I found this incredibly nasty long post about Elizabeth Taylor on the eXiled front page

tpsbmam

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Sat Mar-26-11 01:25 PM
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I found this incredibly nasty long post about Elizabeth Taylor on the eXiled front page

eXiled are the people who have done so much Koch-outing work.
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This one is titled: Ding, Dong, Elizabeth Taylor’s Dead

Written by Eileen Jones, here are the 1st 4 paragraphs:

So, Elizabeth Taylor’s dead, you might’ve heard! They planted her yesterday. Thank God that’s over.

There are a lot of tributes out there, praising her to the skies. What a fabulous broad, the Last Great Star, and all that guff. It takes a tremendous amount of willful forgetting to consider Elizabeth Taylor “fabulous” any time after 1966. Forty-odd years of aging Liz Taylor looking as purple and swollen as an overripe plum, with a face ever meaner and more imperious, doing terrible films, then terrible TV, wearing hideous bedazzled clothing, hung with rocklike jewels, dating George Hamilton, befriending Michael Jackson, carting around an unhousebroken Maltese dog named Sugar that reportedly shat everywhere, granting endless interviews with slavish interlocutors who’d ask her variations on the question, “What is it that makes you so eternally wonderful?”

She was always happy to answer that one in detail.

Okay, sure, AIDS activism in the ’80s, before it was popular among celebrities, we’ll give her that. But otherwise she was ghastly embarrassing, like so many once-big film stars who won’t go away.

That is her sole reference to AIDS throughout the long post, the remainder of which can be read at the link.

I was royally pissed when I read it. I actually wasted my time reading the whole thing to see if it got better -- it didn't. And before I commented, 100% of the comments were similarly disparaging her. I had to comment -- this was mine:

I found you guys just yesterday by clicking a link that led to one of your Koch posts. I read a few of your posts and thought you'd be a great Koch resource, bookmarking the site as such. I was a little put off by your use of "retarded" as a slur, but not enough to write the site off.

I am clearly in the minority here when it comes to your Liz Taylor post. I find it vapid, puerile, shallow, unnecessarily hateful and frankly, just plain stupid.

I lived in worked in New York City in the 80's. I had many, many GLBT friends. And I had many GLBT friends who suffered the horrors of AIDS back then. Not only was it a death sentence with no hope of treatment of any kind, my friends were stigmatized and spurned not just by the rest of the population, but often by their own families and sometimes healthy GLBT.

The mysteries surrounding AIDS and the ways that AIDS was spread abounded. The fact that it was known as a "gay plague" made it easy for people prone to fear based on nothing but "I heard that..." information. I had friends whose families were somewhat accepting before outright refuse to be in their presence after they tested positive for HIV.

Elizabeth Taylor played a pivotal part in educating not just the US, the world, about AIDS. She had a pivotal role in removing the stigma associated with AIDS. What you so glibly brush off in one sentence was a 30+ year devotion to AIDS education, funding research, service provision, and more. As her AmFAR tribute noted, when she got involved "she didn't just help, she changed the landscape forever."

How many here who are joining in to disparage Elizabeth Taylor will be able to claim the same on your deathbed?

Just throwing it out there in case anyone feels the urge to stand up for this landscape-altering hero!