Since JOHN didn't grow up or live during the 80's here is a great retrospective.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/th...180948611/

Some highlights
* In 1982, Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz, two gay men living with AIDS in New York City, published How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, which helped spread the idea that safe sex could be used as protection against spreading the epidemic--an idea that hadn't yet become prevalent in the medical community.

So apparently the most at risk people understood what would help reduce the risk of catching the disease

* In 1981 there were 121 US deaths attributed to what we now know as AIDS
* The virus was not isolated until 1984
*federally-funded campaigns sought to address a large number of people from all backgrounds--male, female, homosexual or heterosexual. The America Responds to AIDS campaign, created by the CDC, ran from 1987 to 1996 and became a central part of the "everyone is at risk" message of AIDS prevention.
*"It's a fundamental question of public health," says Brier. "Do you spread information by scaring people, do you do it by trying to tap into pleasure or do you do it by recognizing that people’s behavior isn’t just about their individual will but a whole different set of circumstances?"

There isn't much about funding or lack thereof. In the cold hard calculus of disease funding, there weren't enough deaths to warrant huge budget increases earlier. In the early 80's not much was none about the disease other than how to best prevent it. Imagine if those most at risk embraced the idea of how best to prevent its spread at that time. That, more than any Govt funding would have helped stem the tide.
Blaming Reagan for the AIDS epidemic is like blaming Woodrow Wilson for the Spanish Flu pandemic. Which killed far more in the US than AIDS ever has.