amfAR

And then she did a benefit in 2020 called The Great Work Begins, Scenes from Angels in America.

which was to raise money for AMFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.

So Glenn and a bunch of other big-name actors enacted scenes from Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and Glenn actually played Roy Cohn.

which is a fascinating bit of casting.

The movie did well at the box office, was generally liked but not loved by critics, and, according to a contemporary TV Guide review, Winkler turns in the best performance of his career, and Keaton is wonderful.

However, the longest-lasting legacy of this film is probably the role it played in raising $3 million for the American Foundation for AIDS Research.

The film's closing credits sequence features a song performed by Rod Stewart and written by husband and third wife duo Burt Bacharach and Carol Bayer Sager.

By their powers combined, Stewart, Bacharach, and Sager made a track so powerful that it was destined to live and die on the Night Shift soundtrack, if not for the intervention of former Bacharach and Hal David collaborator, Dionne Warwick.

This is from a New Yorker article much later.

"In 1988, in an effort to put Duesberg's theories to rest, the American Foundation for AIDS Research sponsored a scientific forum in Washington, DC on the origins of the epidemic.

One after another, researchers presented data linking the increase of HIV infections around the world to the growing number of AIDS cases.

Duesberg rejected the data completely.

And remember earlier when I said Ronnie started mentioning in 1985 that AIDS was the nation's top priority? Well, this was because it took his best friend getting sick for Ronnie to even give a shit.

Rock died on October 2nd, and the day he died, his estate granted $250,000 to co-found the American Foundation for AIDS Research with Elizabeth Taylor, which she continued until she died in 2011.

The day Rock Hudson died in 1985, Congress provided $190 million in funding for AIDS research.

But the real change in how the US government started to deal with the AIDS epidemic came when a 15-year-old middle school student from Indiana named Ryan White was diagnosed with AIDS.