepreneur Merv Griffin had died (at 82, Sunday, in Los Angeles) for a drumbeat of wrath—yes, wrath—to begin on some of the Internet’s fringe Web sites, where Griffin was assailed by various contributors for allegedly having been a "closeted" homosexual who should have announced he was gay to the world—though at which stage of his career he should have made the declaration was not specified.

Well…actually one place he could have done it was spelled out.  And as it turns out…Shales knows damn well where and when it was, that Griffin could have made a difference…

Whatever, the vehemence and fury in the attacks was disheartening. "A bloated pig like that should burn in hell," wrote one anonymous assailant. Michelangelo Signorile, who runs a Web site called The Gist, wrote that Griffin could have helped prevent the AIDS epidemic if only he had spoken to his friends Ronald and Nancy Reagan about it, but that "it is highly unlikely" he ever did, preferring to remain "shockingly silent" even as "his own people were dying."

No benefit of a doubt for poor old Merv.

The Reagans, let it be long remembered, had no trouble laughing at AIDS jokes…

The Reagan administration’s reaction to AIDS is complex and goes far beyond Reagan’s refusal to speak out about the epidemic. A great deal of his power base was born-again Christian Republican conservatives who embraced a reactionary social agenda that included a virulent, demonizing homophobia. In the media, people like Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell portrayed gay people as diseased sinners and promoted the idea that AIDS was a punishment from God and that the gay rights movement had to be stopped. In the Republican Party, zealous right-wingers, such as Representative William Dannenmeyer (CA) and Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), hammered home this same message. In the Reagan White House, people such as Secretary of Education William Bennett and Gary Bauer, his chief domestic advisor, worked to enact it in the Adminis- tration’s policies. 

In practical terms this meant AIDS research was chronically underfunded. When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute for Health asked for more funding for their work on AIDS, they were routinely denied it. Between June 1981 and May 1982, the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS, but $9 million on Legionnaire’s Disease. At that point over 1,000 of the 2,000 AIDS cases reported resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire’s Disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue through the Reagan years. 

When health and support groups in the gay community instigated education and prevention programs, they were denied federal funding. In October 1987 Jesse Helms amended a federal appropriation bill that prohibited AIDS education efforts that “encourage or promoted homosexual activity”(that is, tell gay men how to have safe sex). 

When almost all medical opinion spoke out against mandatory HIV testing (since it would drive those at risk away from being tested) and the ACLU and Lambda Legal Defense were fighting discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS, Republicans such as Vice President George Bush in 1987 and William Dannenmeyer (in a California state referendum in 1988) called for mandatory HIV testing. 

Throughout all of this Ronald Reagan did nothing. When Rock Hudson, a friend and colleague of the Reagan’s, was diagnosed and died in 1985 (one of the 20,740 cases reported that year), Reagan still did not speak out. When family friend William F. Buckley, in a March 18, 1986 New York Times article, called for mandatory testing of HIV and said that HIV+ gay men should have this information forcibly tattooed on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their arms), Reagan said nothing. In 1986 (after five years of complete silence) when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report calling for AIDS education in schools, Bennett and Bauer did everything possible to undercut and prevent funding for Koop’s too-little too-late initiative. By the end of 1986, 37,061 AIDS cases had been reported; 16,301 people had died. 

The most memorable Reagan AIDS moment was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagan’s were there sitting next to the French Prime Minister and his wife, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners, Hope quipped, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterrands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States—more then 70,000 of them had died.

Emphasis mine. If the Reagans epitomized Truman Capote’s remark that "a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room", Shales epitomizes the person who looks the other way when they see it.  But Griffin had a chance to put a human face on that joke, and he ether didn’t, or he allowed the illusion of friendship persist, let himself be the "some" in "some of my best friends are…" 

One commenter on the TV Week site avers that Griffin, "…was under no obligation to share his sexual preference" and "the GLBT community must realize that, just as they have a right to "come out," they have no right to "out" anyone else- unless that person says one thing and does another."  True enough, generally.  The struggling gay teen…the poor working stiff who’s just barely making ends meet…the closeted solider torn between the needs of their heart and the needs of their country…the closeted middle manager, struggling to hold on to their career dreams…most all of us need to be left alone to deal with the closet on our own terms, in our own way.  But with power comes responsibility.  In the face of social indifference to a staggering death toll that many then (and even now still) were saying was nothing more then what homosexuals were due, closeted celebrities like Griffin, people whom pop culture fame had blessed with status and wealth had an obligation, not only to their own people, but to their country, and to humanity, to raise their voices.  And Griffin didn’t.

You can’t take it with you…not even your closet.  But something that remains behind, long after we’re gone from this good earth, are the things we did to make a difference, that made our world better for our having walked in it.  Those remain, long after our names are forgotten.  And also, the things we didn’t, that we could have.