Does anybody remember Clintons and AIDS?

Bill and Hillary Clinton visiting the AIDS Quilt when it was on display in the National Mall, 1996. The president later told a PBS interviewer: I remember when Hillary and I walked on the Mall [in Washington, D.C.] to see the AIDS Quilt. We walked back and forth to see all the squares, and we were looking for people that we knew. We had several people that we'd known and cared about who had had HIV, and it had grown into AIDS, and they had not survived it, including someone that Hillary worked with very closely in Legal Services back in the '70s. It was a personally emotional thing, seeing the love and devotion that those sections of the quilt represented for all those people who died prematurely, and knowing that now, with medicine, they didn't have to die anymore, if we did the right things. It was a very emotional day.

Well, so, the existence of a horrible and deadly new disease that seemed to be attacking primarily gay men became evident in 1981, and all sorts of things happened from there, as many of you will no doubt remember, but there was one thing that didn't happen, for about 12 years: no president of the United States, or his wife, would touch the thing with a ten-foot pole, even when, as was the case with the Reagans, a close personal friend, the great movie star Rock Hudson, was dying in inexplicable torment, and they refused to lift a finger to help. No attempt was made in the White House to set policy on the crisis, whose occupants seemed mainly to be hoping that AIDS, and the HIV virus that caused it, didn't really exist at all, or that it would blow over in some way, until something finally changed that pattern.

Which was, as it happens, Bill Clinton campaigning on HIV/AIDS, March 1992 (New York Times):