UNSTOPPABLE

Ellen Matzer had a different story to tell, working in AIDS wards in New York City at the height of the epidemic.

Nurses have always been frontline troops in every health war. Doctors may get more recognition — and money — but nurses hold the hands of the dying and comfort the families and friends. Their entire focus is on patients. Nurses are the glue that holds everything together.

Matzer and her friend Valery Hughes wrote Nurses on the Inside: Stories of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in NYC, released in 2019 (re-released in 2025). They regularly share their war stories online and in presentations to a variety of audiences, but they don’t seek the spotlight. They’re not what anyone would consider celebrities.

But in 2024, something remarkable happened to Matzer.

She was surprised to receive messages on Instagram in September 2023 from actress Debi Mazar, best known for films like Goodfellas and TV shows like “L.A. Law” and “Succession”. Matzer, however, had no idea who she was; at first she assumed Mazar was a former coworker and just didn’t recognize her. The two began a conversation about her 2019 book and HIV. A decades-long friend of Madonna, Mazar offered to send the book to the superstar’s people. Madonna’s new tour was being prepped and there was a plan to recognize HIV and the losses over the years. It would not be the first time Madonna turned the spotlight on AIDS — she had been an early supporter of amfAR and included HIV medical information in her albums. Word had it that the new concert presentation was going to be deeply dramatic.

Mazar worked with co-authors Matzer and Hughes to draft a set of bullet points about the book to send to the tour manager. The women received a positive response, saying that they would be invited to the concert when it reached New York City.

In 2016, Scotland’s Stuart Armstrong, a gay man, started an Instagram page called “The AIDS Memorial”. The account is filled with heartbreaking personal stories by people who recall those taken by the virus. (The AIDS Memorial has over 300,000 followers.) I submitted a photo and story about a former assistant who had died. Friends alerted me that it had been posted on Instagram, with over 1,000 likes in the first 24 hours. That persuaded me to open an account there.

Prior to the Matzer-Mazar connection, in late 2023, Madonna’s people contacted Stuart Armstrong to say they wanted to use photos from the account in a proposed tribute on her next concert tour. The account’s rules of posting prohibited that, but Armstrong offered to put out a call for people willing to share a photo and brief story of someone who died from AIDS, for use in Madonna’s personal tribute. There were few restrictions; it could be a story already published on the AIDS Memorial page, or a new one. Matzer and Hughes submitted several photos of patients who had become friends. When the tour reached Madison Square Garden in January 2024, the two women, as promised, had VIP tickets.

Ellen Matzer at the Madonna concert (photo credit: Amy Altmann)

Matzer wasn’t sure what to make of all this, especially when they were escorted by security to their front-row seats. “We were told she might invite us up on the stage,” she recalled. The two were soon witness to the awe-inspiring audio-visual tribute of walls of thousands of projected photos of AIDS casualties as Madonna sang the ballad “Live to Tell.” But the concert went on a long time after the AIDS tribute. So long, in fact, that Matzer was ready to call it a night. She asked Sergio, their assigned security guard, if she could leave, but he begged them to stay in their seats. Within minutes, Madonna called out from the stage, “We have two very special people here tonight!”

As the spotlight shone on Matzer and Hughes, the crowd erupted in appreciation. Madonna explained their years of service to the AIDS community in New York City. It was overwhelming to both of them, Matzer said.

Ellen Matzer’s time now is spent teaching nursing students HIV care and recounting the darkest days of the epidemic. Her students are eager to hear about her experiences, but shocked at the state of nursing in that era and her descriptions of opportunistic infections they have never seen. Many of her students worked during COVID, so Matzer draws parallels between AIDS and COVID to demonstrate that both are deadly, quick, stigmatizing. She stressed how people with poor access to healthcare were similarly affected by the two viruses — groups of people considered disposable, then and now.