On March 23, 2011, the gay community lost one of its earliest staunch celebrity advocates, Dame Elizabeth Taylor, two time Academy Award winner, one of the last legends of Hollywood’s Golden Age … and the first major celebrity in the world to come to the defense of people with AIDS.
For young LGBT people today, it must be hard to imagine the significance of her impact. We’re in an era where people like Ellen Degeneres and Neil Patrick Harris can be open about their sexual orientations and their careers can still thrive. Thirty-year-olds are approaching middle aged (more or less), but they have never lived in a world that didn’t know about AIDS.
But when I started to come out in early 1986, it was a very different world. And Liz was an unbelievably instrumental part of making it better.
The first cases of AIDS-related illnesses were first identified in the United States in 1981. Initially dubbed Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID) by the media, it wasn’t until a year later that the CDC adopted the term Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Its causes were unknown but it was clearly spreading like wildfire through the gay community.
When I first started to come out in 1986, the causal virus, HIV, had only just been identified a year or so before. But already Elizabeth Taylor had become an outspoken advocate for research, treatment, and above all, compassion.
I came out after the virus had been identified and safer sex practices were being promoted. It’s hard for me to grasp the magnitude of someone losing 90 percent of their friends. But I saw a generation lost, and I saw an entire nation gripped in fear. Young kids like Ryan White who had contracted AIDS had to sue for the right to go to school. Though such a thing never occurred in my own high school, I was shocked by the number of students who, in a poll I conducted for our student newspaper, felt that students with AIDS should be banned from schools. Police would wear latex gloves and sometimes even surgical masks if they were dealing with someone suspected of being gay. In the first election where I was legally allowed to vote, Prop. 64 tried to begin the process of quarantining people with AIDS, an initiative that most of us feared would lead to concentration camps. This is not hyperbole; it’s hard to describe the level of terror that gay people provoked in those days. Two years later, we had to rally again to defeat Prop. 102 that would have created those quarantines.
In the face of this, Elizabeth Taylor emerged as our first and forever greatest advocate. She helped her dear friend Rock Hudson found the National AIDS Research Foundation in 1983, which merged with a New York organization two years later to become the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR). Two years after that, she led a campaign to force President Ronald Reagan to finally address the disease. She created the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991 to provide direct services for people with AIDS, though she continued to remain involved with AmFAR.
Because of her humanitarian efforts, she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars in 1993 and the Presidential Citizens Medal from President Clinton in 2001.
Everyone today recognizes how dedicated Liz was in helping people with AIDS. But for younger people who didn’t live through it, it’s hard to comprehend how revolutionary that was. Perhaps more than anyone, she was instrumental in guiding a terrified America into responding with care and support and compassion rather than quarantining people with AIDS as lepers of a Biblical era.
