A gay friend and colleague on Elizabeth Taylor's AIDS work and how she created a safe space to be out

The film industry hasn’t always been a friendly place for LGBTQ+ people. In most of the 20^th century, being out — or outed — usually was a career ender. But there was one bright light in Hollywood for the community, one of the biggest movie stars and one of the most famous women in the world: Elizabeth Taylor.

“She was the best friend you could ever have,” says Tim Mendelson, a gay man who worked for Taylor from 1990 until her death in 2011 and is now co-trustee of her estate and an officer of the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. For National Coming Out Day, he speaks to The Advocate about how Taylor created a safe space to be out and about her involvement in the fight against HIV and AIDS at a time when few high-profile people would get involved.

Mendelson went to work for Taylor at the suggestion of a friend after a short time in the film business as a production assistant. His position with Taylor didn’t really have a name, but “I was her right-hand person and by her side,” he says.

“Being in her life was like living in a movie every day,” he notes, with events such as her tour to promote White Diamonds perfume and her 60^th birthday party, which took over Disneyland. It was also a good situation for a gay man who’d been bullied in his youth.

Related: The Passion of Elizabeth Taylor

“At some point I realized I was gay, but the kids on the playground realized I was gay before I did,” he says. He moved from North Carolina to Los Angeles as a child, and he found the kids in L.A. were meaner. “I got bullied and teased so much … it traumatized me,” he says.

Things got better in high school and college, and he learned that being friend with the pretty, popular girls offered some protection. “So I went to work for the prettiest, most popular girl in the world,” he says.

He was out to his parents and a few close friends when he started working for Taylor, but with her he felt free to be completely out. “Once I was in Elizabeth’s world, it was just a totally safe place,” he says. “It wasn’t a question in her world as it was in the rest of the world.”

Taylor was famed for her friendships with gay and bisexual men, and Mendelson notes this as well. She was friends with Roddy McDowall from the time they made the 1943 film Lassie Come Home as child actors, and “Montgomery Clift was like a soulmate of hers,” he says.

She acted in films based on the work of gay playwrights too, such as Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which Taylor won her second Academy Award.

And while she was friends with her Giant costar Rock Hudson, it wasn’t because of him that she became involved in the fight against HIV and AIDS — she had been involved for a while before Hudson’s AIDS diagnosis became public in July 1985, Mendelson says. “It was just that this community needed her help,” he says.

For instance, when AIDS Project Los Angeles (now APLA Health) was planning its first Commitment to Life fundraising dinner that year, the executive director, Bill Misenhimer, asked Taylor if she wanted to attend, and she said she would not only attend but help organize the event, Mendelson says. “Until it was public that Rock had AIDS, she couldn’t get Hollywood to participate,” he notes. Then Hollywood did participate, with many big names turning out for the event, at which Taylor delivered a passionate speech. She was a frequent visitor to AIDS hospices as well, Mendelson recalls.

Related: 1985: the year the AIDS crisis finally broke through the silence

Also in 1985, Taylor cofounded the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), which focuses on medical research. She also wanted to do something to in the realm of direct services and advocacy, and to that end she founded the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991.

Taylor started her foundation with the $1 million she received from selling the photos of her wedding to Larry Fortensky to People magazine, and she wanted the foundation to continue after her death, so she left 25 percent of her name and license royalties to it. The organization has a "great executive director," Mendelson says, in Catherine Brown.

While advances in treatment have allowed many people with HIV to live normal, healthy lives and never develop AIDS, Mendelson stresses that the fight must go on — globally. Not everyone has access to HIV-fighting drugs or can afford them, and that’s the same with the HIV prevention drugs used in pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. “The bottom line is there’s no cure,” he notes. And there are still laws in more than 30 states that criminalize people with HIV, and Taylor’s foundation is seeking to change this situation through its HIV Is Not a Crime project.

While the Trump administration has made some drastic cuts to HIV and AIDS programs, Mendelson declines to speculate on what Taylor would think about current politics. She was willing to work with both Republicans and Democrats to help fund the fight, and one of her husbands, the late U.S. Sen. John Warner, was a Republican, although of a moderate variety in short supply today. She even pushed President Ronald Reagan to address the AIDS crisis and to speak at an amfAR event. “Elizabeth was just a very practical woman,” Mendelson says.

A new generation is getting to know Taylor through the work of another Taylor — Swift, whose song “Elizabeth Taylor,” on her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, wonders if love will be forever. In every one of the eight marriages Elizabeth Taylor went into, she thought it would be forever, Mendelson notes.

But while her love life filled the gossip columns and her film performances won her acclaim, he remembers her primarily as a friend and an advocate. He recalls her speech upon receiving GLAAD’s Vanguard Award in 2000, when she said, “There is no gay agenda; it’s a human agenda.”

“We’re all human beings,” he reflects. “Elizabeth was also a human being. She always held on to her sense of childlike wonder. She wasn’t jaded. She had an open heart.” He describes her as a “spiritually evolved, loving person who was also tough as nails.”

“It was magical,” he says of his time with Taylor. “Sometimes I’d have to pinch myself. Yes, I worked for her, but she was also my best friend, and I was hers.”