HUFFINGTON
12.09.12
OUT AT THE TIMES
“It may be quite possible that I should have
approved of the word
gay earlier.”
But perhaps the most
devastating of Rosenthal’s misdeeds was his
callous indifference to
the AIDS crisis early on
in the epidemic, a catastrophic ignorance on
his part, the outcome of
which can never be re-
medical establishment
and the rest of the media
switch into emergency
mode. Within days,
the nation’s resources
and attention were focused on what came to
be called Legionnaires’
disease, an illness that
killed 29 people.
the way he was treating the AIDS epidemic
wasn’t much different
from the way that news
organizations treated the
Holocaust early on.
When asked about
this failure, Rosenthal
becomes defensive. “I’m
not going to talk about
all that,” he says. “I’m
not going back to then.
Look, it’s quite true that
“Punch, you’re going to
have to swallow hard on
this one: We’re going to
start using the word gay.”
— Max Frankel
versed. In 1976, when a
mysterious illness struck
several American Legion convention attendees in Philadelphia, The
Times immediately ran
the story on the front
page (where it stayed
for months), ensuring
that the government, the
But as the number of
AIDS-related deaths of
gay men rose steadily
into the hundreds and
later the thousands,
The Times coverage of
the disease amounted
mostly to minuscule reports buried in the B and
C sections. Ironically,
Rosenthal, who attacks
anti-Semitism in the media, never