Oprah Winfrey pays tribute at GLAAD Media Awards to gay brother who died from AIDS
In an emotional speech during the GLAAD Media Awards in Los Angeles Thursday night, Oprah Winfrey paid a tearful tribute to her late brother, Jeffrey Lee, who died from AIDS in 1989 when he was just 29 years old.
In an emotional speech during the GLAAD Media Awards in Los Angeles on Thursday night, Oprah Winfrey paid a tearful tribute to her late brother, Jeffrey Lee, who died from AIDS in 1989 when he was 29.
“Growing up at the time we did, in the community that we did, we didn’t have the language to understand or to speak about sexuality and gender in the way that we do now,” said Winfrey, who was accepting the advocacy group’s Vanguard Award for LGBTQ allyship. “At the time, I really didn’t know how deeply my brother internalized the shame that he felt about being gay. I wish he could have lived to witness these liberated times and to be here with me tonight.”
Winfrey, one of the most famous and successful women in the world, then reflected on how she has used her platform over the past four decades — including her wildly popular daytime talk show, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which ran from 1986 to 2011 — to amplify LGBTQ voices and dispel misinformation about HIV/AIDS, which disproportionately affects gay and bisexual men and transgender women.
She recalled taking her syndicated talk show to Williamson, West Virginia, in 1987 and holding a town hall after discovering that local officials there had shuttered a community pool because a man with AIDS had gone swimming there.
“They shut the whole pool down and the town turned against him because he’d gone swimming with his sister, and it caused such an uproar that there was rampant misinformation and misguided fear,” she said. “We took our whole show there, and we brought a medical expert … we brought the facts and tried to erase some of the biases.”
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