As though in exchange for the conservative establishment's victorious banishment of "The Reagans" over one line of dialog, now comes Tony Kushner's raging angels of retribution with six and half solid hours of the whole, inconvenient story that was embodied in that notorious line.

During the ruckus over "The Reagans" mini-series -- based on its accurate representation of Ronald Reagan's attitude toward the AIDS crisis and its victims in a line of created dialog -- The National Review and friends got busy rewriting history to make Reagan look good while accusing "The Reagans" of rewriting history to make Reagan look bad. They omitted his six years of silence, his indifference to funding aggressive research and public health measures to combat the disease in the early going, before it blew up into the scourge now raging around the world. They included Reagan's appointment of a 1987 commission to make recommendations on how to deal with the epidemic. They omitted his administration's subsequent opposition to the recommendations of that commission, fighting every step of the way as Congress tried to implement a bill based on the commission's urgings to ban discrimination against people infected with the HIV virus and increase funding for AIDS services. Reagan's congressional factotums only allowed it to pass after they succeeded in rendering it pointless by deleting any mention of federal-level anti-discrimination rules and gutting a crucial provision assuring confidentiality for patients who tested HIV-positive. During that battle, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), remarked "I think the administration will be remembered for its continued and stubborn refusal to deal with AIDS."

Representative Waxman's prediction will be cemented into permanent cultural fact by the debut and month-long re-broadcast of Kushner's "Angels in America" on HBO, invariably to be followed by the DVD. An audience larger by several orders of magnitude than all the people who ever saw Kushner's epic memento mori on the stage will take away with them the truth of the story of AIDS in Ronald Reagan's America, a truth seared onto their TV screens with the light and heat that great art brings to the project of history.

It will be plain to all, including a generation who was not there at the time and generations yet to come, that one of the primary building blocks that went into the construction of Reagan's conservative icon status -- his defense of "family values"-- was affirmed in large part by acquiescence in the agonizing deaths of gay people. Reagan watched 28,000 die before he could permit the name of the disease that killed them to pass his lips. Conservative Republicans have evidently discovered a certain level of discomfort with these historical facts. Every AIDS activist alive -- and certainly every one of those who no longer are -- knows that Ronald Reagan was the Marie Antoinette and Emperor Nero of AIDS. They also know that, at the time when he was playing to his base and his administration was expressing its vast unconcern for the fate of a generation, that attitude was basically okay. The divine retribution theory was quite popular inside and outside the White House (Reagan's actual, non-dramatized words: "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague" because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments"), but twenty years on, look who beat CBS bloody to prevent the broadcast of a one-line reminder about the way we were: Bill O'Reilly and the Republican National Committee.

And that's really what was newsworthy about the hysteria over "The Reagans:" In 1983, the Reagan take on AIDS was more than okay; it was a central tenet of Reagan's philosophy, a central demand of his constituency. Now we find that very same constituency furiously denying this. It is impolitic to recall this particular piece of history -- like asking Werner von Braun and Reinhard Gehlen to discuss what they did for a living just before they found employment with the US government after World War II.

For forcing that degree of shame upon the conservative establishment, Kushner, ACT UP, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor can take a bow. They cannot, however, leave the stage: When CBS president Les Moonves took the shears to "The Reagans" in a vain attempt to re-cut history sufficiently to appease the hagiographers at FOX News, one of the sequences that hit the cutting room floor was a scene of Ron Reagan, Jr., dancing ballet.

Apparently, "Angels in America," "La Cage aux Folles," "Will and Grace" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" haven't quite done the trick. You still have a ways to go yet, guys, but at least the ruling class is no longer literally telling you to drop dead, and is making obvious to all its shame that it once did.

Andrew Christie is a film editor in Los Angeles

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