Stories of Dedication

One of the bravest men and patients I remember. They were all brave, but Jim Brumbaugh (1948-1991) faced this illness with a calm and realism we didn’t see often.

He was in and out of the Hospital many times. He had a multitude of opportunistic infections throughout the year he was ill. He had a wonderfully supportive partner and family that was also rare back then.

I remember one of the times, Jim knew he was close to the end. I went into see him. He was sorting out imperial topaz gem stones. I had never heard of that stone before and he explained to me that it was one of the most beautiful topaz stones there was. He was sorting out the stones to give them to all his nieces after he passed.

I remember sitting with this wasted yet still handsome man, looking at each stone and talking to his partner about which family member should get which stone. It was as if Jim was having a normal conversation about anything. I remember thinking, how can he do this so matter of factly? His partner had also known that my 2-year-old son liked elephants. The next day, he came in with a bandana that had elephants on it. I still have it.

Jim, I miss our talks. I miss you, how brave you faced every speed bump, every obstacle. There were so many we lost back then. I try to remember everyone’s face, something special about them. Most of them, I do.

Valery Hughes and I wrote the book Nurses on the Inside, Stories of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in NYC to remember this generation lost. To warn against it happening again.

We must know the history of the awful epidemic. There are too many people that don’t remember, were too young or not even born yet. It was a holocaust. We must honor all these brave men and women. We must never forget they were here.

I’m Sean Strub, and in 1994 I founded POZ magazine with the tagline “Help, Hope, and HIV.”

Hope was important.  At the time, not many people believed there would be many survivors, if any, of the epidemic.  And while the media context at the time was AIDS was inevitably fatal, dread disease, terminal illness, no treatment, no cure, no survivors – I was living in a world full of people with HIV who were living vibrant lives, raising their children, making art, going to school, creating businesses, engaging in activism, going to demonstrations, caring for others, despite this tremendous health challenge that was likely and only did kill most of us.

It was important to show the example of people who were leading vibrant and full lives, despite that challenge – especially for people who were culturally and geographically isolated and didn’t have the option of going to an ACT UP meeting in the Village and being surrounded by that kind of support.  

At the time when we started the magazine, we had a number of, sort of, rules. When we had science coverage, we made sure that a person with HIV was quoted in the first few paragraphs of the story.  We didn’t want to hear just from scientists or just from the clinicians; we always wanted to hear from people with HIV themselves.  

We sought to make stars.  We put people on the cover no one had ever heard of.  They weren’t famous; that’s not why we put them on the cover.  They were doing really important and inspiring work, and we wanted to bring attention to what it was that they were doing.

The idea of the magazine was to strengthen our community, foster empowerment, resistance and pride, and give that example of survival and hope to people anywhere who read the magazine.

Our first issue featured Ty Ross on the cover.  Ty was a very attractive young man who was the grandson of famously conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.  He was interviewed by Kevin Sessums, who at the time was the top celebrity interviewer for Vanity Fair magazine.  Hollywood photographer Greg Gorman took really great pictures of Ty, added to the appeal.

Frank Rich was a columnist for the New York Times, and he called POZ “easily as plush as Vanity Fair, and against all odds, the only new magazine of the year that leaves me looking forward to the next issue.”

We were criticized, even for the fact that we had high production values and glossy paper and beautiful photography.  As if somehow people with AIDS had to have a publication on newsprint with typos, or something.  I never understood that criticism.  At the time, the publisher of The Advocate said to a trade publication he didn’t understand why anyone would ever advertise in a magazine with such a grim topic.

In those first years, every month, we ran my lab work — the actual scan of the report from NetPath or Quest or whatever the lab was — and explained each of the different things on it.  And then we had different physicians and experts comment on my health.

One of my very favorite ones was when my CD-4 count was down, I think, to 1 and my viral load was in the millions.  And one doctor looked at my health records and said:  Sean is in very serious shape, he is at great risk at becoming ill, and what he needs to do immediately is A, B and C.

In the next paragraph was a different doctor, also an expert, and said:  Sean’s situation is dire, but what he shouldn’t do is A, B or C.  He should be doing X, Y and Z.

And it wasn’t about trying to call out one doctor or the other.  That was the reality at the time is that people were getting conflicting advice even from people who were expert and well-meaning, because so little was known about how best to treat the disease and the opportunistic infections that arose from it.

We were also very focused on the Clinton administration and their failure to support syringe exchange programs when the science was utterly clear that they were incredibly effective at reducing HIV transmission.  And that became a campaign that went on for several years.  And we were a thorn in their side.

Bob Hattoy, who worked in the White House, used to surreptitiously report to me what people were saying at meetings when the topic came up or things about the epidemic came up.

A year or so after we started, my health had really plummeted.  I had spent the money I had saved in my life; I’d sold my insurance policies to fund the magazine.  My CD-4 count was almost non-existent, I had pulmonary Kaposi’s sarcoma in my lungs, and I had lesions all over my body.  But we carried on, and we found a path through to a point where POZ became the most trusted information source for people with HIV.  

In survey after survey, done by us or by government agencies or even the pharmaceutical industry, found that people with HIV trusted POZ more than they trusted even their own personal physicians or any non-profit organization.  The only category of information source that they trusted more were their personal friends who were also living with HIV. 

In 2004, I sold the magazine and it found a new life online with a much broader audience around the world.

I’ve done a lot of things in the epidemic.  I was involved with ACT-UP, co-chaired the fundraising committee, raised a lot of money.  I was at demonstrations at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, climbing on the top of Jesse Helms’ house, putting a giant condom over it, working with the People With AIDS Coalition in the early ‘80s even before ACT UP was around, running for Congress as the first openly HIV-positive person to do so in 1990.  I produced David Drake’s hit play The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, and in 2014, I published a memoir called Body Counts.

But POZ holds a very special place in my heart, because of what it came to mean to so many millions of people living with HIV and affected by HIV in the U.S. and around the world.  And I’m proud that it endures and our community endures.

I’m Torie Osborn, telling the story of the “No on 64” campaign against the heinous 1986 proposition to quarantine people with AIDS, put on the California ballot by right-winger Lyndon LaRouche.

Remember, that was during the dark time when AIDS was still new, all the urban gay and bi-men were at risk, there was zero treatment, and the general population still thought it was transmitted in the air, if not by mosquitos.  Early polling showed a potential big win for Prop 64 – largely due to the fear and misinformation out there.  Seventy percent of the electorate was undecided.  But our community rallied, and in four short months, we won the day.

Our campaign consultant was David Mixner – the best in the biz in our world.  He’d headed up the “No on 6” campaign in 1978 against the Briggs Initiative to fire gay teachers.  I was Southern California Campaign Coordinator for “No on 64,” and Dick Pabich (R.I.P) was my counterpart up north. Co-chairs of the campaign were Harry Britt and Diane Abbitt.  So many who are now gone were key spokespeople, such as Rob Eichberg, Randy Klose, Duke Comegys, Bruce Decker, Peter Scott, Jean O’Leary.

We’d learned from Prop 6 that to win, we needed both the volunteer-driven, grassroots mobilization arm and the paid professional campaign, so “Stop LaRouche” worked alongside “No on 64” campaign — we were tightly coordinated.  It was run by Ivy Bottini, Lee Werbel, Phill Wilson, and others.

AIDS phobia was so widespread that at the start of the campaign, no mainstream liberal groups – except the docs and nurses — were with us, except the Southern California ACLU chapter, and a few random Hollywood straight types, like Paul Newman. But we mobilized like crazy.

In four short months, we raised over $2 million, 90% of which came from our own community, and mounted a professional, bi-partisan campaign that ended up winning 71% of the vote in November.

We had hundreds of House Parties and a thousand volunteers who spoke at every civic club and community group and Dem Club around the state. By the last month, every single slate card, every labor union, everyone was with us.  And every voter in California – including every Republican! – received a strong “NO on 64” mailer.

That 71% victory belonged to our entire LGBTQ+ community that rose up en masse to forge a victory out of the agony of AIDS, and, in the course of it, firmly established ourselves, alongside medical experts, as trusted spokespeople on the issue of HIV and AIDS.

Gaëtan Dugas died of AIDS at the age of 32 on March 30, 1984, very early in the AIDS epidemic.

Dugas was known by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control as a particularly helpful man from Canada who was forthcoming and transparent about his sexual history, which was very extensive but not entirely unusual for someone who was fully immersed in the sexually liberated gay scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

What was unusual about Dugas was the large number of cities on his map of sexual liaisons, afforded to him by his job as a flight attendant for Air Canada. He leased an apartment in Los Angeles and frequently visited other U.S. travel hubs, and he admittedly was sexually active just about every place he travelled to.

For CDC researchers trying to determine how HIV was spreading in the U.S. population, Dugas was invaluable, readily providing names and addresses for many of his intimate partners and giving data that supported some of the early infection pathways of the virus.  But in 1987, three years after Dugas’ death, he was erroneously vilified as “Patient Zero” and the person who brought the AIDS virus to the United States.

The publication of the book And the Band Played On by journalist Randy Shilts was quickly regarded as the seminal exposé on HIV and AIDS. Unfortunately, Shilts included in his book a profile of so-called “Patient Zero” to illustrate how the virus could spread. The book referred specifically to Dugas as “Patient Zero” and described him as a Canadian flight attendant with a home in Los Angeles and other cities.

The book implied that the first-known source of the HIV spread in the U.S. was Dugas. Media stories about Dugas exploded.  His handsome face accompanied stories in which he was characterized as a kind of “typhoid Mary” who callously spread the virus in the early days of the epidemic.

In actuality, Dugas was not “Patient Zero” and the CDC never considered him as such. The CDC had labeled Dugas as “Patient O,” as in the letter O.

Flash-forward to 2016, when researchers led by evolutionary biologist Dr. Michael Worobey determined that it was impossible for Dugas to have been the original source of HIV in the U.S.
Worobey’s team conducted a genetic study of blood samples taken from gay and bisexual men in 1978 and 1979 as part of a hepatitis B study, and based on the results of the data, concluded
that the AIDS virus was already prevalent in the U.S. in the late 1970s.

According to Worobey, “On the family tree of the virus, Dugas fell in the middle, not at the beginning. Beliefs about Patient Zero are unsupported by scientific data.”

Howard Ashman was a masterful writer, lyricist and director, in my opinion the greatest of our generation, who died of AIDS on March 14, 1991, at the age of 40.  My name is Alan Menken.  In a collaboration that lasted 12 years, Howard and I wrote the stage and movie musical Little Shop of Horrors and won two Academy Awards, two Grammy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards for Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast.

We forged a collaboration that was intense, creative and supremely effective. Each moment I spent in the creative space with Howard Ashman remains with me every day of my life.

With our first project at Disney, Little Mermaid, some studio executives resisted using the song “Part of Your World,” for fear we would lose some of the younger audience members. But Howard insisted that our audience had to know what our little  mermaid Ariel wanted. She needed to have what he called an “I want” song.

I think that as a gay man, Howard grew up knowing what it felt like to be on the outside, wanting to be a part of the world that he saw around him but somehow not able to fully take part.

For two years, while Little Mermaid was being made, Howard knew he had HIV but he hid his illness from everyone on the movie, including me. We found out later that, during the press junket for Little Mermaid at Disney World in Orlando, Howard wore a catheter in his chest so that he could get medicine intravenously at night. When he saw the parade of Little Mermaid characters at the park, he burst into tears.

Later, those of us who worked with Howard realized why he cried: It was the idea that those characters would live on long after he was gone.

The night we both won our Oscars for Little Mermaid, Howard said he and I needed to have a serious talk, and after we got back to New York, Howard revealed to me that he was sick with AIDS. We had just reached the pinnacle of our careers in both theater and the movie business, and we had worked side-by-side for 11 years, yet my dear friend kept it a secret from everyone he worked with that he had an incurable fatal disease. That’s the kind of fear people lived with back then: fear of rejection, of death, of a fatal illness with no cure, and there was so much stigma and discrimination.

But Howard wouldn’t let AIDS keep him down. He was so determined to keep working, to keep creating magical song moments and unforgettable characters. I think AIDS spurred him on to work even harder because he knew he was living on borrowed time.

Howard and I were brought in to fix Beauty and the Beast while it was being developed. But Howard was too sick to commute back and forth to LA, so he finally had to tell Jeffrey Katzenberg that he had AIDS.  Katzenberg agreed that the production would travel from LA to meet with Howard and me in upstate New York.

At the same time, we were also working on Aladdin, which Howard had initially developed. Because of AIDS, Howard was suffering neuropathies, began losing feeling in his fingers, losing his voice and much of his eyesight, all the while we were collaborating on joyous, incredible songs. Howard was determined to keep working as long as he could.

Towards the end of his life, Howard and I wrote “Prince Ali” from his hospital bed. He was down to 80 pounds. He couldn’t see and could barely speak.

Howard and I won an Oscar for Best Song for Beauty and the Beast. And the movie was the first animated picture ever nominated for Best Picture. Howard had passed before ever experiencing the movie’s success.  The award was accepted by his companion of seven years, Bill Lauch.

Ron Woodroof was an unlikely hero, but he rose to the occasion and became a lifeline for many people with AIDS in the Dallas area. Ron created the Dallas Buyers Club in 1988 to get HIV and AIDS medication to those in need who couldn’t legally get it from doctors and pharmacies.

I’m Matthew McConaughey. I had the privilege of portraying Ron in the 2013 movie Dallas Buyers Club, for which I was honored with the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Ron, a feisty, foul-mouthed electrician who lived in Oak Lawn, Texas, tested positive for HIV in the mid-80s and was given only a few months to live.  Soon after, his third marriage ended in divorce. When the FDA-approved drug AZT failed to help his condition and caused significant side effects, Ron researched and bought drugs from outside the U.S. that were not approved by the U.S. government. They helped lessen his symptoms and prolong his life, but the FDA wouldn’t allow Americans to bring more than a three-months supply of unapproved drugs into the U.S., and clearly many people didn’t have the money to travel abroad to buy medicine.

With the help of his doctor and a fellow patient, he began importing, or obtaining from underground chemists in the U.S., different drugs, nutritional supplements and treatments through The Dallas Buyers Club for use by others suffering from HIV and AIDS.  Eventually, the club imported over 100 different treatments. Clubs would often test samples of new drugs at a friendly laboratory to make sure they had the right quality and potency.

According to a Dallas Morning News article in 1992, Ron, who often dressed as a priest or a doctor in a white lab coat, made over 300 trips across the U.S./Mexico border, smuggling as many as half a million pills in the trunk of his Lincoln Continental, tricked out with heavy duty air shocks so that the car wouldn’t sag with all the extra weight.  Ron and others who worked at or bought drugs from the buyers’ club risked arrest and death by importing and taking unapproved medications, but when your disease is a death sentence, is it really such a big risk?

As Ron put it, “Dammit … I don’t see how anything can be more toxic than HIV itself.  I have taken chances that have almost killed me and I will keep on taking them.  I have nothing to lose.”

Many buyers’ club operators and customers accused the big pharma companies and their FDA regulators of conspiring to keep drug prices high and to keep new competing drugs out of the hands of patients.  Certainly, the slow pace of FDA drug approval was no help to terminally ill people on death’s doorstep.

Ron took an experimental drug called peptide T, which was used to treat AIDS-related dementia, but when the U.S. government intervened and stopped his supplier in Denmark from shipping out the drug, Ron sued the Food & Drug Administration.

“I have no choice with peptide T,” Ron said. “It is the only line I have to staying alive.  When I stop it, I start dragging my leg.  I urinate on myself. I can’t speak.  I slobber all over the damn place.”

A judge ruled against Ron, saying that although there was no Constitutional right to import unapproved drugs, he personally thought that terminally ill people should be able to buy them.  Ron managed to strike a deal that allowed him to get the drug and report his results to the FDA.

Ron died in 1992, six years after his HIV diagnosis.

As Ron said in a documentary released that year, “Let me try anything I can get my hands on. Because if it kills me, at least I died trying.”

Scott Smith was a longtime friend, business partner, political adviser and lover of San Francisco human rights leader Harvey Milk, famous for being the first openly gay man elected to public office in California.

Scott met Harvey Milk in 1969 in New York City, where they started a romantic relationship while working for the Broadway production of the musical Hair.  Previously, Harvey had accompanied the show’s touring company to San Francisco and fell in love with the city.

In 1972, Harvey convinced Scott, 18 years younger than him, to move with him from New York to San Francisco. Down to their last $1,000 in collective savings, Harvey and Scott needed to find a cheap place to live and a way to make money, according to Randy Shilts in his book The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.

They decided to open Castro Camera, a photography supplies and service shop that would soon serve as Milk’s campaign headquarters. They chose the Castro District because they heard that apartments there were cheap and they knew of two gay bars that were thriving. Castro Camera opened at 575 Castro Street on March 3, 1973.

Later that year, Scott helped to orchestrate the Coors Beer boycott that elevated Harvey to prominence in the Bay Area’s political scene. One of the first public displays of power by the gay community, the boycott galvanized support behind the Teamsters against the Coors Company, which refused to employ union drivers. Harvey convinced the owners of San Francisco gay bars to boycott Coors beer and it worked — Coors caved in. In return, Harvey convinced the Teamsters to hire openly gay truck drivers, solidifying his reputation as an astute political operator.

Harvey and Scott used the success of the boycott to launch a campaign to elect Harvey Milk to public office. But three unsuccessful campaigns took a toll on their seven-year relationship, and they broke up. However, they still continued their business and political alliance.  Scott helped Harvey get elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in November 1977, a major triumph for the LGBTQ community.

When Harvey Milk, along with Mayor George Moscone, was assassinated in late November 1978, Scott was devastated.  The violent death of his closest friend sent Scott into a deep depression.

Scott was executor of Milk’s estate, a job that came with the tedious process of resolving Milk’s debts and other open affairs, and he also became head of the Harvey Milk Archives, spending long hours organizing Milk’s papers, speeches, photographs and other ephemera.

Still in the throes of depression two years after Harvey’s death, Scott sought out counseling and began reconstructing his life. He converted Castro Camera into an art gallery, left the world of politics, and started afresh as a travel agent. He continued to work on the Harvey Milk Archives, earning the nickname “The Widow Milk” from his friends.

On February 4, 1995, Smith died of an AIDS-related illness at San Francisco General Hospital surrounded by friends and family. He was 46 years old.

Smith will forever be linked to Harvey Milk’s human rights legacy and life in the Castro District in the 1970s, an era of LGBTQ liberation and empowerment.

Constance Robin Norman — Connie — was, contrary to popular belief, born right here in California, in Oxnard in 1949. She had been a boy called Robbie who would later transition to Connie at the age of 26. That was in the mid 1970s.

Hello, I’m Peter Cashman, and Connie was my dear, dear friend.

Many of her formative years were spent in Texas in the Houston area, where her grandmother Mabel Murphy owned a bar. Connie would end up working for Mabel, and there she gained a good deal of the Connie that we came to know. The hard-scrabble life in the South made her streetwise and tough, but with a great sense of humor like Mabel.

Many years later, reflecting on her life, she said, “I often tell people I am an ex-drag queen, ex-hooker, ex IV-drug user, ex-high-risk youth and currently a post-operative transsexual who is HIV positive.”  And she added very poignantly, “I have everything I’ve wanted, including a husband of ten years, a home and five adorable longhaired cats…. I do however regret the presence of this virus.”

She had discovered she was HIV-positive in 1987.

Connie had met Bruce Norman in San Francisco. Bruce was a gay man who became her soul mate and husband. He had grown up in the Altadena.

The highlight of Connie’s Bay area years was as a manager at the Trocadero Transfer, the world-famous disco in San Francisco’s Mission District. “Disco Connie” with her huge oriental fans immortalized in the documentary Wrecked for Life.

By the mid ’80s, she and Bruce would attend the weekly “Hay Ride” gatherings in West Hollywood hosted by self-help practitioner Louise Hay. That was where I first remember seeing her and Bruce and many other folks who would join the new national AIDS activist group ACT UP when a chapter formed here in Los Angeles in December 1987.

Connie said she saw ACT UP in the Pride Parade in June of ’88.  Straightway she knew that was where she belonged and joined up. She had never attended college; in fact, she’d been a teen runaway on the streets of Hollywood. But she had an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Completely self-taught she put in an enormous amount of work. She would end up co-hosting a weekly cable show in Long Beach. She would write a regular column for the Southern California LGBT newspaper Update. And she would become the very first queer person in the U.S. to host a talk show on AM talk radio, broadcasting from Hollywood.

Connie was fierce and strong, a force to be reckoned with, whether talking with legendary talk radio host Tom Leykis on KFI or with someone she didn’t agree with, like Wally George, appearing on his infamous shock jock talk show on KDOC 56. Speaking at rallies and demonstrations she was loud, forceful and eloquent. By now she was known as the AIDS Diva, to which I added “Self-Appointed and Self Aggrandizing,” typical of the banter between her and I during those times. So she became a statewide figure and was ACT UP/LA’s representative on the LIFE AIDS Lobby.

One thing that really made Connie stand out to me and so many others was her nurturing instinct, her kindness and her ability to speak to people from all walks of life. Connie educated, informed and spoke from the heart, an innate talent that so impressed people. Later she became public policy director at Pasadena’s AIDS Service Center, continuing the work she’d done with ACT UP. Talking with policy makers, lawmakers, locally, in Sacramento and in Washington.

As a respite from the death and dying that surrounded all of us, Connie and Bruce annually took time out with numerous friends, including myself, in their beloved Kauai. A time to tend to rebuilding health and spirit and befriending queer folk all over the island. Her last trip was in late 1995. Her health was failing, and she rapidly declined during the first part of 1996, passing on Bastille Day that year.

Later that year in early October, ACT UP folks gathered from around the country for a second Ashes protest — scattering the ashes of loved ones on the White House lawn. So, my final goodbye to Connie was as I clung to the White House fence, scattering her ashes onto that famous lawn.

Connie Norman – a beloved warrior who remains in our hearts and dreams.

Sylvester, sometimes known as the Queen of Disco, was famous for an androgynous look and a fierce falsetto voice.  Born in the Watts section of Los Angeles on September 6, 1947, he grew up singing in a Pentecostal church but left the church at age 13 and soon after left home after being shunned by the congregation and his mother for being gay.

Refusing to bow to pressure to conform, for his high school graduation photo Sylvester wore a blue chiffon prom dress and his hair in a beehive.  He moved to San Francisco in 1970, where he performed for a couple of years with the infamous group of drag performers “The Cockettes.”

He released in a solo album in 1977, performed regularly in gay bars in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, and was cast in a cameo singing role in the Bette Midler film, The Rose.  It wasn’t until his third album in 1978 that Sylvester found success including his best-known hit “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”.  That album, with background vocals from the Two Tons of Fun, Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes, went gold, topped the dance charts in the U.S., and led to major talk show performances and promo tours in the US.

On March 11, 1979, while Sylvester recorded his Living Proof live album in a sold-out show at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein awarded him the key to the City and proclaimed it “Sylvester Day.”

Never forgetting his community roots, Sylvester performed at gay pride festivals that year in San Francisco and London.  Another dance hit, “Do You Wanna Funk,” released in 1982, was co-written with Sylvester’s frequent collaborator, writer-producer Patrick Cowley, who died of AIDS that year when the disease was still known as GRID.

Sylvester, along with Joan Rivers and Charles Nelson Reilly, did the first-ever AIDS fundraiser at Los Angeles’ Studio One nightclub in 1982.  He called his 1983 song “Trouble in Paradise,” an AIDS message to San Francisco, and performed benefit concerts to raise awareness and money about the epidemic.

Sylvester’s boyfriend at the time died of AIDS in 1987, and Sylvester’s own health began to decline later that year.  In the spring of 1988, Sylvester was hospitalized with pneumonia but managed to attend the Gay Freedom Parade in June in a wheelchair.

The Castro Street Fair in October of that year was dubbed “A Tribute to Sylvester.”  Although he was too ill to attend, he heard crowds schanting his name from his bedroom and continued to give press interviews, openly stating that he was dying of AIDS and trying to highlight the impact of the disease on African-Americans.

Sylvester James, Jr., died on December 16, 1988 at age 41.  At his direction, his body was dressed in a red kimono in an open casket.  In his will, he bequeathed all future royalties to two AIDS charities.

In 2005, Sylvester was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame and in 2019 the Library of Congress chose “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” to be preserved in the National Recording Registry.