During the Facebook outage commotion the other day, we waited for this meme to show up, and sure enough, it did...
Looking back over the 1980s, when AIDS was first recognized as a deadly killer illness, at first, it was called the "gay flu" and many people were quite insensitive. It really took courage for Rock Hudson, a longtime movie idol, to come out and admit he was gay. And when he came down with AIDS, he went to France in search of cures not yet available here, and asked First Lady Nancy Reagan, one of his old friends from Hollywood, to intercede with French authorities in getting him into a hospital with the special treatment.
Nancy Reagan refused her old friend the help that might have extended his life. Her husband, Ronald, was a former movie actor who somehow became president of the United States, and sat silent about AIDS until more than 25,000 Americans had died from the disease.
Back in Hollywood, Stucker was bravely and openly out about his sexuality, and played key roles in several movies until he was diagnosed and lost to the disease that many people joked about and played down. He was open about his 1984 diagnosis as well, and lived just two more years, it's sad to say.
If you've never seen "Airplane!" or the watered-down, still somewhat funny "Airplane II - The Sequel," I recommend that you check them out, and see how funny Stucker was. His answer to Lloyd Bridges should be in the list of the top ten movie lines that crack me up 40 years later.
It's just a shame that so many lives were lost while people fooled away their time. It's good to know that eventually, AIDS was taken seriously.
By the way, the picture from the scene where Stucker pulled the plug on the airport lights shows up on memes all the time. We have to wonder if social media had existed in the 1980s, would AIDS have gotten the proper attention any sooner?
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