The Trump Regime has made it very clear to American evangelicals that it is going to end all funding to AIDS. Monies going to the Ryan White Act, a program that makes AIDS meds – antiretrovirals – accessible as these drugs can cost a hundred-thousand-dollars a year, will disappear as support in terms of making the virus undetectable.

AIDS funding has been turned into an economic chess game. Appropriations legislation passed by congress to make sure we can contain the pandemic has been diverted to ICE.

“We don’t want these drug addicts and gays, really bad and loud gays, in our society. These are despicable people who did it to themselves. They are immoral and I will end all funding to AIDS.”

AIDS is not over. Nor are the culture wars fought so vividly in the 1980s.

Adolescent boys at-risk, often homeless, many who have been raped in institutional, detention facilities, and who are doing sex work to survive, represent numbers that have never gone down. Only up and up again.

Advocacy on the part of AIDS ORGS has been nonexistent, and the ORGS themselves (all of them clinging to federal funding) have been focused on PR and fundraising through AIDS walks. They remain mostly silent. Such silence still equals death. They are afraid to confront the Regime because they understand they will be punished.

The current trade war with China now includes antiretrovirals, most of which are made in Shanghai. Tariffs will make these drugs impossible to obtain.

The old days of corpses piling up will happen all over again. The men who once fought so hard to put an end to this are mainly dead.

We have been betrayed by America.