In less than two months, once again, I’ll be participating in BRAKING AIDS® Ride, a 300-mile bike from Cooperstown to NYC. Between now and mid-September, I have two objectives: to get into some semblance of shape for the physical challenge of the ride and to raise $20,000 to support the amazing advocacy and services provided by Housing Works, the ride’s beneficiary.
Since my first year doing this ride in 2008, individual donations from people like you have been essential in helping me raise over $100,000 and counting to support life-saving services for those living with HIV as well as its efforts toward ending the AIDS epidemic once and for all. I’m counting on the support of hundreds of individual donors again this year to raise at least another $20,000 to end AIDS as an epidemic in New York by 2020.
Photo: Me on Day 1 of BRAKING AIDS® Ride 2018, by fellow rider Kyle Cameron. The photo later appeared as the Contents photo spread in the Nov./Dec. issue of Positively Aware magazine, which was pretty fabulous.
As someone who worked at Housing Works for five years, I have seen firsthand how its programs and services make a concrete difference. Since its 1990 founding, Housing Works has provided services to more than 20,000 homeless and low-income New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS. Unlike many HIV service providers, which tend to focus on one or two primary areas of service, Housing Works offers a startling array of programs that help address the overlapping, intersectional issues faced by its clients: In addition to housing, services include primary healthcare, meals, case management, nutrition, substance use treatment, legal assistance, and job training, as well as relentless advocacy at the city, state, and federal levels to fight for funding and legislation that will help us end AIDS once and for all. It also offers those services with respect and compassion, a context that is essential to healing but all too rare.
I began doing this ride in 2008 in memory of two family friends who died of AIDS-related illness in 1987 and 2003, respectively, and for many close friends who live with HIV. For BRAKING AIDS 2019, I am riding in memory of two friends who died this past year whose lives epitomize compassion and citizenry in the best senses of both words.
My friend Dawn Grimmett (1975–2019), a pediatric nurse who lived in Alabama, died unexpectedly this last April from complications from pneumonia. If we hadn’t both participated in AIDS rides, I might never have met Dawn—and I am lucky to have known her. Dawn was funny and kind. A giver of tremendous hugs and fierce loyalty. One had to pity anyone foolish enough to say a bad word about the people Dawn loved; as she herself put it, “I might look nice, but I’ll cut a bitch!” She also led by example: She was open and candid that she struggled with depression, which even today comes with so much stigma despite how common it is. Without fail, every year since 2004, Dawn traveled across the country to dedicate two weeks’ vacation to being a volunteer nurse on the crew for two different AIDS Rides—California AIDS LifeCycle in June and BRAKING AIDS® in September—dispensing Advil, Band-Aids, Gatorade, ice packs, sunscreen, and whatever medical care was needed, along with unconditional love, and just the right amount of snark. Her life, which ended all too soon, two months shy of her 44th birthday, is a testament to the power of showing up. Dawn reminds me that some of the most important and significant gifts to fellow human beings and contributions to a movement are comprised of mundane, ordinary, and often quiet acts of kindness. The impact of those acts are cumulative, and a commitment to those compassionate acts is the stuff that long-term change is made of.
Photo: This year, I will be riding in memory of my friend Dawn Grimmett (1975–2019), who was a volunteer nurse on every BRAKING AIDS® Ride I have ever done.
My friend Andy Vélez (1939–2019), a longtime LGBTQ and ACT UP New York activist, passed away on May 14 at age 80 after a severe fall in his Greenwich Village building earlier this spring. Andy joined ACT UP in 1987, the year of its founding, back when AIDS was a death sentence to so many, the downward spiral of the illness itself was ugly and painful, treatments were toxic and few, and our government leaders had been ignoring the burgeoning epidemic for six years. Andy was a devoted and fierce activist for 32 years, and his passion for and tenacity in undertaking righteous lifetime activism inspired and continues to inspire countless individuals, myself included. The friendship we developed during a relatively finite number of years of coalition activism together was and remains dear to me, and I miss his kindness, his delicious stories, his wicked and bawdy humor, and his authenticity. To read more about Andy’s remarkable life, check out the tribute that appeared in the Los Angeles Blade, as well as this piece in PLUS, “Why We Still Need HIV Warriors.”
Photo: This year, I will also be riding in memory of my friend Andy Vélez, a longtime LGBTQ & HIV/AIDS activist who passed away in May. In June, ACT UP New York created these buttons, featuring a portrait of Andy by Bill Bytsura of The AIDS Activist Project, in honor of Andy’s lifetime of fierce, relentless activism.
You don’t show up for 32 years of activism unless you have some faith and hope that what you’re doing will make a difference, whether you yourself are able to see that difference or not. Andy’s life is a reminder of that for me. It’s a reminder to heed what writer Rebecca Solnit says about hope:
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.” [emphasis mine]
I’m not usually good with uncertainty. In fact, I struggle with it. All the time. But BRAKING AIDS® and the example of people like Dawn and Andy challenge me to challenge myself to find that “spaciousness” Solnit describes.
When asked what he wanted to be remembered for, Andy once said, “As someone who is able to help.” I’m riding again this year because I am able to, and in that same spirit, I am asking for your help to support my efforts. Together, we can end AIDS.
Please DONATE TODAY. Donations of all sizes are welcome, but a gift of $200 or more will go a long way toward reaching my $20,000 goal. A $200 gift feeds 100 homeless youths at Housing Works’ East New York Health Center.
DONATE VIA MY FUNDRAISING PAGE: https://give.classy.org/mika2019
Photo: Me, wearing the Japanese ACT UP “Silence + Death” tee-shirt that Andy Vélez gave me several years ago as a gift, with my wife Jennifer at the Dyke March for NYC Pride 2019, which was also the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
The Blue Streak 