In the summer of 1985, I went to Paris.
I was then working as a newspaper reporter and there had been an outbreak of teen suicides in my city and I finagled my way to an international conference on teen suicide in Paris. This was one of the great perks of being a paid journalist back in the day. It didn’t hurt that my best friend was there for the summer with her boyfriend and that I had roughly 10 weeks of vacation coming to me.
If you were not alive in 1985 or are not old enough to remember it – the hysteria about AIDS (which had previously – and not too much previously – been known as GRID – Gay Related Immune Deficiency) was – not to put too fine a word to it – hysterical. I do not mean “funny.” People who knew people who had the disease wouldn’t touch them or visit them. There were “jokes” about sliding pizzas under their doors as their only sustenance.
That fall I would unexpectedly enter law school. I had been wait-listed by the two law schools I wanted to attend – which was why I felt sanguine about blowing a bunch of vacation time and dollars sallying off to Paris. (The ugly anti-gay AIDS hysteria at my law school – a place where people supposedly went to stand up for the rights of others – is another story.)
That summer, when I was in Paris, I had the time of my life. I was in my 20s, the dollar fetched 11 Francs, all the pretty clothes were on sale and my best friend and I visited museums and shops and drank wine by the Seine and were the sort of happy that comes with being in your 20s in Paris with not a care in the world. There are few types of happy that are better.
My hotel room that I had booked had mysteriously been cancelled (chalk it up to the maze of tourists that showed up that summer as a result of the cheap Franc) and I ended up in a tiny room with a bed and a bathroom down the hall – but it cost the US equivalent of $10 a day (with breakfast). There was no phone in the room, which made it exceedingly difficult to file my stories on the conference – I ended up dictating them to my newspaper from the office of the concierge. The phone bill was more than my hotel bill.
A few days into my stay, the concierge knocked on my door to tell me that my newspaper was calling me. They were calling me to let me know that Rock Hudson was in a hospital in Paris and that he had AIDS. They asked me to go cover the story.
That’s how big a story this was then. Rock Hudson, Hollywood movie star, was in a French hospital being treated for AIDS. It was front-page news around the world.
Because, at the time, no one EVER admitted having AIDS.
No one could possibly have the AIDS virus, because no one could possibly be gay.
It was not too long after the announcement about Rock Hudson that Elizabeth Taylor began her campaign to raise money to combat the disease. She did so at a time when this was not popular. In her friend, Dominick Dunne’s book, People Like Us, there is a character that is obviously her (who is donating $2 million to AIDS research) and there is another character, a Park Avenue socialite, whose son has AIDS. The socialite mother visits her son in the hospital and leaves him a shopping bag of books. At the bottom of the bag is a prescription bottle of barbituates – the message being that suicide would be an appropriate choice.
Suicide being a better end than admitting that one had AIDS.
In the decades since, Dame Elizabeth Taylor worked tirelessly to educate people about AIDS prevention and to raise millions of dollars for research for a cure.
She was one of the most beautiful women who ever lived, a famous and gifted actress (I love her movies and am a huge fan) – but what I am grateful for, tonight, is all she did to wake up the world about AIDS. What a legacy to leave.
Thank you, so much, Dame Elizabeth Taylor.