For over three decades, Elton John has been receiving the crowds of Hollywood’s biggest night — but the mission behind this year’s edition of the annual Oscars night fundraiser felt more urgent than ever.
Though you wouldn’t know it from the inside, the gala-style event took place inside a gargantuan tent in West Hollywood, or “in a dog park behind The Abbey,” as Chappell Roan gleefully put it on stage during her featured performance. By the time Drag Race stars like Heidi N’ Closet, Valentina, and Manila Luzon poured in, the Midwest Princess was gracing attendees with a generous, near hour-long set that ended with her and John (christened with a pink bedazzled cowboy hat) singing a duet version of “Pink Pony Club.” In addition to the intimate concert from Roan, a ticket to the event came with a full night of celebrity-studded programming, bidding access to a lively auction with Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe prints, and more.
But the event has always been about more than champagne and caviar for actors and film industry elite; it also raises funds for the vital work of the Elton John AIDS Foundation (EJAF). This year’s event raised a whopping $8.9 million for the foundation, which reached well over 600,000 people last year. With priority going to partners regardless of geographic location or socioeconomic status, their direct services model boasts 89 cents of every dollar raised going directly to those in need. And amid the Trump administration’s sweeping attacks on HIV research grants or the US-funded aid abroad, the work of the Foundation, arguably, hasn’t felt this critical since its inception.
Founded in 1992, EJAF was created in part as a response to grief. Elton John had lost friends like Freddie Mercury to AIDS and also forged a deeply personal relationship with Ryan White, a teenager from Kokomo, Indiana who became a poster child for the AIDS crisis after contracting the virus from a contaminated blood treatment and getting banned from his own school. John spent the last week of the teen’s life at the hospital with him and his family to provide support, and also take control of a stigmatizing media narrative, before White died in 1990 at 18.
Since EJAF’s launch, the organization’s efforts to end AIDS across the globe have stretched to 102 countries, with attention in years past to particularly at-risk groups like young people, trans communities, drug users, sex workers, and the incarcerated.
Though most might not know it, EJAF is the third-largest HIV-related philanthropic funder specifically for LGBTQ+ communities. But this year, U.S.-funded health programs and initiatives have been cut or closed down altogether, and though EJAF doesn't receive government funding itself, many of their partners are now under unprecedented strain. President Trump’s administration is hell-bent on withdrawing federal funding from any initiatives they don’t politically align with, leading to months of massive cuts in foreign aid services before all but shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) last Friday.
The layoff announcement, sent in an email to agency employees informing them of “USAID’s final mission,” detailed how the government would reduce USAID from a headcount of 10,000 to about 15. The news came despite lawsuits and public protests arguing that such downsizing efforts were illegal. The cuts — ostensibly done in the name of “efficiency” — are, in fact, part of the administration’s plan to use foreign aid as a tool of diplomacy. (This month, recipients of USAID were asked to prove their value to national interests amid questions about whether their programs would help in nativist initiatives like limiting illegal immigration.)
Without the services typically provided by USAID, the vital work of EJAF and others in the relief movement have been impacted. “Around two-thirds of our partners working in Africa and Asia have been affected by the USAID cuts,” Anne Aslett, the foundation’s CEO, tells Them. After the U.S. administration announced its freeze of foreign aid at the beginning of the year, EJAF contacted all partners to ascertain how they would be affected, with 41 partners reporting disruptions due to the stop-work orders.
“Drop-in centres have been closed, healthcare workers contracts have been terminated, laboratory services have been paused, family planning services have been halted, HIV testing kits are increasingly scarce, people have been left without prevention medication and antiretroviral therapy stock is running out and support has been withheld from vulnerable groups,” Aslett says.
In Vietnam, Aslett says, one EJAF partner’s funding for lab tests has completely halted, forcing patients to pay for routine lab tests out of pocket, which many cannot afford. Aslett also notes that many community-based peer supporters have been laid off; in Nigeria, one EJAF partner was forced to ration — and eventually suspend — all antiretroviral therapy (ART), which has prevented over 400 patients from receiving their monthly refill at the time of writing. In South Africa, another partner was forced to halt ART provision for at least 2000 clients and PrEP for 4000 clients.
Together, all of these closures and pauses will almost certainly add up to a devastating death toll on a global scale. In a World Health Organization (WHO) press conference earlier this month, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted that USAID’s cuts could “undo 20 years of progress.” With countries like Nigeria at risk of fully running out of HIV meds in the coming months, the impact of such cuts could lead to an estimated 10 million additional HIV cases and 3 million HIV-related deaths, per the WHO.
“This leaves HIV free to do what it does best — spread,” Aslett said during remarks at this year’s viewing party. “All the progress we’ve made in the fight against HIV is at risk.”
As more HIV prevention and treatment programs face disruption, the threat of HIV resurgence also looms large. Even stopping and restarting ART can cause drug resistance to develop and scale, posing a global health security threat. “If the pills don’t work abroad because drug resistance develops, they’re not going to work here either.”
“The longer the disruptions in HIV services last, the higher the likelihood of a new wave of preventable HIV infections,” Aslett notes.
Though EJAF’s work has been met with support from four presidents and 11 congresses, millions are now unsure whether they will get their life-saving medication. And as many advocates have expressed, this is not just a foreign issue.
“It matters to us,” Aslett stresses. If the U.S.-focused PEPFAR initiative were eliminated, she observes, the world could face an HIV pandemic by 2029, with an estimated 6.3 million AIDS-related deaths and 3.4 million AIDS orphans within 4 years.
But EJAF is committed to meeting this moment with the urgency it requires. In response to what experts are calling an imminent crisis, the foundation launched the Rocket Response Fund earlier this year. The emergency fund is designed to provide immediate relief to partners experiencing gaps in treatment, prevention, and workforce in HIV services affected by government cuts as EJAF continues to triage the most urgent requests for support in the wake of funding disruption. To EJAF, the mission has never been clearer.
“Tonight proved what’s possible when we unite,” actor Neil Patrick Harris said at this year’s gala, referring to a recent EJAF partnership with Tiko, an app that links adolescents in Kenya to sexual and reproductive health services. “People coming together to fight for a future where lives are saved, stigma is shattered, and no one is left behind.”
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.
