Sheryl Lee Ralph talks about her decades of work honoring AIDS victims through art
“I wanted to create something that could raise up their memory.”
Sheryl Lee Ralph has recently gotten a boost from her role on the ABC sitcom “Abbott Elementary,” but for years the longtime stage and film actress has been an advocate for the LGBTQ community and people diagnosed with AIDS.
In the 1990s she founded the nonprofit DIVA Foundation, which aims to empower those groups through arts and honor the memory of those who died from the disease.
The Emmy Award-winning actress spoke with ABC News Live’s Linsey Davis about the foundation’s work in honor of World AIDS Day and her career.
SHERYL LEE RALPH: So much was going on. First of all, our fame was rising fast. It was like a burning fire, and everybody wanted to come and see it in the best possible way.
I always tell people it was like the best and the worst time in my life, because here it is, our star is ascending and my friends literally, start dropping dead. I mean, I wrote it in a play that I had written: They were sick today and dead tomorrow.
Nobody wanted to talk about who they were, who they had been. It was like if, oh, they were just gone so — shhh — we don’t talk about that. And it was just told such… oh, my God, hate, such disdain, such disregard for humanity. And it was one of the best and absolutely devastating times in my entire life. Part of it changed me forever.
I don’t think I’ll ever be the same after having seen all of that.
RALPH: Oh, it was horrible. That was when I started really learning about the different levels of -isms in life.
I’m a child of the 60s, so I thought it was just racism. You know, I didn’t know that it was sexism, sexual choice-ism. I didn’t know there were all these other -isms on top of it.
And when people will look at me and tell me, “Why did you care? What’s wrong with you? You must be one of those people.” And I was just like, “What people? The people who care? The people who are part of our entertainment community, the talented people, the kind people, what people are you talking about?”
The people who said to me to my face, “Nobody’s going to like you for caring about them.” I could never wrap my brain around all these things that were being thrown at me.
RALPH: Divinely Inspired, Victoriously, Aware, AIDS aware. At that time, you could swing a pocket book and knock a diva down. Everybody wanted to be a diva, but it was diva with bad attitude. My whole thing is, look, if your attitude is bigger than your hairstyle, I can’t deal with this. No, it’s just too much. And therefore, you see me and my big hair. (laughs)
But I started this, and I called up all my friends, all the divas with the good sense that I knew. I said, “Divas, we need to come together and use our voices, one song at a time, to raise up the memory of our friends because they deserve to be remembered no matter what.”
RALPH: When we first started, it was a living, breathing memorial to all the friends that I had lost to AIDS.
And I said, for all of those people who, when you went to the hospital, and there was no hospital bed for them and they were just out in the hallways. For those people, there was no burial for them because churches and hospitals didn’t want to touch them. For those who couldn’t get care because doctors and nurses didn’t want to give them care. You had to see what this was like. You had to see what it was like when people could literally stand in judgment and say that’s what they get. That’s what those people deserve. So I wanted to create something that could raise up their memory.
They were somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s lover. They were somebody to somebody. Besides anyone that could help you with your wig and your wardrobe problems, they need to be reminded, right? So I created Divas Simply Singing. The light, the mic and the diva with the sheer power of her voice and her presence. One song at a time to raise up their memory, and I would never have believed that we would be sitting here 33 years later.
And we’re still doing this. I would have thought that there would have been a cure. I would have thought that at the very least, we would have a vaccine.
