It could be said to be a love that dare not speak its name. Certainly Russia’s president makes little of it when warning of the degrading dangers of western acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights. “I’m told unreliably, or reliably, who knows, that Putin is a fan,” says Elton John’s husband, David Furnish, of the unlikely Rocketman devotee in the Kremlin.
“Every March 25, I get a WhatsApp message from the [Russian] health minister saying: ‘I just want to wish Elton happy birthday and we wish him all the best and love his music so much.’ So, it is this strange paradox.
“There’s nothing in it for them to send me a WhatsApp on Elton’s birthday. They’ve done it a couple of birthdays in a row.” Furnish laughs. “I always make sure if there’s an attachment I never open it. I don’t want to end up like Jeff Bezos.”
That he tells this anecdote, with the side-reference to the alleged hacking of the Amazon founder’s phone courtesy of a WhatsApp from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, says much about Furnish, 60, who first met John, then in recovery, 30 years ago at a dinner at his home in Windsor.
He is refreshingly open and wryly knowing of the absurdity of some of what comes with sharing a life with a global star who has never quite shaken off a reputation for excess formed in part by the infamous 1997 Tantrums and Tiaras documentary. But Furnish, who is now a film producer and chief executive of Rocket Entertainment, gave up a highly successful career in advertising on meeting his partner and adapting to his somewhat unusual lifestyle, is intensely serious when it comes to the mission he shares with his husband of nine years: eradication of HIV/Aids within their lifetimes.
This has never been merely a crowd-pleasing sop for the couple but a goal forged out of the pain of losing a swathe of friends. The Russian health minister had Furnish’s number for a reason. He does mean business.
Furnish is perched at a table in what he describes as a “gallery slash living space” of the couple’s pristine Tardis of a townhouse in Holland Park, west London, where a Damien Hirst butterfly installation sits by a Sam Taylor-Johnson pastiche of the Last Supper on a wall across the room from a David LaChapelle photographic series entitled Jesus Is My Homeboy.
It has taken two Covid tests to get this close to him. “I’ve got Elton on a Covid bubble on tour,” he says apologetically of the circle of steel put around what are being billed as the star’s “farewell” performances. Furnish concedes that footage of his husband embracing half the Manchester City squad at an airport on their way home from the FA Cup final last weekend suggests there may be a rockstar-sized gap in the defence. “Elton is sometimes his own worst enemy,” Furnish laughs. “That’s the boundless enthusiasm of a football fan from boyhood.”
It is three decades since the Elton John Aids Foundation (Ejaf), of which Furnish is chair, was founded. Back in the early 1990s, it was funding palliative care, providing cash so that patients could get a decent meal in hospital, and trying vainly at first to deal with some of the stigma attached to a disease that was quite simply a “death sentence”, he says.
It is an unrecognisable siatuation from today and Ejaf has some major recent successes of which to boast. A project that started in south London where people were asked to opt out rather than opt in to HIV tests when they were being screened for other conditions has been rolled out across the UK. As a result, 500 people with HIV were diagnosed in just the last year, says Anne Aslett, Ejaf’s chief executive. “[Prof] Kevin Fenton, who leads the government’s HIV action plan, said this is one of the most transformational things we have ever done,” she says.
As a result, the NHS has saved millions of pounds by getting to people early. However, Furnish is not here to celebrate but to counsel for the need to redouble efforts, not least, he says, amid growing illiberalism around the world. And that’s when Russia and the US presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis come up.
Furnish had swapped numbers with Putin’s health minister at the end of a concert in Moscow at a time when John was able to spread the message of tolerance from the stage. Today, Ejaf is seeking to improve HIV/Aids services in a country where the state, in the cause of child protection, has made it illegal since 2013 to state that heterosexual and same-sex relationships are equally valid.
It is an infuriating obstacle in a country where John has enjoyed a strong fanbase since being the first western rock star to tour in the USSR back in 1979. He famously even spoke to Putin in 2015 after two Russian pranksters had earlier got through to him pretending to be the Russian leader. “Putin himself was so appalled by this that he wanted to ring up personally to say ‘I’m sorry this happened’,” Furnish recalls. “I remember the call coming in – the whole house froze. Vladimir Putin’s phoning the landline in your house. Perfect English. He just said: ‘I’m sorry that someone phoned you up and pretended to be me because you don’t deserve to be, you know, pranked or treated like that. And I hear you would like to sit down and meet and talk with me one day. I would welcome that, I would love to talk to you.’
“Unfortunately, you know, Ukraine, war, politics,” Furnish says of the lack of follow-up. What is known from the World Health Organization is that the country had the highest number of new HIV diagnoses in Europe in 2021. Ejaf is running large programmes across central and eastern Europe. But Russia is only one of the more extreme examples of a trend towards intolerance that Furnish says he fears is turning back much of the good work of recent decades.
There is the increasingly uncomfortable rhetoric in countries such as Hungary and Slovakia. He makes passing reference to an anti-homosexuality bill recently passed in Uganda. But evidently at the front of his mind is a country that he and John know far better. The couple and their two children, Zachary, 12, and Elijah, 10, live mainly in the UK rather than their homes in Los Angeles and Atlanta. Not least, Furnish suggests, because the issue of LGBTQ+ rights is being “weaponised” in the US as American politicians seek to attract a few decisive extra votes in a country split in two.
DeSantis, the Florida governor, for example, is “pushing a bill that will give any doctor the right to refuse treatment to anyone based on ethical grounds”. In April, the Florida board of education approved a ban on classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity. This is happening amid stubbornly high infection rates in southern US states.
“Now listen, I’m all for appropriate sexual education and gender identity and education in schools. I don’t want my kids going to school and being taught ‘this is how gay people have sex, this is how these people have sex’. That’s a conversation for later on in life,” Furnish says. “But the laws are written in a way that what’s right and what’s wrong is not defined at all. It’s like completely open, and as a result any parent can launch legal action against the school board to say you’re breaking this law. School boards don’t have deep pockets. They want to avoid litigation. So the easiest path is the path of least resistance. We just won’t talk about it at all.”
Furnish goes on: “If I look at my own circumstances, where my sons go to a school, the very least is they can go to a school where they can say: ‘Some families have two moms and some families have two dads, and they love each other and they support each other and they support the community and we should put our arms around them, accept them.’ There’s no sexualisation or anything like that. That’s just creating an awareness that the world is a wonderfully broad, diverse and loving place. You can’t talk about that in school in Florida now and if you do you run the risk of getting sued by one irate parent, and so it’s the lack of definition.”
It is often the call of the populists to do away with the experts. Furnish could not disagree more. “I do the same thing with my kids every day. ‘Can I watch this film? It’s rated 15, it’s rated 18. I really want to watch it, all my friends are watching it.’ Well, I need to watch it and make sure that it doesn’t push you into a dark place. It doesn’t, you know, challenge you in a way that isn’t appropriate for your age and your development. And I think the same thing applies to what is and what isn’t in the school curriculum. We need experts.”
With that in mind, Ejaf has announced a $125m (£100m), three-year initiative to support access to HIV prevention and treatment services for more than 1 million people. There is alongside it a request that supporters post photographs this month of themselves wearing their own take on the Elton John image, described as “letting the inner Elton out”. Dolly Parton and the model Heidi Klum are signed up. It is a bit of frippery. But don’t think for one moment Furnish and John aren’t serious.