I often get asked why I keep coming back to BRAKING AIDS® Ride and the cause and organization it supports. Most of the time, my answers take written form. This year, thanks to Black Watch, the video production company that’s been documenting the ride since its inception, I’m able to share some brief video footage from the road that gives a glimpse into what ending AIDS means to me.

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I don’t say it anywhere in the interview footage, but I’ve said elsewhere that the ride community, like Housing Works itself, embodies radical inclusion. Radical inclusion means accepting people as they are and standing for love that heals and for acts of kindness. Fortunately for me, that also means that those spaces and communities accept me as I am, however and wherever I am. I’ve shown up for the ride determined and confident. I’ve shown up terrified and exhausted. I’ve shown up elated to see my ride family together again. I’ve shown up lost, feeling like life has brought me to my knees, with no notion of what I might have to offer anyone else, much less a community or a cause. I’ve show up in joy and grief, heartbreak and euphoria. I’ve shown up juggling many of these contradictory feelings all at once.

Year after year, my BRAKING AIDS® family has shown me I can show up as I am, even mired in the doubts and dark-angel whispers of my weakest, most critical selves and still be accepted, loved, and useful. That openness in and of itself is a healing presence. The most important part is the showing up itself.

The same is true for Housing Works, which has been showing up for 30 years and counting to create hope for the most vulnerable among us, whether that’s through its long-standing, innovative HIV/AIDS and housing services to its recent Covid-19 emergency response efforts.

In this way, the ride and its community embody how prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba describes hope: She talks about hope as a practice, a discipline, a process rather than an external outcome, force, or destination. Hope is created from how we each choose to live and act every day.

The ride engenders that practice of hope for me. The collective spirit it creates and inspires enables me to “take the way to joy,” as my brilliant musician-songwriter-podcaster friend Sam Shaber says in the lyrics to the song playing in the video above.  I hope you’ll join me in supporting that journey.

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Donations of all sizes are welcome, but a gift of $200 or more will go a long way toward reaching my $20,000 goal. 

From left to right: me, with friends Rodney Newby and Blake Strasser on a recent Saturday ride. Photo credit: Mikola De Roo.