And if the government was stone-deaf, the press was mute. The media are convinced in 1987 that they’re doing a great job reporting the AIDS story, and there’s no denying they’ve grasped the horror. But for four years they let the bureaucracies get away with passive genocide, dismissing a no-win problem perceived as affecting only an underclass or two. It was often remarked acidly in West Hollywood that if AIDS had struck boy scouts first rather than gay men, or St. Louis rather than Kinshasa, it would have been covered like nuclear war.
