Me, right, with my first boyfriend (and still one of my best friends) at that October 1996 display on the Mall, after helping to unfurl the quilt that morning. Chris Geidner Archives.
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I was there! Purely by happenstance. My former in-laws lived in the area and were showing us DC and they were ‘disappointed’ 🙄 so we didn’t get to stop BUT we then drove up to the Cathedral to find it was closed because they were hanging quilts there but they said we could walk around anyways!
What a darling photo - you can feel the love there. I turned 6 that month, and I think a lot about how many people were already fighting for me to be able to do the work I do today. I am blessed to walk among giants. 🌈💓
I love that not only did you participate in this, but that you have a photograph from such an important event in history. Thank you so much for sharing this with the world.
I helped bring the Quilt to my (central Indiana) university in 1992. A fucking PROFOUND experience and I have never been the same. I hated Reagan already but that dropped the keystone right into the arch of my lifelong disgust for him and his cronies.
Was there as well, I will have to dig out the old photos to find mine. The 80’s early 90’s were awful for us due to Reagan and cannot agree more. simply put the reference could have excluded Reagan name and simply said Trump would have lost the Cold War-no praise for that awful man who abandoned us
This makes me cry. As a millennial I was there, it was formative in my young life to see this display, to walk the mall. It’s beautiful to see you both there and also to know you’re still friends 💞
OK, I’m seeing some unexpected people in here defending Slotkin. I hear you, and, respectfully, you’re wrong.
There are *hundreds* of ways of opening the tent up to Reagan voters without LITERALLY saying you’re “thankful” Reagan was president in the ‘80s. Hundreds!
That was a speech from the wrong decade! I don’t understand why we’re not using the firebrands we have!! Should have been Jasmine or Pete. Someone with some balls!!
why do you think they’d have anything different to say? and if it was just about saying something else why wouldn’t you wish for alissa slotkin to say something else? how much of the democrat party leadership can worship reagan and still have your vote
My point is that this speech was tone deaf and wasn't the kind of resistance we needed from the Democratic Party. I don't think anything I said indicated I was supporting Reagan worship. Go pick a fight elsewhere 😘
Hell, remember Hillary saying that she was planning on being a good person for AIDS just like Nancy Reagan? She had to extensively walk it back because FUCK that noise.
I wasn't out at the worst of it- I came in on the aftermath- but fuck every part of that pro reagan message.
Slotkin is more of a Reagan era Republican than she is a Democrat. She isn't "opening the door to Reagan voters." She would have gladly voted for him given the opportunity. There is no defense.
Michigan was given the choice between Slotkin and a right-wing extremist. She barely won.
And I'm still pissed that those were my choices. I held my nose and voted for Slotkin, and now I call her offices at least once a week for whatever good it does.
I heard her speech praised. It wasn't for me for this and other reasons. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's the country. But, I wasn't captivated in any way and thought it fell short of the moment.
I was in West Hollywood in the 80s & rotested Reagan/Bush on AIDs, nukes, the environment, Bork, Thomas, and more. I registered voters. Reagan was awful. But, compared to Trump, he's FDR. Slotkin's right, if 2024 Trump were POTUS in the 80s, we'd be writing in Cyrillic today.
This is how the Overton Window shifts. “Listen, I never liked Rush Limbaugh, but at least he wasn’t Alex Jones.” Fuck that. You can hate both. You *should* hate both. Without Rush, there’s no Jones, and without Reagan, there’s no Trump. We don’t need Reaganites. No place in the tent for them.
IMO, it's like saying, "Thankfully, my dog just shit a regular turd on my living room rug, and didn't have diarrhea all over." Much better if the dog doesn't shit in the house at all.
I am old enough to know how awful Reagan and Thatcher were, but I took the comment to be specifically about the USSR and communism. Perhaps she could have said she was thankful that the POTUS of the time recognized the threat to the world and he dealt with it, without praising him specifically.
Communism is always a threat, because it can quickly morph (paradoxically) into authoritarianism. Other "political" models can do the same of course, like theocracies. At that time, communism was being blamed for everything, so I agree that the extent of the threat may have been overblown.
I think saying that she is okay with his bigotry is your inference, not a fact. Yes, her votes aren't always great, but I don't think there is clear evidence she supports all the nastiness. Russia is a totally different type of threat now - I believe worse than ever before, if that's possible.
Sorry friend I’m in the collectible business I get excited when I see Haring items. Like I say yes I make money but nothing makes me happier when a buyer tells me thank you this item means a lot to me. To better days ahead and never forget the good memories.
I'm a bit reminded of those championing Liz Cheney. Besides her hatred of Trump, she shares little of our values & would happily vote against much that we stand for -not my hero!
My take is cynical and much less substantive and historical. There are not really anyone left on the right who this will resonate with, this “reaching out” is performative to centrists to make them feel comforted. Not needed and insulting to democrats and there anti-Trump supporters.
She was born in 1976 and raised in the wealthy suburbs of Detroit and only knows what her parents told her. The Slotkins weren’t impacted by Reagan like other communities.
And? I'm a Detroiter who grew up when Kwame Kilpatrick was mayor, and I was blissfully unaware as a child. I never defended him. You don't need to be LGBT to find his response to AIDS horrific.
That's not an excuse. She's a grown ass adult who can read books and shouldn't need anyone else to tell her what to think. She should be able to look beyond her situation and have a little empathy for all the people that bastard let die ... that's the least I'd expect from a Senator.
As someone who was born in 1976 and raised in the wealthy suburbs of Minneapolis, I know Reagan was a bastard who harmed lots of people and paved the way for our current ascendant fascism. There’s plenty of information out there and no excuse for whitewashing that man.
The Democratic Party is getting set to sale us down river every LGBTQ person in the United States out of the democratic plan wanna guess how many times they’ve mentioned trans folks? Goose egg zero none
The youngest Reagan voter - someone 18 in 1984 - is now 59. MAGA radicals don’t care about the old guard Republicans. A pitch that appeals to some people outside your base but also pisses off many people in your base doesn’t seem wise.
His first term was 1981. You don’t want anyone who doesn’t recognize and call out the real damage that idiot inflicted and then propagated with his economic policies, producing the income inequality of today. Plus homophobic culture wars that demonized gay men carving a path for the trans bigots now
Is there even any evidence that "Reagan voters" are a meaningful constituency in 2025? There are people who were not yet born when he entered office who are now grandparents.
Losing the 2016 and 2024 elections in pursuit of these voters does seem a good indication that they do not, in fact, exist. Or if they do, they're really not interested in voting for Democrats.
“Like it or not” how about “not” and maybe you sit down and STFU. You could praise Charlie Manson in comparison to tRump and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. This is just bullshit.
One of the problems with your take on this is that it actually represents a 40 year failure of Dem leadership. They should have been challenging that notion all these years. They should have been educating people as to all of the harms his policies were doing to us instead of capitulating to it.
Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign with a speech on states' rights in Neshoba County, MS where civil rights heroes Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were murdered.
Trump's racism is Reagan's legacy. Fuck that guy. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html
Also a reminder that the youngest voters who remember Reagan are in their 50s and who actually voted for him are in their 60s. And only about half that group voted for him.
Um what? I'm 41 and I remember Reagan. I remember watching the Berlin wall come down. Granted I did not understand contextually until highschool what I watched. But we all watched it, because there were so few channels to watch at the time. Reagan clips continued well into the 90s political scene
Respectfully, you are fighting a battle from the 20th Century. What Trump and his oligarchs envision is a death of Democracy and a turn toward a mob state. Wake Up!
I know I wasted my time reading your hateful nonsense.
Reagan opposed the Soviet Union. Trump admires Putin and aspires to build a larger, better "mafia state."
Get your head out of your ass.
I'm sorry, but if you are alive in the year of 2025 and think a Reagan voter would vote democrat ever in the future, than you are more delusional than the republican voter you're trying to capture.
exactly, my dad told me he voted for trump and reagan, and HATED clinton for reasons he couldn't articulate when I asked directly "what did the democrats do to you to make you hate them this much", and told me "Hillary is evil" in Feb 2017 after the muslim ban was making airports chaos.
The response to 9/11 was really a bellweather - if the rapid insane jingoism didn't gross you out, if the masks off racism/Islamophobia didn't gross you out, if the pointless war didn't gross you out, then nothing immoral or inhumane would.
That said, the "Hillary bad"-mine was planted ages ago.
yea, and my timing probably solidified his beliefs, as I graduated hs in 2002 and went to college, the same college he went to, and I was pretty upset about the whole series of events at a federal level, so he would always try to dismiss any concerns and pretend to know more about anything I said.
My mom voted for Reagan. I thought She was lost to them but she saw how terrible trump is and voted for Biden and then she voted for Harris. I hate Reagan for laughing at aids and creating the homeless population and creating the crack epidemic to arm osama. But my mom was saved.
Also who is the fucking audience? Modern day conservatism is more informed by Timothy McVeigh than Ronald Reagan. The people you're chasing don't exist anymore.
Unfortunately, “fiscal conservatism” is the ideology of killings off gays in the 80s, and most people are going to think that it was merely a whim of Reagan’s and not the rotten nature of “fiscal conservatism.”
Yeah, any Democrat who invokes Reagan is going to get a hard side-eye from me, not just Slotkin. The whole party needs to stop referencing him!! Other parts of her rebuttal were much better, but this was not the thing to say.
I didn’t watch but it seems like the reason she brought up Reagan was to say that the US would have lost the Cold War if Trump was president then so why not just say that?
The largest caucus of Dems in the House is the “New Dem Coalition” which is a fiscally conservative caucus. It’s larger than the “Progressive” caucus. The Dem party belongs to Ronald Reagan already.
Reagan fucking started this whole mess we are in: the brainwashing that bigger govt is bad, less regulation, lower taxes for the rich while increasing taxes for the less rich, starving and de-housing people, homophobia, Iran-Contra, etc. Just because he saw Russians as a threat doesn’t mean squat.
To be clear, and this is a REALLY important distinction: Reagan didn't see RUSSIA as a threat. He saw COMMUNISM as a threat. He would have been a lot less threatened by a far-right Russian dictatorship like we've got now.
If anyone ever tells you that at least Reagan wouldn't have sold us out to the Russians you should look them dead in the eyes and say, "perhaps not, but he sure as fuck sold us out to the Iranians".
If you're holding a mic please don't be too it; they're expensive.
But ultimately he did. Reagan and Thatcher set the terms for the Russia comeback. There was no oligarchy class in Russia back then, like always with Republican foreign policy it's always transactional. They did a deal and moved on. The deal went badly and they took their eye off the ball.
Reagan was the shining "STAR" that the right and rich selected that started the ball rolling downhill. Demonizing others, destroying unions, tax cuts and deregulation. Top it off with Rush L., Fox news, Religious rights and our racist history. Welcome to today. Sorry for the rant. Struck a nerve.
Heritage Foundations first attempt at Project 2025 was simply called, "Mandate for Leadership". They gave it to Ronald Reagan in 1980 & he implemented about half of it during his time as President. It formed the basis of Reaganomics as well as his foreign & domestic policies.
“fuck reagan” is good. your instincts are good! slotkin should have 10,000 voicemails this morning that just say “fuck reagan.” i personally would like that very much
Democrats are the only ones who are going to remember the precise wording. So they can bitch & moan about it. Hopefully others heard he counted on alliances and distrusted Russia.
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In 1987 I watched the quilt displayed for the 1st time. I helped organize the protests at the SCOTUS. Protesting AIDS & Bowers criminalized sex between consenting same sex adults. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/14/us/600-in-gay-demonstration-arrested-at-supreme-court.html
There are *hundreds* of ways of opening the tent up to Reagan voters without LITERALLY saying you’re “thankful” Reagan was president in the ‘80s. Hundreds!
I wasn't out at the worst of it- I came in on the aftermath- but fuck every part of that pro reagan message.
(I'll see myself out.)
Michigan was given the choice between Slotkin and a right-wing extremist. She barely won.
Also obv Russia is different from the USSR they are two different countries with two different ideas on how to project global power.
I disagree on your second point. I have work colleagues in eastern Europe and though quite different, the threat from Russia is just as bad now.
I'm a bit reminded of those championing Liz Cheney. Besides her hatred of Trump, she shares little of our values & would happily vote against much that we stand for -not my hero!
And have guns.
From a dark perspective, there might be something to this strategy.
Trump's racism is Reagan's legacy. Fuck that guy. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html
https://youtu.be/uhJyPTEMHr8?si=MeFMpl9b4P_rRJxR
Reagan opposed the Soviet Union. Trump admires Putin and aspires to build a larger, better "mafia state."
Get your head out of your ass.
(my mom voted for him the first time. Not the second. or any other republican ever again)
That said, the "Hillary bad"-mine was planted ages ago.
How are they so so so so so consistently bad at messaging?
(Wrong answers only; we already know the real answer.)
We should NOT be welcoming to conservatives.
If you're holding a mic please don't be too it; they're expensive.