ABSTRACT
On April 15th 1985, Margaret Heckler, then Director of the Depart-ment of Health and Human Services, defined with bracing clarity the extent of the Reagan administration's concern about acquired immune deficiency syndrome: “We must conquer AIDS before it affects the heterosexual population … the general population. We have a very strong public interest in stopping AIDS before it spreads outside the risk groups, before it becomes an overwhelming problem.” Heckler's now famous caveat, which prompted wags within the AIDS movement to rename the department she directed Health and Heterosexual Services, doesn't appear to require much analysis. The reluctance of the Reagan administration, as well as most state and city governments, to furnish significant funding for research, treatment, or effective education, their reluctance indeed, to do anything other than develop testing apparati for quarantining so-called risk groups, draws even the least suspicious observer to conclude that they didn't and don't care very much about saving the kinds of people who were and are dying by the tens of thousands.
