For the twentieth time in 21 years I will, in about ten days, be getting on a bicycle and riding it from San Francisco to Los Angeles on AIDS/LifeCycle 2019. AIDS/LifeCycle (“ALC”) is a fundraiser. Participants, depending on where they live, raise money for either the San Francisco AIDS Foundation or the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Jeffrey Goodman Clinic. I live in San Francisco so I’m raising funds for the Foundation. And I’d like your help. My original goal was to raise $10,000. That seemed ambitious to me but it was done to celebrate my 20th year of riding. I’ve actually already raised the goal not just once but twice, to $12,000. Because beating the minimum makes a fundraiser more successful and if there are beneficiaries (which there are) more of them can be served. And isn’t that sort of the point?
A bit of background:
The California AIDS Ride began in 1994 as a fundraiser for the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center (now the Los Angeles LGBT Center) and their recently-established Jeffrey Goodman AIDS Clinic, a bike ride lasting a week and covering about 575 miles. The following year the San Francisco AIDS Foundation joined in as a second beneficiary.
After having been pressured for a couple of years by a friend to sign up (“Are you nuts? What crazy person tries to ride a bicycle from San Francisco to LA???”) I bit the bullet and registered in the fall of 1998 for California AIDS Ride 6, which took place at the beginning of June, 1999. So by time I came along the event was pretty well established. I figured I would ride a year, perhaps two, and then move on with my life. During my second year of riding I responded to a request, as someone living with HIV, to be interviewed by a local television station in LA. The footage of me (and others) aired the following evening and I immediately signed up for the 2001 event. In the interim I joined the board of directors for an organization known as the Positive Pedalers, a group of people, mainly but not exclusively gay men, who took part in AIDS charity rides and were living with HIV.
I took a year off in 2002 to go to the Gay Games in Sydney and compete. I returned the following year to what was then the second AIDS/LifeCycle.
Why do I do this year after year? I’m the old fart in the video below, giving somewhat of an explanation. I’ll continue below the fold.
(Video credit: Mischa Hedges/TrimTab Media and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation)
I’m here to represent. This being a fundraising gig I of course am here to represent the agency I’m raising money for. At least that’s the obvious thing. But actually I’m here more to represent the clients that the benefiting agency serves. They’re the ones whose lives are at stake.
The San Francisco AIDS Foundation is one of the two oldest AIDS charity organizations in the world. It and New York’s Gay Mens’ Health Crisis were organized within a few weeks of each other in 1982, mainly to serve as clearinghouses for what little information then existed regarding a disease that at first had no name, then became known as “GRID” (Gay Related Immune Deficiency”) and a few months later as “AIDS” (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). As things evolved the focus of the Foundation has changed. Today the majority of their clients receive help from the Foundation either because they have HIV but no income and no health care and thus no access to medication or treatment, or because they have substance abuse issues and/or mental health issues and consequently take medications only inconsistently if they bother filling their prescriptions at all, or because they are homeless and have no place to store their medications as well as having no money to pay for them. Or else they are HIV-negative but are at elevated risk for many of the same reasons. Or they are a member of a marginalized community that has a historically high rate of HIV infection. Sex workers, and in particular transgender sex workers, as well as people of color who are gay, bisexual or are “men who have sex with men.” The Foundation also provides free, non-judgemental STI and HIV testing for the community at large without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity or socio-economic status. I represent ALL of those people.
I’m also here to represent the people who contracted HIV at around the same time as I did but who were not fortunate enough to survive until effective treatments became available (or who didn’t respond to the first or second round of treatments—there are people who simply don’t respond to the current available therapies).
When I was a young gay man I assumed, as I suppose most young people do, that their friends would always be around, even as we got older and that although we might drift apart there was always the option of finding them and being in contact again. For me and many of my generation that was a devastatingly false assumption.
I’m HIV-positive for over 38 years, I have a long history of ulcerative colitis and a significant history of substance abuse—drugs when I was in college but mainly alcohol later on when I was more or less out of the closet and the only venue I knew of for meeting guys to date was gay bars. There are so many reasons I ought to be dead and yet am not only still alive and well enough to contemplate riding a bicycle 500 or more miles over the course of a week. The people who are no longer here, the people who would ride if they were capable of it but can’t—I represent them as well.
The ride itself is simply the prize we get for having raised money. Naturally over the years I have become an avid and fairly skilled cyclist. To put it charitably I’m moderately competitive. I will admit to keeping statistics about my cycling performance. And I’m not oblivious to wanting to raise lots of money and be recognized for it. But that isn’t what the ride is about, not fundamentally.
As a gay man I have a vested interest in my own civil rights and I have fought for them in various ways for over four decades. As a gay man with HIV I have a vested interest in maintaining my health and I’ve been pro-active about that since I first learned that I was HIV-positive back in 1985. 1981 is the year generally considered to mark the start of the AIDS epidemic. Gay men, indeed most people but gay and bisexual men most especially, born in the late 60s and later don’t know a world in which HIV was not one of the risks of being sexually active. Although I left the closet relatively late—in my mid-20s when I was in graduate school—I’m still old enough to have been part of the gay world when things one could catch ranged from nuisance to moderately debilitating but rarely fatal.
I turned 30 in 1981. Because I was already out of the closet I can remember when the epidemic started; I can remember when it was at its worst, when there were no medications or when there were no effective medications. And when there was almost total indifference to the disease because it (apparently) mainly affected gay men, Haitians and drug addicts. I definitely remember how, for the first six years of his administration, Ronald Reagan refused to talk about AIDS or to do anything at all about it other than to make derisive remarks about gay people in private.
I had a girlfriend when I was in college; when I came out to her in the summer of 1973 and told her I was gay, she was strangely unsurprised. My first two long-term relationships with men involved HIV. My first partner, Bob, I met in October 1980 just after I had moved to DC from New York. We saw each other for several weeks, split up and then got back together the following summer. It was during the hiatus in our relationship that I contracted HIV and it’s almost certain I infected him. We split up for good in 1986 (that is a whole other story) and had little contact from then on. Bob was hospitalized on April 19, 1993 and passed away four days later. I found this out only afterwards.
I moved to San Francisco a couple of months after breaking up with Bob. It was fortuitous; I was offered a job that resulted in relocating and was happy to move to the “gay mecca” that also was considered the best place in the world for people with HIV.
I met Mario not long after relocating. We were friends for a bit and then became serious several months on. The situation with Mario was different. We knew I had HIV; we were really, really careful. Mario had a substance abuse history that included injecting crystal meth. He was in recovery by the time we met though he struggled to stay clean and sober. When he got tested in August of 1988 it was obvious he had had HIV since well before we met. He immediately received an AIDS diagnosis. He stayed well for about 3 ½ years but he passed away on December 4, 1992 after having been hospitalized several times.
Mario was 41 when he passed away. Bob was not quite 34 years old.
In my interview I mention having lost some significant number of friends over a short period of time. That included both Bob and Mario as well as numerous others. I kept a sort of list over the years; there’s about 160 names on that list. It’s sad that, when I look at that list I difficulty recalling who some of those people are. Others on the other hand I remember quite vividly. Some I was with in one capacity or another until they passed away or at least almost until they passed away.
Losing so many people over a short period of time was traumatic. I went to grief support groups; I also had my 12-step community as well as family and other friends. But healing is tough. Mario and I had registered as domestic partners in 1991 when San Francisco began offering that option. It took me until April of 1999, over six years after he passed away, to file the paperwork needed to dissolve that relationship. I didn’t date successfully during that time and it wasn’t a coincidence.
It’s also not a coincidence that I signed up for my first ride five months later. The early rides were emotionally fraught but ultimately healing. Still there is a residue of grief that remains and that, along with all the ways in which I represent, keeps me riding.
I’m 68 years old (or I will be on Sunday). I’m retired, with a pension, Medicare and additional health insurance. I’m fortunate. From what I understand a good ¾ of people in the US who live with HIV live below the poverty line. There is of course no legitimate reason for anybody in this country to be poor or to lack access to healthcare. But the reality is different which is why charities exist. There are many organizations similar to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation in other places but that’s the organization my riding raises money for and, San Francisco being among the most expensive places to live in the US, and having about the most severe income equality of any city in the US and also having a rather large population living with HIV, it’s important that I do what I can do to see to it that those folks are able to live with dignity. And, since the Foundation also has programs designed to limit new HIV infections (housing, counseling, substance abuse treatment, access to PrEP with special outreach to marginalized communities) I also have a responsibility to see to it that another group of people never contracts HIV in the first place.
That link again is: sfbob's AIDS/LifeCycle page. I hope I’ve convinced you to donate. I ride in ten days and fundraising totals are counted as of midnight, May 31st.
The video below is here because Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys said:
"For me [Being Boring] is a personal song because it's about a friend of mine who died of AIDS, and so it's about our lives when we were teenagers and how we moved to London, and I suppose me becoming successful and him becoming ill."