Charli XCX gave West Hollywood a surprise on Saturday night. According to a GlobeNewswire release issued by MISTR on October 13, the singer delivered an unannounced performance at The Abbey as the centerpiece of the second annual National PrEP Day celebration, hosted by MISTR founder and chief executive Tristan Schukraft. The event, which marked National PrEP Day on October 10, paired a genuine pop moment with a public-health message: getting HIV prevention into the cultural conversation, without stigma.
The lineup around her was stacked for a one-night room. MISTR announced DJ sets from Chappell Roan and Leland during the celebration, with Tove Lo taking over the after-party decks. Guest names released by MISTR included Demi Lovato, Christina Aguilera, Emily Ratajkowski, Tinashe, Omar Apollo, Kim Petras and Kesha, among many others from music, television and drag. Even allowing that this was a hometown crowd for half the list — The Abbey sits in the middle of West Hollywood — assembling that range of stars for a sexual-health benefit is not a small feat.
National PrEP Day itself is young. MISTR said Schukraft created the observance in 2025, fixing it on October 10 — 10/10 — as a yearly prompt for people to think about prevention before they need to. A second annual edition is the moment an idea either becomes a fixture or quietly fades, and MISTR clearly chose fixture: bigger room energy, a surprise headliner whose appearance was not on any flyer, and a guest list designed to be photographed, shared and talked about on Monday morning.
Why a surprise set works for this cause
There is a logic to booking Charli XCX for this particular job. Her recent work lives in clubs, after-parties and group chats — the same social circuits where conversations about sexual health actually happen, or fail to. A surprise performance also changes the room's math. Guests who came for a benefit stayed for a moment they could not have bought a ticket to, and every clip that travels out of The Abbey carries the event's name with it. MISTR's announcement framed the night around celebrating sexual health, eliminating stigma and championing free HIV prevention — in that order, party first, pamphlet never.
In the release, Charli XCX praised what MISTR is doing to make HIV prevention more accessible, saying in paraphrase that clear information and real resources should be available to everyone without stigma or judgment. It is a short statement, but it lands on the organization's central argument: the barrier is rarely the existence of prevention options — it is cost, confusion, embarrassment and access. Remove those, MISTR argues, and more people protect themselves.
What MISTR actually does
For readers who know the name mainly from events like this one, MISTR is a telehealth service built around HIV prevention and care. According to the company, patients can access PrEP, DoxyPEP and long-term HIV care through MISTR for free, with or without insurance. That last clause is the point of the whole model, and the reason a free-care provider can credibly throw a party about access: the service it promotes at The Abbey on Saturday is the same service anyone in the audience could sign up for on Sunday.
Framing matters here, and Previously is framing it plainly: the details of Saturday's celebration come from MISTR's own announcement, distributed through GlobeNewswire on October 13, and syndicated coverage of that release, including USA NewsHour's republication, carried the same account of the performance, the DJ sets and the guest list. Benefit events describe themselves generously by nature. What is verifiable and newsworthy regardless is the combination — a current pop headliner, a landmark West Hollywood venue, and a prevention provider putting its name, and its free-care pitch, at the center of the night.
The Abbey, and a West Hollywood tradition
The venue choice was its own statement. The Abbey is one of the best-known gay bars in the United States and a de facto civic living room for West Hollywood, a city whose modern identity was shaped in part by the AIDS crisis and by decades of community organizing that followed it. Holding National PrEP Day there ties a 2025-born observance to a much longer local history — one in which nightlife spaces doubled as information networks, fundraising engines and places where a community took care of its own when institutions were slow to.
That lineage is part of why celebrity benefit nights in this specific neighborhood read differently than a generic gala. Demi Lovato, Christina Aguilera and Kesha have each spent years as fixtures of LGBTQ+-friendly pop; Tinashe, Omar Apollo and Kim Petras speak directly to the younger, club-going audience prevention campaigns most want to reach. Whether every guest posed for a photo or slipped out early, the aggregate signal is the one MISTR was buying with its guest list: this cause is not a niche, and it is not uncool.
The second annual edition also sets a bar the third will have to clear. A surprise Charli XCX set is a hard act to follow in 2027, and MISTR has now established both a date — October 10 — and an expectation that the night will produce at least one genuine pop moment. If the goal is to make an annual health observance function like a cultural one, that expectation is exactly the asset to build. Holidays people look forward to get marked on calendars; holidays people merely agree with get a like and a scroll.
For Charli XCX, it is one more entry in a run of appearances that treats pop stardom as something you can lend. A surprise set costs an artist an evening. What it buys a cause like this is the one thing awareness campaigns cannot purchase directly: people repeating the name National PrEP Day on a Tuesday, in stories like this one, because a singer they follow showed up unannounced on a Saturday. More culture and music moments like this live in our news coverage, on the music page and across our podcasts.
