The Gipper - I mostly remember the Reagan years fondly. In seventh grade social studies I had to research issues for the 1980 election, and I fell hook-line-and-sinker for the then-prevalent anti-Soviet sentiment. I wrote a typically serious assessment of the U.S.'s dangerous inferiority to Russian military might. Living in the Navy town of Norfolk, we loved all the attention the newly conservative Congress lavished on us during the early 1980s. There always seemed to be awesome new aircraft carriers and or secret missile submarines pulling into port. Yeah, so maybe by the time high school rolled around, the things I would hear about Ed Meese and his ilk started bothering me. But this was a time when I was more likely to defend John Poindexter and his then little-known sidekick Oliver North, and I devoured the only Clancy novel then written. In short, those were happy carefree days when a boy could play war games without thinking too much about bigger issues, and certainly not about my own sexual confusion, which was far too scary to delve into.

It was only later that I learned the reaction of many social liberals to the Reagans, in particular, the pathological hatred espoused by many gays. I think I understand it, even if I don't share it. Those were the worst days of the AIDS crisis, and none of my generation can appreciate how bad it must have been. The fact that I didn't experience it -- maybe even succumb to it -- was an accident of history and the timing of my birth. So while I read Randy Shilts and have some sense of the desperation that lead to ACT UP, I don't have this visceral antipathy towards Ronnie which apparently led the screenwriters of the recently canceled CBS mini-series to put the words "Those that live in sin shall die in sin" into his mouth. No, I don't think Reagan was good for gays, but he probably wasn't as bad as his detractors make him out to be. (Rock Hudson's lover doesn't think so.) So the whole brouhaha over the bio-pic has me more bemused than agitated.