The government was supposed to act on what? Information they didn't have? Information that would be ignored by the primary carriers/Typhoid Marties even if they did have it, because according to your own description here, gays were proto-SJWs who believed that everything was done to victimize them and couldn't have more reasonable motives?
And what would you have had them do? The government's terrible at constructive solutions; and if you have a recalcitrant population unwilling to restrain themselves, you do realize that all the government can do is deter under penalty or forcibly quarantine? And lo and behold, those were declared unconstitutional (because they oppressed the gays, apparently), so...what was left to be done, exactly?
I'm open to there being some government fault here, if it can be proven, but neither "They should have paid less attention to the Cold War and more attention to meeeeeee" nor "What, you expect me to exercise normal adult responsibility? Responsibility is something the government does for you" qualifies as that proof.
I get that the normal reaction nowadays to every problem is "The government oughta", but the government can't oughta when the problem is willfully negligent and irresponsible behavior.
They weren't proto-SJW's who constantly saw themselves as "victims" per se, but a lot of them remembered that time before the Stonewall protests (and more importantly, before homosexuality was decriminalized/removed from the DSM)
As for why they didn't trust the government, it wasn't just being in denial and refusing to "grow up" and a lot of them did suspect that the government was going to victimize them. But it was a lot different from the victim mentality of SJW's and at the time, the assumption seemed a lot more reasonable.
There was a real fear that Reagan was going to either reverse a lot of the laws that decriminalized homosexuality or was going to voice his support for state politicians who would. The Reagan Administration was very closely allied with the Religious Right and Reagan himself openly expressed contempt for the Sexual Revolution of the previous decade.
Reagan's "Morning in America" platform during the 1980 Election was basically "The 1960's and 1970's were a mistake" and given the terror of the New Left, the eventual collapse of Nixon's detente, and the many failures and utter hardships of the Carter years, the platform was appealing to your average American.
Here's the thing though, the 1970's was honestly the first time that gay people as a whole were even allowed to legally exist in Western society since the rise of Emperor Constantine*. This was new and uncharted territory and it's usually easier to undo and overturn the legalization of something while it's still within recent living memory.
If you didn't really know the full extent of the AIDS epidemic (and few outside the CDC did in the early part of the crisis) and suddenly federal agents are telling you to shut down the bathhouses and bars less than a decade after they became legal, it wouldn't be that irrational to think there might be an ulterior motive.
The kind of apathy and irresponsibility that the gay community exhibited during the AIDS crisis of the 80's could've only been able to happen at the time it did. The lack of easily accessed information (remember, no internet) and the relative newness of the gay community as a whole played a major role in why the pandemic got as bad as it did.
Hypothetically speaking, if the Stonewall protests and the legalization of homosexuality still happened at the time it did and Reagan still got elected in 1980 and 1984, but HIV first arrives in America in the 1990's instead of the 1970's, with the first known cases of AIDS in the early 2000's instead of the 1980's, I doubt you would've had a scenario where "the band played on" and instead the gay community would've likely taken more responsibility and actively helped the CDC in trying to contain the virus as much as possible.
While the LGBT community wasn't championed in the 1990's and 2000's like they are in the 2010's, there was a lot more tolerance and acceptance compared to the 1970's and 1980's and homosexuality would have been legal for longer, so you probably wouldn't have had any assumptions of an ulterior motive for the government from the gay community.
*-A handful of liberal Nordic countries decriminalized homosexuality in the 1950's, but it was still heavily stigmatized and there were still legal gray areas until Norway legalized gay marriage in 1974.
