David Boeri, remembering Elizabeth Taylor for her courage on AIDS:
She weighed in heavily. She shamed the industry that turned its back on its own, like her friend Rock Hudson. And then, complaining that no one was doing anything to raise money, she did. She raised millions — for the AIDS Research Foundation and the AIDS Medical Foundation and the Elizabeth Taylor HIV/AIDS Foundation. And she kept on going.
I came to know her in a small way in the mid-eighties, when she was battling with her own demons of addiction. She was grand, all right, and she hypnotized crowds with her eyes and manner, but she had the dedication of a bedside nurse. And for those years in the early eighties, she had more clout than the surgeon general.
As a TV reporter then, Boeri said some of his camera men refused to shake hands with patients.