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AIDS/LifeCycle 2025 -- The End of a 31-Year Legacy and a 26-Year Journey for Me [1]
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Date: 2025-05-27
This story represents the end of an era for me. Since I joined Daily Kos in July 2006 I have, every year, posted a story on or around my birthday related to my participation in AIDS/LifeCycle (ALC), a seven-day charity bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles (or if we want to be technical from Daly City into San Francisco, then to and through Los Angeles into Santa Monica). Long before I began my participation the ride was an annual event beginning as the California AIDS Ride (CAR) in 1994. As you can tell from its names the ride has raised money to fund AIDS and HIV treatment and prevention. It’s taken place every year on one form or another every year since that first year; there as a virtual version in 2020 and a home-based version in 2021. Unfortunately this year’s event will be the last one. By any name it is surely the single largest and most successful AIDS-related charity event in history. Since it began it has raised over 300 million dollars. I came along in 1999. My personal fundraising efforts have generated not quite $250,000 of that total which amounts to about 0.08333% of that $300 million.
[Edit: It occurred to me that since this story is rather long I should probably put my fundraising link up here near the top as well as at the end.]
Because this is the conclusion of a series this story may run a bit long and may cover more ground that I’m used to covering. Please be patient and follow me below the fold.
The Ride’s Origin and Beneficiaries
The Los Angeles LGBT Center originated in 1969 as the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center. It was later renamed the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center and more recently the Los Angeles LGBT Center; its friends call it simply “The Center.” In 1993 the Center hired Pallotta TeamWorks, a production company founded by Dan Pallotta, to produce a charity event to support AIDS services; people who raised a certain amount of money would get to participate in a week-long cycling event to begin in San Francisco and end in West Hollywood. A few hundred intrepid folks, mainly activists more so than cyclists, departed San Francisco and, a week later, finished riding their bicycles to West Hollywood. The event raised a fair amount of money for the Center. A San Franciscan by the name of Jonathan Pon had been clued in in advance and was one of a handful of people from Northern California to take part that year. He mentioned it to his contacts at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and in 1995 the Foundation became the second beneficiary of the ride, which continued to gradually increase in size. In 1997 or so participation suddenly took off.
Founded in 1982 as the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation assumed that name in 1984. Unlike the Center which was organized in the immediate aftermath of New York’s Stonewall Riots and which has long provided a variety of services the greater LGBTQ+ community, adding an HIV wellness clinic in the late 1980s or early 1990s, the Foundation’s entire structure has always been built around services treating and preventing HIV/AIDS.
Following 2001’s event a number of participants reached out to the Foundation and the Center asking them to consider either changing their agreement with Pallotta or else severing their connection with him. That ultimately resulted in the creation of AIDS/LifeCycle. The final California AIDS Ride, in 2002, had a different beneficiary and terminated following that event. Going forward AIDS/LifeCycle maintained the format and style of the first eight California AIDS Rides while other Pallotta-produced events were breaking down into more localized ones or else disappearing entirely.
I took 2002 off from riding; I haven’t taken a year off since.
How and Why I Got Involved
This year’s ride will be my 26th going back to 1999. In 2020 training rides were canceled on March 14th because of COVID. But I trained for as long as I could, there was a virtual event, and I kept on raising money. In 2021 things had not improved to the point where an actual ride to LA would be feasible. In it’s stead the beneficiaries created an at-home event in which we pledged to ride a certain number of miles from October to June—I think I picked 3,000 miles—and counted that as a ride to LA. I raised more money that year than I had any year prior.
A couple of my friends rode in 1995; one of them joined the ride’s staff afterward. The other was a friend from my neighborhood gym. He started nagging me to ride with him shortly thereafter. As one would expect when a friend says “You should definitely get on a bicycle and ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles with me, after raising a couple of thousand dollars for charity” my initial response was “Just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean I have to be crazy too. I’ll give you a check, now stop bothering me.” But eventually I relented.
Over the past quite a few years I’ve written either in advance of the ride or else to commemorate World AIDS day about some of the people I lost during the early years of the AIDS pandemic or about how I was able to establish when and from whom I contracted HIV.
In the summer of 1998, shortly after my 47th birthday, I came down with pneumonia. It was not in any way HIV-related. Still it was a wake up call. I was pretty sick; it took me a while to fully recover.
I figured if I was going to do something outrageous I had better do it soon. At that year’s Folsom Street Fair I found the California AIDS Ride’s registration booth and signed up. For the following year’s ride, California AIDS Ride 6.
Training began a couple of weeks later. And on my second training ride I found out that my friend Donald-David who had tried to get me to participate had passed away several months earlier from a form of illness at least tangentially related to HIV. That got me committed to riding at least once.
By June of 1999 I had, despite two different time-outs to recover from a couple of injuries related to falls, trained for a good couple thousand miles at least. And when the ride came I rode every one of the 545 miles and loved doing it. I figured I might just do it again. Meanwhile the veterans of previous years who led training rides had so inspired and encouraged me so much that I decided to become one of those as well. And at the Folsom Street Fair that Fall I signed up again.
Why I kept (and keep) riding
I tried a couple of times to enlarge this and move it over but no dice. Here I am (in the center, at Fort Mason in San Francisco, about to embark on my very first ride, 6/6/1999.
It took me a while to come out as gay. When I tested positive for HIV I took it as a cue to tell my folks I was gay. I was 34 years old and they had long since figured it out. But I didn’t want to get sick and THEN come out to them as gay. Still I didn’t discuss my status with them until my partner Mario was dying in 1992. Once again Mom was ahead of me, coming to the right conclusion though for the wrong reason. I’d told her I couldn’t donate blood which had been true virtually my entire adult life. I had been taking sulfa drugs to which many people are allergic, I had had hepatitis which as far as I know still results in a permanent ban on donating blood, and gay men in general had been forbidden to donate blood since the early 1980s.
One day during my second year of riding the chair of the Positive Pedalers board of directors, the above-mentioned Jonathan Pon, was looking for volunteers to talk with news reporters about living with HIV and my hand unaccountably shot up. The following evening one of my friends who was staying in a hotel that evening walked up to me and said “Hey Bob! I saw you on television!” I had been interviewed by a reporter from KTLA in Los Angeles. The only remaining place where I kept my status a secret was work. I worked for the federal government in San Francisco so my immediate colleagues weren’t going to see it. Some I had confided in, some merely made the assumption since I had lost a partner to AIDS. My office had been devastated by AIDS in the 80s and early 90s so none of them were naive. Still, saying it out loud on television proved to be incredibly illuminating. So I signed up for my third year and was also invited to join the board of directors of the Positive Pedalers.
I was very shy and socially awkward when I was a kid. I was bullied a lot. When I was in college I used lots of drugs to cover up my discomfort with myself with only sporadic success. When I came out of the closet while I was in graduate school in the West Village I went to bars to socialize hoping alcohol would help me “mix” better. That didn’t work very well either. Having come out of the closet I still needed to find more functional ways of coming out of my shell. Experiences I’ve had a various points in my life (including getting sober in AA and participating in other recovery programs) have accomplished that but being involved with a bunch of people with common interests makes talking to those people so much easier. Over the years I built a circle of friends, some of whom I have ridden with for a quarter century by now. And there is always something to talk about. As a training ride leader my role was always to make sure the new participants felt welcome and to gauge their level of prior cycling experience—another form of healthy ice-breaker. And then I became handy with a camera. That helped too.
In 2022, after two years without a real ride, we got back on the road. We had enormous participation and raised a record amount of money. Many who rode that year had been training for their first ride for two years! At the time it seemed we were back on track. On the downside despite fairly rigorous safety protocols quite a few participants contracted COVID during the event. I was one of the lucky winners and I’m glad Paxlovid had recently become available.
But 2023’s inflation hit the ride hard. Production costs skyrocketed. It turns out that multi-day bike rides are quite costly to put on and require enormous amounts of movable infrastructure. Meanwhile thanks in part to the ride’s success over the years younger people don’t generally think of HIV as an existential threat. They may not know anyone who has HIV, nobody they know of, except possibly a relative from a previous generation who they may only have heard about, has died from AIDS. And if they or a friend should happen to contract HIV it’s viewed as a chronic health condition, easily controlled with a pill or two a day. For that reason recruitment has gone down. So it was announced last July that this year’s ride would be finale. At that point registration took off and was closed early for the first time in nearly fifteen years.
That brings us more or less up to date. So I may as well focus on the fundraising aspect of the ride. Really this is a fundraiser with a bike ride as a reward for having raised enough money. The first year I rode the minimum needed to actually take part in the ride was $2,500. That seemed like a great deal of money to me at the time and in most respects it still is. Over the years the trend has been gradually up. In 2001 it went to $2,700. During the early years of AIDS/LifeCycle it dropped back to $2,500 but now it’s $3,500. One of the things that was impressed upon me early on is that the ride costs money to put on. And we’ve seen that inflation has raised productions costs to being very nearly unsustainable. So regardless of the minimum which many people indeed struggle to reach, if we can we’re encouraged to raise more money. For about the past ten years as I’ve found riding every mile to no longer be possible my fundraising has gone up. Last year I raised over $20,000, which was inconceivable to me even a few years ago. I raised just over $18,000 in 2022; slightly less than that in 2023. This year a long-time donor encouraged me to raise my goal past $20k. He promised additional donations in return and he has followed through. This final year my goal is $25,000 which seems insane despite the fact that my total stands at $17,600 (unless it goes up in the next few hours) and I reached $17,000 this year three days before I did last year.
Apart from the fact that this is the final ride and that even if the ride were to have continued I might not have been able to keep going anyway, there is the urgency caused by the Trump adminstration’s outrageous behavior which I needn’t detail here since anyone who spends any time on this site knows full well what they’re doing. In February the Foundation, the Center, and numerous other LGBTQ+ and AIDS services organizations filed suit against the administration for using three Trump-issued Executive Orders to threaten to defund any organization that includes outreach to marginalized communities in any way or that references DEI in any positive way. Transgender people are particularly and targeted. The administration in its infinite wisdom has decided that transgender people simply do not exist and therefore there is no reason to spend federal money providing services for them. It really is unspeakable. The language used to smear the entire transgender population is highly reminiscent of language directed at Jews in Nazi Germany. It really is that bad. And who thinks, if the government is able to demonize trans people that they will stop there? Since HIV takes a heavy toll on people of color, on women, on sex workers, on injection drug users and on transwomen organizations that perform outreach to any of these groups or who base their missions on DEI principles in any way are going to face a financial crisis. I’ve been saying throughout the year that the money my friends and I raise this going to have to go much farther than it usually does.
The ride does not raise money to pursue legal action in this manner. Donations cover the costs of client services.
The ride begins on June 1st; the day before it called Orientation. Participants check-in; riders get a participant number and tags for their bike frame and their helmet. Fundraising incentives are given as of the night prior. In 2023 and 2024 I was one of the top 50 fundraisers which merits a special jersey. One more would be nice but I’m doubtful it’ll happen. And there are opportunities to shop and to socialize. That leaves me four days to raise that final $7,900. So the appeal is there. You can make a donation by going here.
Just for the heck of it and because I can be a bit of a data nerd, here are some stats.
As of this (Tuesday, 5/27) morning I have raised $17,600 for this year’s ride. Cumulatively since I started fundraising in the Fall of 1998, I have raised $243,723 for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
When I began training for my first ride I also started commuting to work; fortunately my circumstances were such that I was able to do that most of the time. I began recording data from training rides and from AIDS/LifeCycle in January 2006 and that data is pretty accurate as far as it goes though unfortunately it didn’t occur to me until way too late to record commute miles. I retired at the very beginning of 2015 and since then all of the miles I’ve ridden have been recorded. I started biking to the gym as things re-opened in the wake of COVID; for some reason it never occurred to me to do that previously. According to my best estimate of pre-2006 training and riding and approximate commute miles, since October 1998 I have biked between 85,000 and 90,000 miles.
In 2016 I was chosen to be one of a group of participants known as “media spokespeople.” We were the ones the media were directed to before and during the ride, if they wanted to interview someone. Of that group of about 25 I was one of the individuals the ride’s media staff produced a short video of. It’s worked well as a fundraising tool over the years. I had just gone on Medicare and was celebrating the feat of having lived long enough—with HIV—to be able to retire and access the relevant benefits.
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