Yes, he looked great in a cowboy hat, he had a natural gift for leadership and possessed an easy optimism that helped raise America from a demoralizing economic slump. But that doesn’t make him perfect, nor is it an excuse for slavish devotion from our nation’s press.

The mixed reactions and strong emotions coming out over the June 5 death of former President Reagan have become a reflection of the divisions in our nation. Exhibit A is Los Angeles: In this city to the north of us, a brief tour of the neighborhoods serves as a microcosm of mixed reactions. Bel Air, the location of the Reagan family estate, is just a few minutes away from the gay enclave of West Hollywood, where people in the cafes expressed Reagan-era memories less fond than those held by the people waiting in lines by Reagan’s casket outside Simi Valley. In South Central Los Angeles, black leaders referred to Reagan’s notorious lack of rapport with the African American community and his tepid support of anti-apartheid in South Africa, and some alleged that the 40th President’s policies in support of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and the Nicaraguan contras helped exacerbate drug problems in South Central L.A. Central Americans in southern California and throughout the U.S. protested by holding images of family members believed to have died under the regimes of anti-communist dictators Reagan supported in the early 1980s. Other Californians of all political stripes criticized Reagan’s mass closure of mental health hospitals while governor of this state, which sent mental health patients onto the streets.

Then, there are the gay and lesbian activists. In the past weeks we’ve had National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Executive Director Matt Foreman’s well-publicized letter to his late best friend (who died of AIDS), emotionally pointing out that it took six years and 36,000 AIDS deaths before The Great Communicator publicly addressed the disease. Reagan-era surgeon general C. Everett Koop has said that he was excluded from all AIDS discussions during the first five years of Reagan’s administration. Koop’s 2001 speech on U.S. AIDS policy is worth quoting: “Because transmission of AIDS was understood primarily in the homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs, the advisers to the President took the stand they are only getting what they deserve.” That pretty clearly sums up the Reagan administration’s tragic flaw in policy, and clearly delineates the reasons that people who were around for the 1980s get angry about Reagan.

It’s true that Reagan had a contagious charm and effortless intelligence that made him in some ways a natural leader. One could even say that he possessed a graciousness of the sort that helped make the world a better place, particularly when his easy manner was directed at the Soviet Union’s Mikhael Gorbachev, precipitating an end to the Cold War. Like his political colleague Margaret Thatcher, Reagan seemed to be able to raise a nation’s spirits by sheer force of personality.

It’s okay to recognize these traits – and to feel bad for a family that has lost a loved one to the debilitating, tragic illness of Alzheimer’s. Such condolences are natural.

However, for members of the media to slavishly devote copy to his legacy, in the face of the many aforementioned flops, is simply bad journalism.

So, we have to wonder what planet Andrew Sullivan is on these days. The openly gay conservative commentator managed this past week to devote entire columns not only on his own website but also in Time Magazine’s commemorative edition to the legacy of Reagan, without mentioning the word AIDS. In fact, he’s written these two columns without mentioning the word “gay”. Is Sullivan hoping to distance himself from his community and, now that he’s become a well-known commentator on gay issues, to prove that he’s able to write about other subjects? Sullivan lays out a string of highly questionable, if not outright lame, assertions: that a Reagan-era upturn in the economy and the winning of the Cold War were in no way “inevitable” (they quite possibly were, and even if they weren’t such victories were hardly attributable to Reagan alone); that Reagan’s cowboy image “certainly shook the Kremlin” (really?); that Reagan’s early political broadcasts were the work of “superb, intelligent” journalism (they are laden with clichés and the well-circulated ideas of others); and that Reagan nurtured a deep faith. To demonstrate this last point, Sullivan really goes off the deep end. Quoting a faith-based cliché Reagan delivered about his “looking up” (to God) to solve his problems, Sullivan gushes: “Well, now, at last, he will look face to face. And as surely as we are now grieving, he will be smiling.”

Dear Andrew, if you really believe Reagan is “face to face” with a heavenly God, that’s your choice; but if you want to get a dose of reality about Reagan’s true legacy, we suggest you look into the faces of your gay friends, especially those that remember AIDS in the 1980s. As it happens, they’re not smiling.