Free Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings by The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America Page B

said, “I’m not afraid of death. It’s getting there that scares me.” Being stripped of all your dignity and losing half your body weight and having friends turn away just because they’re in such pain they can’t stand to see you that way is just horrible.
    The level of ignorance and homophobia from some of the callers was just amazing. And the indifference was overwhelming. When I first started, prank callers would just say, “All you faggots should die!”
Click
. Thank you for sharing. It was bad enough all these people were dying and there was nothing that we could do about it, and then you’ve got people hating you for being sick or for helping sick people. Of course, you wanted badly to be able to say, “Where’syour compassion? Who do you think you are? What’s wrong with loving someone?”
    My friends and I often talk about the community of infected and affected people. I am HIV-negative but have been affected deeply. We’re all living with AIDS. I often wonder why I have been so lucky when so many of my friends and colleagues have died of AIDS. When I look back at the pictures of the early days at GMHC, it hits me every time that the majority of the people in them are no longer living. In the end, I have to be philosophical about it. I guess my job is to be there for everyone else. The best thing that I can do is just stay HIV-negative.
    Throughout the 1980s, President Reagan maintained an iron-hard posture toward Communism. And this posture led to yet another government scandal. Nicaragua, a country in Central America, was led by a Communist government. Reagan wanted to help the “contra” rebels, who were fighting a guerrilla war against the government, but Congress had passed a law banning military aid to the contras. In a bizarre scheme to sidestep the law, American ammunition, spare parts for tanks, jet fighters, and missiles were sold to Iran to make money to fund the contra rebels.
    Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North ran the secretoperation that eventually became known to the country as “Iran-contra.” A decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, North was a patriot with an unshakable loyalty to the president. In testimony before Congress, North said that he believed he had acted “with authority from the president” in carrying out illegal operations in Central America and the Middle East. For America to be negotiating with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s government was astonishing enough. But for illegal weapons sales to be linked to the White House was shocking. Just as they had during Watergate a decade earlier, Americans now asked, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Iran-contra suggested one of two possibilities: Either the president himself was involved in an illegal international operation, or else he was a weak leader who did not know what was going on under his own nose. Neither possibility was flattering to the president who had promised a return to America’s glory days.
    As Americans faced their problems at home and abroad, it was comforting to know that at least the economy was still booming. That changed dramatically on October 19, 1987, Black Monday, when the stock market crashed. In one day the market lost 508 points, or 22.6 percent of its value—approximately $500 billion, an amount equivalent to the gross national product of France. BlackMonday reminded Americans of the stock market crash of 1929. But what really frightened them was the memory of what had followed—the miserable years of the Great Depression. For the next year, people watched and waited, but the depression never came. Slowly the market bounced back, and Americans breathed a sigh of relief.
    In spite of—or perhaps because of—President Reagan’s hard-line policy toward the Soviet Union and the renewed nuclear arms race, Communism was beginning to crack. In the late 1980s the Soviet Union was going