$1,417.50

This is the third time I'm riding my bike from Toronto to Montreal with the Friends for Life Bike Rally in support of people living with HIV/AIDS. 

I ride because the money we raise supports the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation (PWA), along with Trellis in Kingston and ACCM in Montreal. These organizations provide essential programs and services for people living with HIV/AIDS and help them access food, wellness care, peer support and safe, welcoming spaces. Together, our support makes a real, tangible difference in people’s lives.

I ride because events like this help combat the stigma and shame that still accompanies HIV/AIDS. I know because too many people who are dear to me and are poz tell me this is what they experience. 

I ride in the memory my dear Gilles, who died 29 years ago this July. Gilles was a dancer, he was worldly and sophisticated in ways that often intimidated me. He was kind. And most of all, he was funny. He had been living with HIV for many, many years but his body just couldn't hold out until retrovirals became more accessible. That picture you see is of me and Gilles in his apartment in Montreal, probably in 1995 or 1996.

And now, I ride in the memory of Lori Cannon. I met Lori on January 17, 1991 at Federal Plaza in Chicago. It was the night the US started bombing Kuwait. Thousands and thousands of people turned out to protest that war. I was in my first year of university, already out and with a knee-jerk revulsion of US-led wars. But I had no way to think or talk about that connection, the idea that my liberation as a queer person was intimately connected to the liberation of the people the US was bombing. Lori was handing out flyers for Open Hand Chicago, a meals-on-wheels service for people living with HIV and AIDS. She gave one to me. It said something like: for all the money Bush is using to bomb Kuwait, we could feed x-thousand PWAs. Lori had cofounded ACT-UP Chicago, then Open Hand. She touched the lives of countless queer people, reaching across the divisions of one of the most racially segregated cities in the US. Lori introduced me to ideas, to vocabulary, to people, to networks, to political organizing that literally changed my life. Lori died almost two years ago. May her memory be a blessing. 

I ask for your donation to honour the memory of Gilles and of Lori, and to help combat stigma and raise needed funds for those living in the here and now.