Celebrity News

Elton John checked into rehab in 1990 after being inspired by Ryan White: memoir

Elton John was inspired to pull his own life together and check into rehab after he’d struck up a friendship with Ryan White, the Indiana teen who famously fought to attend public school when he contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion and was banned.

“My life was up and down like a [bleeping] yo-yo,” recalls the “Candle in the Wind” singer, who’s featured in Out magazine’s upcoming Out100 issue, in his recent memoir “Love Is the Cure: On Life, Loss, and the End of AIDS.”

“My sense of values was buried under by self-destruction…In the end, the Whites would do far more for me than I ever did for them.”

According to Out, “Ryan White died in 1990… but his brief, curtailed life proved a catalyst for [John] who checked himself into rehab three months after White’s funeral and never looked back.”

The singer has since raised $275 million to support HIV/AIDS prevention programs around the globe, the magazine says.

David Hockney and designer Francisco Costa also made the 18th Out100 issue this year. The magazine’s hold a gala Nov. 15 for its new issue at Canoe Studios in Chelsea.