There is a huge amount of material about this, plenty for research. Just as a way to familiarize yourself with some of the circumstances surrounding AIDS policy in the early days, you may want to read And the Band Played On. Or watch the movie, if you just want a really quick overview. Long story short: people were uncomfortable about AIDS, made jokes, ignored Centers for Disease Control requests for lots of funds to do research, some said it was a good thing because it was killing all the right people, there was a race to isolate the thing that caused AIDS because while it was known there was this disease that attacked the immune system, no one knew what the disease was exactly -- a virus? bacteria? fungus? something else? and at least one doctor (Gallo. Scathing article here: http://media.sethroberts.net/spy/Lab_Rat_bw.pdf) made his quest for glory more about him than about saving lives and so tied up researchers in an intercontinental argument about who made the discovery, and the delay may have caused a large number of deaths. And then once HIV was discovered and then soon after that, a test for HIV was developed, people were afraid to get tested because the results could be so stigmatizing, endangering their job and relationships with family and friends. Even getting the test in and of itself, was stigmatizing, because if your health insurance company found out you had gotten the test, they might drop your insurance.

Another movie to watch is The Normal Heart, a fictionalized view of the situation. And watch the very brief documentary When AIDS was Funny, which covers the efforts of a White House reporter to get some kind of acknowledgement from the White House that AIDS exists and they're doing something about it. Instead, all he got were jokes about it from the White House spokesman.

There will be a lot written about the Reagan administration's non-response to AIDS for years.

See if you can access archives for the* New York Times*, and check to see if you can get papers like The Philadelphia Gay News.