HIV/AIDS research had a hard time during the 80's since it was considered EXTREMELY homophobic to ask if a person had a homosexual experience when diagnosed with HIV/AIDS/Kaposi's Sarcoma, which was an issue when tests were extremely limited/unsure of efficacy and the CDC was trying to figure out infection vectors.
This was an issue since, while not unique to the gay community, it massively increased the likelyhood of transmission, but it was politically untenable to claim that AIDS could be spread sexually and that anal sex massively increased the changes of transmitting it since it was considered homophobic.
I regret to inform you that it doesn't address the point.
The saunas and baths where gay people convened were mostly in the big cities, the places where the AIDS epidemic were most concentrated due to basic population density.
The very places where the message that "you should probably use condoms and have fewer partners due to this new disease that we don't understand yet but are pretty sure is sexually transmitted" was a political death sentence in the cities where the message actually mattered.
This doesn't excuse Reagans response or the general homophobic attitude, but lets try to be more historically accurate.
There are reasons why Fauci, who used to be hated by the gay community for above reasons, is now considered one of the good guys fighting for the gay community.
It wasn’t because it was considered homophobic to ask. It was because society was so homophobic that it put patients in a tough position to answer, even the in context of a trusted patient-doctor relationship.
> HIV/AIDS research had a hard time during the 80's since it was considered EXTREMELY homophobic to ask if a person had a homosexual experience
You're confusing the cart and the horse. Homophobia was mainstream, to the point where it was extremely dangerous to honestly answer that you had a homosexual experience.
HIV/AIDS was considered a "gay men only" disease in the early to mid 1980s. I believe they are referencing how among straight men (and women) testing was commonly curtailed because they weren't perceived to be at risk. It wasn't until 1986 that testing of all military recruits became standard.
