In New York City on May 8, the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation will honor veteran actress Rosie Perez and The Howard Stern Show icon Gary Dell’Abate by shining a light on their decades of activism on behalf of the cause. It will surely be a big night for the pair, and if Dell’Abate’s mother were still alive, he knows exactly what she would say.
“The most meaningful part of this whole thing for me is if my mother were still alive, I would give her the award and she would put it on her mantle,” Dell’Abate told The Hollywood Reporter by phone recently. “And she would tell everyone who walked in the house that Elizabeth Taylor gave her son an award.”
It’s an obvious thing to boast about, but the comment carries extra weight when considering why Dell’Abate got involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS in the first place. Dell’Abate’s brother, Steven, died of AIDS in January 1991, a precarious time for those suffering from the disease and their families. After shaking off the shock of his beloved brother’s death, Dell’Abate jumped in to offer support by joining LifeBeat, an organization that he has been closely associated with for more than three decades (he served as president and now sits on the board).
Below, Dell’Abate talks to THR about his favorite memories of Steven, the controversy of handing out condoms at concerts with LifeBeat and how he’s seen the fight against HIV/AIDS shift and change over the decades.
Congratulations are in order …
Yeah. I’ve been on the board of LifeBeat for, gosh, it’s got to be more than 30 years now. I lost my brother in 1991, and I wanted to do something. I joined this amazing organization, and I was president for about a dozen years. A couple of years ago, we partnered with the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, which is an amazing organization. They’re doing a dinner in May, honoring two people including myself and Rosie Perez. Rosie will be getting the Elizabeth Taylor Legacy Award and I will receive the Elizabeth Taylor Commitment to End AIDS Award for my work in being on the board for 30 years.
You’re somebody that I assume has been offered many awards and gets invited to many high-profile events. Why did you say yes?
I get asked to do stuff all the time, and I always feel like shouldn’t bother your friends too many times. You can’t accept everything. At the end of the day, this is really about raising money for the cause. My knee-jerk reaction is to save the asks for something really important to me so when they asked me to do this, I realized, wait a minute, this is the thing that’s really important to me. This is the cause that I’ve been saving it for.
What’s the strategy with your speech? Do you read it to someone you trust in advance?
I haven’t really gotten there yet. It’s not going to be a very long speech. By the time I thank all the people who have helped me out with this and talk about my brother, that’s really the speech. We’ll be talking about my brother because he’s the reason I do this. He died in 1991 and every time I do any of this work, it helps me remember him. I have two kids, ages 30 and 27, and they never got to meet him. We talk about him all the time. My older son lives on the West Coast, so he won’t be able to make it to the dinner, but my younger son is going to attend. It will give us another opportunity to talk about the uncle that he never met. That makes me feel good.
What was Steven like?
I am the youngest of three. He was the middle brother, and he lived in Manhattan. He led a pretty simple life. He took classes at school. He drove a cab during the day. He loved to travel. He loved the movies. When I was a kid, I would take the train into the city all the time. We would go to the Zigfeld [Theatre] and see all the movies on the first run. I remember we went to see Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter and Hair and all those. Then, we would hang out and have dinner. He was just a really funny guy who had a great circle of friends. He was a really good uncle to my older brother’s kid. It’s one of the things that makes me sad because I always thought that once I got married and had kids, he would be the cool uncle who would come over and spend time with my family, never realizing that we would never get there.
That’s heartbreaking. What’s interesting about your journey is that you joined the fight and stayed with it these past 30+ years, meaning you’ve seen the attitudes and support for HIV/AIDS shift and change over the years. What has that been like to be knee-deep in the work ,and how do you see it from your vantage point in 2025?
It’s very interesting. After my brother died, I was kind of numb for a while. At some point I realized that I could do something so I went with a really good friend to see a screening of Philadelphia. We were blown away by it, and we went out for coffee afterward to decompress. We both said, “We have to do something.” She knew a guy who is still a very good friend, Tim Rosta, who is on the board with us. At the time, there were two organizations really doing the work, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and LifeBeat. GMHC was amazing, and it was raising money like crazy so I felt like they didn’t need my help.
LifeBeat was a smaller, more grassroots organization. It was started by Bob Caviano and Daniel Glass, who was in the music industry. When people started dying, he knew they needed to help their own. So, I went to LifeBeat and that’s where I met Tim and started working with them. Since it’s a smaller organization, every penny you raised meant a lot more.
What was the work like in the beginning?
At the time we were very big on education — that was really LifeBeat’s thing — meaning that we weren’t the organization trying to find the cure. We were involved in education, we were really helpful in helping to pay the bills of musicians who had AIDS. We were involved with God’s Love We Deliver, which brought meals to people’s homes. Then probably the biggest thing that we did was we started to go on tour with major acts and would set up booths at concert venues to distribute condoms. It seems so ridiculous now that it would be considered controversial, but we were very controversial back in the ’90s.
In fact, I remember one year we planned to do a Christmas tree decorated with condoms in Central Park. The commissioner of parks at the time said we we weren’t allowed to do that because they didn’t like it. We ended up bringing the tree to MTV’s TRL and we lit the tree on TV, which was a much more effective way for us to get a lot more press. We went on tour with Ozzfest, Madonna, Rod Stewart and more. That was a large part of our thing.
How has it changed?
I have seen this shift over the years. One of the things I like to do is go out and talk publicly when I can. There were a lot of years when, on World AIDS Day, I would speak at a high school. I remember when I first started, I would say, “How many people here know who Magic Johnson is?” Everybody would raise their hand, and I would talk about the impact it had when he first announced that he was HIV+. It has now gotten to the point that I would ask the same question and nobody would raise their hand. I realized that there’s a whole new generation out there who don’t know its history.
I remember seeing Angels in America when it came out, which was not long after my brother died. I saw it in Manhattan and it was riveting. You could hear a pin drop. It was such an important piece that showed what was going on in real life at the time. A few years ago, I went to see the reboot of it, and it was amazing but it’s now become a period piece. There’s a whole generation of people who don’t remember what it was like in the ’80s and ’90s when people died at such a rapid rate, and it really was a true pandemic. They don’t remember.
They also don’t remember what happened to patients like your brother who had issues receiving care at hospitals. I read some of your quotes in recalling what it was like to visit him during that time and it sounded awful how ostracized people were when they were sick and in need of help …
It was crazy. It was kind of brave for our family even to publicly admit what happened to him. But that’s what it was. My brother, when he originally went to the hospital, went by ambulance and they took him to a floor that wasn’t the floor called PWA, or people with AIDS. Once he got to the right floor, the care he got was amazing. Everybody who worked there wanted to be there. He was in the hospital for nine months before he passed away. It was a really long time.
Wow.
Another great thing that LifeBeat did was a program called Hearts and Voices. We would send singers to hospitals, hospices and wards every night of the week to perform. It really made a difference. My brother sat in a hospital for nine months with nothing and if somebody came to perform one night, he would’ve been thrilled.
Now that LifeBeat has joined forces with the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, how has the work changed or how has your role changed?
I was talking to somebody recently, and I told them that I was on the board of an AIDS charity and they said, “Oh, is that still a thing?” It’s really sad. The answer is a resounding “yes!” I’m not going to get political but I will just say that this administration isn’t going to be very helpful for this cause, and quite honestly for many charitable causes. AIDS is still an issue in this country and especially globally. Grants are going to be hard to come by if they’re government funded. We’re going to have to find a different way.
Do you feel that there is more of an urgent nature to the work now?
Well, I think that the less money you give, the less ability you have to educate people, the more chances of it coming back on the upswing. So yes, I feel this is really important. The other thing that LifeBeat has pivoted to is that we promote reproductive health along with HIV prevention and services that support them regardless of status, gender or sexuality. We call it sexual health. For instance, a trans person is more likely to be attacked, but for a Black trans person, the numbers are astronomical. Part of what we’re trying to do is help people, but we’re also trying to educate people. I also think we all just got to learn to be nicer to each other.
You have a really demanding career, a high-profile job, a family and children. Was there ever a time you thought that maybe you would step aside from this kind of work?
No, but there was a period of time when I thought maybe this organization doesn’t need to exist anymore, that maybe we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve done the work that we have to do. But I always stuck with it because we are the only ones doing what we do while other organizations have closed down. We were the only ones handing out condoms at concerts and educating people and encouraging them to get tested. If there was another organization that was doing it better than us, I might’ve said that we’d done our job. But there wasn’t. I felt like I had to stick with it, and it’s always been in my brother’s memory. It’s a great example for my kids, too.
Have you ever met or encountered Elizabeth Taylor during your career?
No, but the thing I remember about her more than anything is that she was really the first celebrity to come out and be supportive of people with AIDS. She was by Rock Hudson’s side [after his diagnosis], and she started doing what she did long before anyone else. For someone of that caliber to attach their name and support to the cause at the time she did was beyond brave. She started the foundation in 1991 to provide direct care and support to people. I’m blown away by her because she basically said, “I don’t care what anybody thinks and I know what’s right.”
Tickets and information for the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation New York dinner at Rockefeller Center’s Rainbow Room on May 8 can be found here.