How Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor Helped Shatter the Silence Around AIDS

During the summer of 1985, Elizabeth Taylor grew frustrated with Hollywood’s unwillingness to get involved in fundraising for AIDS research. The screen icon had signed on to chair the inaugural Commitment to Life dinner benefiting the AIDS Project of Los Angeles (APLA). As she told Vanity Fair in 1992, she expected the work to be tough.

“The scuttlebutt was ‘Stay away from this one. You don’t want to get involved,’” she explained. “I asked people if they’d just attend—they didn’t have to do anything—or could they at least loan their names for a committee.”

Taylor said she was never told “no” so many times in her life: “They didn’t want to come to the evening, didn’t want to be associated.”

Just four years after the first AIDS cases, and only a year since scientists had identified the retrovirus (HIV) that causes it, there was no treatment and little understanding about how the disease spread. Fear and prejudice swirled around the epidemic, widely viewed as an illness that primarily affected gay men.

Studio heads who had profited millions from Taylor as one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars refused to take her calls about the event, explains Taylor biographer Kate Andersen Brower. Even close friends like Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson turned her down.

“I realized... that this town—of all towns—was basically homophobic,” Taylor told Vanity Fair, and that “the industry was turning its back on what it considered a gay disease.”

All that would change in July, when Taylor’s dear friend Rock Hudson revealed his AIDS diagnosis to the world.

Taylor and Hudson met in 1955 on the set of their film Giant. They quickly bonded over shared experiences of fame and feeling underestimated due to their beauty, writes Brower in Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon (2022).

Hudson’s sexuality had been something of an open secret within Hollywood for decades. At the same time, Taylor had been surrounded by gay men from her earliest days as a Hollywood starlette in the 1940s; she was close with co-stars Montgomery Clift and Roddy McDowall, as well as many gay artists who worked behind the scenes in the entertainment industry. Hudson found a kindred spirit in her and was open about his relationships with men, Brower says.

Despite their enduring closeness over the decades, Hudson did not confide in his friend when he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984. However, Michael Gottlieb—Hudson’s doctor and the man who first identified AIDS in 1981—informed Taylor of the diagnosis weeks before Hudson's public announcement on July 25, 1985, says Brower.

Apart from the devastation of learning that yet another friend was sick with what was then a terminal illness, Brower says Taylor was “irritated” that it took a celebrity of Hudson’s stature to get the industry to care about AIDS when so many were already suffering and dying.

“Suddenly it was cool for Hollywood to care when before they didn’t,” Brower says. “It affected her deeply.”

Nevertheless, Hudson’s disclosure mobilized Hollywood and inspired a sense of urgency around the Commitment to Life dinner on September 19, 1985. It became the first major celebrity AIDS fundraiser as many people who had previously avoided the crisis helped raise $1.3 million for the nonprofit organization. The 2,500-person guest list included Sammy Davis Jr., Shirley MacLaine, Carol Burnett, Cyndi Lauper, Cher, Rod Stewart and Stevie Wonder.

Burt Reynolds even read a supportive telegram from President Ronald Reagan, who praised the fundraiser and honored former first lady Betty Ford’s recognition at the event. Remarkably, Reagan had mentioned AIDS publicly for the first time only two days earlier during a press conference but did not deliver a formal address on the crisis until May 1987.

Missing from the star-studded evening was Hudson. He had spent $10,000 for his travel but was too sick to make the event. He died less than a month later on October 2, 1985, at age 59.

After the success of the Commitment to Life dinner, the West Coast’s National AIDS Research Foundation merged with New York’s AIDS Medical Foundation to create the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). Taylor became the new nonprofit’s founding national chairperson and principal spokesperson. She continued to be a fierce advocate for HIV/AIDS research and for people living with the disease for the rest of her life.

Taylor frequently challenged leaders in Washington for their inadequate response to the crisis, testifying before Congress three times in support of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act. In 1991, she founded the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, dedicated to providing direct care and support for people living with HIV/AIDS.

“It was a seismic change when she came out and started doing this work,” Brower says. Taylor “absolutely saved countless lives” through the money raised through these organizations.

The actor-turned-activist is credited with having raised over $100 million for HIV/AIDS-related causes during the last 25 years of her life. In one of Taylor’s final interviews before her death in 2011, she told Us Weekly: “My family and people with HIV/AIDS are my life.”

“She found her power as an activist,” Brower says. “For a long time, I think she was trying to figure out what to do with her life as an older woman in Hollywood who had aged, who had gone through weight fluctuation and been criticized on the cover of tabloids. She was trying to find her place, and this was the perfect thing to do with her influence.”