Dame Elizabeth Taylor: When her friend, actor Rock Hudson, revealed publicly in 1985 that he had AIDS, Taylor stood by him and said she would commit her life to the fight to stop AIDS. She was true to her word. Only her death, in March 2011, could stop her activism.
Lady Gaga: In her short but dazzling career, Gaga has modeled more than colorful get-ups as she speaks openly about her own safe-sexual choices. Even if she isn’t gay herself, “Mother Monster,” has been a more visible champion for LGBT (and every other) people than any of our own!
Sir Elton John: For Sir Elton, it was a friendship with the Indiana teenager Ryan White, who was infected with HIV through his hemophilia medication, that brought out his latent AIDS activist. John has raised tens of millions of dollars for AIDS causes through his Elton John AIDS Foundation. Ryan White was the namesake of the federal government’s $2+ billion Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, passed four months after his death in 1990.
Larry Kramer: Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the world’s first AIDS organization, was founded in his living room in Manhattan. His speech at the New York Gay and Lesbian Community Center on the night of March 10, 1987, could be called ‘the shot heard round the gay world.’ It also led to the formation of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, best known as ACT UP. “I think we must want to die,” said Kramer. “I have never been able to understand why for six long years we have sat back and let ourselves literally be knocked off man by man–without fighting back. I have heard of denial, but this is more than denial; it is a death wish.”
Randy Shilts: The San Francisco Chronicle reporter used the visibility of his articles in the city’s major newspaper to warn gay men in the earliest years of AIDS about the risks of promiscuity. Shilts is best remembered for chronicling the first six years of the epidemic in his bestselling 1987 book And the Band Played On.
Anthony Fauci, M.D.: The longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. Dr. Fauci for years was a lightning rod for the wrath of AIDS activists who accused him of intentional foot-dragging on HIV research–and worse. Larry Kramer regularly lambasted Fauci, publicly called him a “murderer”–before eventually calling him “friend.” Once the target of protests, Fauci came to admire and value the contributions of his former accusers.
U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein: When she became mayor of San Francisco after the 1978 double-assassination of Mayor George Moscone and gay Supervisor Harvey Milk, neither Dianne Feinstein nor anyone else knew that only a few years later the city would face a natural disaster that would kill far more residents than the Great Earthquake of 1906. Feinstein was the daughter, wife and mother of doctors, so looked at AIDS as a medical–not moral–problem. Because she had gay friends and staff, she also saw the epidemic as “our” problem and not “their” problem. No wonder San Francisco was able to mount what most consider the world’s best response to its AIDS problem.
Bobbi Campbell: A member of the famous Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, San Francisco nurse Bobbi Campbell was the first person ever to go public about having AIDS. Some of the earliest educational posters were simply photographs of the purple Kaposi’s sarcoma (K.S.) lesion on Campbell’s foot. He called himself the “K.S. Poster Boy.” With fellow gay AIDS activists–the first ones ever–Campbell helped to form the National Association of People with AIDS in 1983.
Cleve Jones: A protege of San Francisco rabble rouser and first openly gay elected official in the country, Harvey Milk, Cleve Jones was instrumental in forming the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the city’s first and today its oldest AIDS service organization. “You! How would you like to serve your community?” he used to say to gay men walking by on Castro Street in the earliest years of AIDS. “Come up here and answer my phone, would you?” The phone was the city’s first AIDS information hotline. Jones would become best known outside of San Francisco for originating the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the most iconic image of the epidemic.
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Michael Bedwell
Christ of the Andes! Was enjoying this appropriate salute until I came to an inexcusable regurgitating of the MYTH that Harvey Milk was “the first openly gay elected official in the country”! He wasn’t even the SECOND. Please print his out and post it over your PC:
1st – Kathy Kozachenko (Ann Arbor, Mich., City Council, April 1974)
2nd – Elaine Noble (Massachusetts House of Representatives, November 1974)
3rd – Allan Spear (Minnesota State Senate, reelected November 1976 after coming out, in office, in 1974) He was also the first out gay leader of a state legislature [not CA’s John Perez as the Courage Campaign claimed] serving as the Senate’s President from 1992-2000. In all, he was there 28 years.
4th – Jim Yeadon (Madison, Wis., City Council, April 1977)
5th – Harvey Milk (San Francisco Board of Supervisors, November 1977)
Thank you.
SteveC
Oh well.
Harvey was 5th then.
He’s famous so he’s 1st (iconic and shit).
QJ201
While Gaga is to be commended for her LGBT Advocacy, except for a Mac cosmetic promotion, she really hasn’t done much of anything HIV/AIDS specific to warrant her inclusion on this list.
John Crespin
Bravo to all your selections and I’m sure everyone can think of ten additional folks to add to this great list. I would have added Michael Jordan.
keep queer & carry on
Lady Gaga is not gay, but she is a member of the LGBT community! She is bisexual.
pro person
really? you couldn’t say heroes/heroines in your headline?
Tyler
fuck gaga being on this list. supporting those with AIDs now vs when Liz Taylor did… apples and oranges. Stop crawling up Gaga’s ass queerty. just stop now. her being in the top ten is laughable.
Jeff
Larry Kramer is NOT any sort of hero to LGBT people or even gay men, or people with HIV/AIDS. He’s never been anything but a professional victim and professional complainer, and cares about nobody except himself and other rich white gay men.
Toferdavid
Jeff, I am gay. Larry Kramer is a hero. He is a hero to me.
Max the Communist
1) Lady Gaga is a member of the LGBT–the B stands for bisexual.
2) Lady Gaga’s activism is largely LGBT focussed, not HIV focussed. Plus she’s two generations too young to even have experience of the pandemic at its worst in America.
3) Want a bisexual HIV activist who actually did make an impact in the war against HIV? May I suggest the little known but crucial work of Dr. David Lourea. A major activist at the San Francisco Bisexual Center (1976-1985) and appointed to Dianne Fienstein’s AIDS Education Advisory Committee in 1983, Lourea convinced the SF Department of Public Health to include bisexual men in its weekly “New AIDS cases and mortality statistics” report. That model was then adopted by other public health departments around the country. Ultimately, Lourea’s work was responsible for the national government adoption of the term MSM (men who have sex with men) as a designation that includes all men engaging in same-sex activity, whether they identify as gay, straight, bi or no labels.
Or you can read about the HIV activism of Elias Farajaje-Jones, Lani Ka-ahumanu, Cianna Stewart and many others at
http://www.binetusa.org/bihealth.html