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BUT - on the other hand - probably no President would have addressed AIDs right away. Such was the stigma of AIDs (and gays in general) in 1980..
AND - Ronnie, as Governor, did a great service to the gay community. One glossed over by history but dreadfully important on the ground. I quote for a Daily Beast article (from a story about Melhman - so no need to read the whole thing).
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A few decades ago, anti-gay sentiment was pervasive in both major parties. In 1978, California was fiercely divided by Proposition 6, a ballot initiative launched by John Briggs, a Republican legislator from Orange County, that sought to bar lesbians and gays from teaching in the state’s public schools. The fight against the so-called Briggs Initiative helped galvanize the national gay rights movement, and brought San Francisco civil rights activist Harvey Milk to national prominence.
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And Milk had an unlikely ally in Ronald Reagan, the popular former governor and conservative icon who had very nearly defeated a sitting president in the Republican primaries of 1976. Though Milk had long since embraced the political left by then, there was a certain logic in the de facto alliance between the two men. Years earlier, Milk had volunteered for Barry Goldwater, not least because of Goldwater’s zealous individualism and commitment to personal freedom. Ronald Reagan was very much Goldwater’s heir. Born in 1911, Reagan, like many of his generation, saw homosexuality as a tragic affliction. Yet as a veteran of Hollywood, he also knew a number of gay men, some of whom he counted as friends. Lou Cannon, author of the definitive Reagan biographies, has written that he was “repelled by the aggressive public crusades against homosexual life styles which became a staple of right wing politics in the late 1970s.” Suffice it to say, opposing Proposition 6 was a political risk for Reagan, but it was a risk he was willing to take.
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and that is what I thank Reagan for. Just as a side note, the "Suffice it to say..." last line is a HUGE UNDERSTATEMENT. Laws like proposition 6 had passed in Florida (thank you Anita Bryant), Kansas and many major cities. The California backers were going to take this nationwide - and Ronald Reagan - a voice of conscious, stopped them. I don't think we have such respected voices of political conscious now on the left or the right. Well respected politicans willing to stand up for what is right - even if it is politically unpopular. It is a tragic loss for the country.