You are probably in the right ballpark. I still have Michael Fumento’s 1990 book, “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS”. At the time he was excoriated by the more prominent voices on the AIDS issue.
Now, proving God has a sense of humor, we are told by someone named de Cock that Mchael was dead on, 18 years ago.
I’ve been following this disease since I lost a cousin to what was then called GRIDS, Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disorder. Cuz had moved to the Castro in San Francisco and revelled in the “bathhouse” culture of the time. Then, the doctors didn’t know what the hell it was, the retrovirus hadn’t yet been isolated, all they knew from tracking cases was it had something to do with gay men, and the deduction it probably had to do with the sex life wasn’t difficult as a question of science.
Politically, something else. To get and maintain the huge funding, it was necessary to scare the bejeezus out of everyone.
BTW, forget the notion AIDS is “God’s scourge” on the sinners. If that were so, why is the group with the lowest incidence exclusively lesbian women? It’s all in the mechanics of transmission. HIV/AIDS is really quite hard to “catch”. Best estimates are about 1 in 500 sexual contacts with an infected person. Needle-sharing in drug abuse is something else, direct blood-to-blood contact has a high probability of transmission, and accounts for a lot of the heterosexual AIDS out there.
I remember when GRID first came out, and the homosexual lobby lowered the boom on the Reagan Administration for not curing it immediately. They even accused Reagan of inventing it.
Then came the lies, that our wives, kids, and dogs were going to get it. If you said it was a gay disease, you were met with all kinds of scorn. The press and entertainment culture were full of stories of newborns in pediatric AIDS units. AIDS was the first full scale use of political correctness. Look at us now.