Gillian Tett
Last Sunday afternoon, two glitzy rituals took place in Hollywood. One was the star-studded annual Academy Awards ceremony. The second – which I attended – was the annual Oscar-viewing dinner hosted by Elton John and his husband David Furnish to raise money for the Elton John Aids Foundation.
This not-quite-the-Oscars fund-raiser, which has been going for 26 years, does not, of course, get the same billing as the actual Academy Awards. But I suspect it is rather more fun. As celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, Lionel Richie and Ricky Martin tripped across Elton’s red carpet and watched the Oscars on gigantic television screens over dinner, there was an air of informal jollity, even amid the relentless fundraising (guests were invited to text in pledges throughout, and the live auction ended up raising about $6m).
“I had a drunken ‘spell check’ moment on my last donation,” Cyrus texted the crowd. “So for that I apologize and donate another 5k. Thanks Elton for all you do! #DontBeCheap everybody donate!”
What was also striking, however, was the cultural symbolism of the event. If you look beyond the red carpet, what the Elton John party shows is just how much attitudes can quietly change. In the early 1980s, when the HIV virus was first identified, it was almost impossible to discuss Aids in polite company. The younger generation might struggle to believe this now: anybody aged 25, like Miley Cyrus, takes it for granted that the victims of Aids deserve only our compassion and support – and that the gay community has the same rights as anyone else. This is a generation, after all, that overwhelmingly backs gay marriage.
But only three decades ago, the word Aids inspired so much terror that when people contracted the disease, they tended to hide it, or disappear, even if they were famous. Indeed, a whole generation of artists and performers, from Robert Mapplethorpe to Liberace to Fela Kuti, were ravaged by the disease, and faded from view.
The stigma existed partly because, at the time, the disease appeared to be both contagious and incurable. But the other issue was that HIV and Aids were associated with the gay community and assumptions around promiscuity; areas that overturned traditional cultural conventions. Aids existed, as an anthropologist might say, in a sphere of cultural pollutants; it seemed taboo.
When Elton John threw his first Oscar party in 1993, he helped to redefine these issues. Aids became a philanthropic “cause” – and mainstream society started to embrace it. The money from last weekend’s dinner brought the total raised in the past 26 years to some $70m – and to more than $400m for the foundation.
Notably, this year’s key sponsors included American Airlines and BBVA Compass bank. Two decades ago, that might have seemed odd. BBVA Compass, which began its affiliation with the Elton John Aids Foundation in 2016, has big operations in conservative southern states such as Alabama. But today, the top officials at the bank – like most other lenders – are keen to embrace a “diversity” agenda, and think that the Elton John Aids Foundation has a new regional relevance. Although America’s Aids victims used to be concentrated in coastal areas like California, “the epicenter of the HIV disease has now moved from the coasts”, as BBVA Compass says, to poor southern areas like Alabama and Texas, where many of the bank’s customers are based.
While medical advances make it possible to treat the disease, only the wealthier patients in the US can afford the drugs. Thus, infection rates are now higher in the poor areas of the south than in the wealthier coastal communities. The challenge to confront Aids is now more to do with poverty and access to healthcare than culture wars, which makes it far easier for groups such as BBVA to get involved.
Of course, this raises a question: might this type of attitudinal change be repeated elsewhere in the coming years? The arena of sexual harassment is one contender, given the #MeToo campaign. So is gun control. But another fascinating issue is opioid addiction. In recent years, the drug epidemic has been shrouded in stigma. And – like Aids – there has been a woefully slow public policy response, even though about 64,000 people a year are now thought to be dying from drug overdoses in the US (slightly more than the annual deaths from Aids at its peak in the mid-1990s).
Thus far, no star has arisen to be an Elton John of the opioid crisis, throwing glamorous dinners that might put the disease on the celebrity map – and remove the stigma. But if any of the celebrities who attended this year’s Oscars want to make a splash, perhaps they should explore this idea. Raising money will not fix the opioid mess alone but it is needed to fight the crisis, along with a new sense of public focus. And as Elton’s Oscar dinner shows, sometimes campaigns can spark cultural change. Don’t ignore the symbolism of that red carpet.
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