In his December 23 column, Cal Thomas says that for two decades the media has depicted "gay as great with no downsides..." This statement indicates that Thomas has either been living in a cave for twenty years (we wish), or is having serious memory problems.

Let's talk about AIDS. First named GRID, for Gay Related Immune Deficiency, AIDS was immediately linked to the "evils" of homosexuality. (This was an interesting attribution, since lesbians were not getting AIDS, so what the ignorant moralizers really thought was that the syndrome was linked to the evils of gay men, I suppose.) Pat Buchanan declared that AIDS was God's punishment of the gay population. The news media did little--almost nothing--to stop the hysteria about AIDS. Gay men were abandoned by their employers, their families, and the health care system. Leaders like Mayor Koch and President Reagan did nothing to help (that is something we can call evil), and they were given a totally free ride by the media. The politics of AIDS research was outrageous, but the media left that subject alone, too.

In other words, the media contributed in a major way to the dangerous myth that looking crosswise at a gay man could result in "catching" AIDS, and it contributed, by neglect, to the societal hatred and abandonment of thousands of gay men and their partners and friends.

Then there was the business about gays in the military. The ignorant and bigoted Colin Powell and Sam Nunn were on television constantly, explaining how dangerous it would be to allow gay citizens to serve in the military (while they were saying this, of course, hundreds of frightened gay soldiers were serving their country as admirably as their heterosexual colleagues). When President Clinton created his inane "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, the news media--tired of the story--hardly bothered to analyze it.

It is true that in the last few years, some media outlets have given more time to covering gay issues, and have even conducted some intelligent interviews with gay spokespeople. This is a good thing, but it is hardly a product of two decades.