Madonna marks World AIDS Day with heartrending speech on living through the height of the outbreak

During a stop in the Netherlands last Friday on her current world tour, Madonna marked World AIDS Day with an emotional speech.

“Today is World AIDS Day. Do you know that? Is that important to everybody?” she asked from the stage at Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome. “Maybe it seems like it’s so far away that it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just another holiday. But let me explain something to you: There is no cure for AIDS. People still die of AIDS did you know that?”

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She described her early years in New York as the epidemic began to emerge. “When I first came to New York, I was lucky enough to eventually meet and become friends with so many amazing artists, musicians, painters, singers, dancers. The list goes on and on,” she recalled. “And then one day, people started getting sick, and nobody could understand what was happening. People were just starting to lose weight. People were dropping like flies. They were going to the hospital, and nobody understood what was happening.”

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“The news started calling it ‘the gay cancer,’” she continued, “because it was predominantly in the gay community. Which was a terrible shame, because I don’t know if you understand this right now, but in the early 80s, it was not cool to be gay. It was not accepted to be gay. Did you know that? Or do you just take it for granted right now?”

She tried to convey how the disease exacerbated anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment. “Can you imagine what it was like in that time when being gay was considered sinful and disgusting? When suddenly the vast majority of the gay community started dropping like flies and people were dying everywhere?” she said. “When I say that they were dying everywhere, I’m not exaggerating. Every day I would wake up and hear a new story, a new friend, I’d be visiting someone new, I’d be sitting by their bedside watching them die. Hundreds and hundreds.”

“Meanwhile, nobody in the medical community wanted to do anything about it, because they said, ‘Well f**k it, they’re fa***ts. They deserve to die,’” she continued. “It was a pretty devastating, scary time. And I personally lost so many friends, so many loved ones.”

She added that she “would have cut off my arms if I could’ve found a cure for them to live,” her voice breaking as she spoke.

She went on to describe watching her best friend, Martin, die, noting that his is the first face that appears in the imagery onscreen when she sings “Live to Tell” on the Celebration Tour. “I was holding his hand. He was suffering so much, he could barely breathe,” she said. “And then there were so many others afterwards.”

“I’m not saying this cause I want you to feel sorry for me,” she added. “I want you to recognize how lucky you are right now to be alive!”

Madonna followed up her speech with a post on X.

“AIDS came through like a brushfire. Like a freight train,” she wrote in the post which also included a video featuring images from her performances of “Live to Tell” on tour. “It was unexpected and merciless. It destroyed all the beautiful people. An entire generation of artists was wiped out. Turned to ash.”

A longtime LGBTQ+ ally and advocate for people living with HIV/AIDS, Madonna has spoken previously about her friend Martin, including in a speech while accepting the Advocate for Change Award at the GLAAD Media Awards in 2019. More recently, she added a Nashville date to her Celebration Tour in protest of Tennessee’s anti-drag and anti-trans laws, pledging a portion of the proceeds from ticket sales to organizations advocating for transgender rights.