Ch 10 - A Straight Man Bends on the California AIDS Lifecycle Ride
Below is chapter 9 from Ken’s forthcoming book, How Did I Get Here? A Memoir of the Baby Boom Generation.
I was a 71-year-old straight married man in a glittering red dress, on a bicycle, pedaling 42 miles through conservative California ranching country. It was June 2016.
I was with 2,000 other cyclists also in red. It was Red Dress Day on the 2016 California AIDS Lifecycle Ride. Climbing the golden hills out of the Santa Maria agricultural valley, streaming past Vandenberg Air Force Base, and winding through the small-town streets of Lompoc, we formed a living red ribbon, a symbol of the fight against AIDS.
We wheeled along, a rolling extravaganza of red: dresses, pajamas, kimonos, bustier, boas, and ballerina tutus. We were a carnival display of red couture and faux cleavage. Men in full-length red satin gowns and parasols dressed as southern belles. Husky Dolly Parton look-alikes. Bearded middle-aged men in red poodle skirts. Male Wonder Women and female Supermen. A co-ed synchronized swim team flaunted women’s one-piece red polka dot swimsuits. Muscled studs in skimpy red party frocks powered forward aboard high-end Italian racing bikes.
Laughing pedestrians and honking drivers cheered us on. “It is fabulous!” exclaimed an excited participant from the People’s Republic of China, a young gay man wearing a demure red shift.
It was indeed fabulous. And for me, revelatory.
The California AIDS Lifecycle Ride was an annual fundraising event with cyclists pedaling seven days from San Francisco to Los Angeles raising millions of dollars for AIDS support services through the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center. This was my eighth Ride, 2016, but my first time in a red dress.
I first rode in 1999, after my friend David had told me, “You should do the AIDS Ride. It will be good for you.” David is gay and HIV positive. He described the Ride as an experience of profound life affirmation, an event that galvanized people to fight AIDS – the disease and the stigma – through cycling.
David knew I was a hardworking attorney, decades removed from my last social justice movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Beyond my wife, daughter, and friends, my life focused on a demanding litigation practice. He thought I needed more.
I was curious about this very gay event, but I worried about how I’d fit. And I was right. From my first Ride, I felt keenly aware of myself as a straight man. I was an outsider, a sidekick to gay outrageousness, a sympathetic witness to gay sorrow and struggles, an appreciative observer of gay humor, creativity, and accomplishments. I was the straight man, and as the straight man I helped to define this bubbling gay world on wheels.
At first I felt out of place. The Ride was more than a demanding athletic event. It was a week-long parade, a travelling public seminar on AIDS, and an unapologetic public demonstration of gay presence. The Ride blasted through California cities and rural communities as an outsized happening, the spirit of the Sixties come alive again, with thousands of cyclists and volunteer supporters on the roads, dozens of trucks and cars and motorcycles, cheering onlookers, and local kids high fiving passing riders. Cyclists wore colorful costumes, decorated their bikes, and discussed the spectacle with pedestrians and local media.
In my early years on the Ride, particularly on Red Dress Day, the unspoken public message of the riders sometimes struck me as defiant: “We’re queer…we’re here…get used to it.” More often it was a jubilant “Here we are again!” Either way, in those years I had to stifle an uncomfortable impulse to inform spectators, “This is not me. I’m not gay.”
On my first Ride, I was startled by the pervasive ethos of grief. Almost all participants had partners, parents, siblings, children or friends who had died of AIDS or been infected by HIV. The Ride began with the solemn walkout of a “riderless bike” at opening ceremonies, with thousands of people gathered in the dark at 6 am at the San Francisco Cow Palace. In a Dedication Tent in camp each day, riders wrote moving memories of loved ones lost to AIDS. On the road between San Francisco and Los Angeles, many riders had pictures on their bikes of loved ones who died from AIDS. The final evening of the Ride there was a silent candlelight vigil on the beach in Ventura, where I saw only the flickering candle flames held by 2,000 people, and heard only the waves lapping against the shore, and I could feel the vastness of the AIDS calamity.
I too had lost a friend; I had been stunned to learn she had AIDS, shocked by how her body was ravaged by the disease, and I grieved her loss. I had another friend, HIV positive, who astonished me one day relating his new problem: with the emergence of new lifesaving protease inhibitors in the 1990s, after years of living with the expectation of dying soon, he now had to figure out how to live in the future as an AIDS survivor. What was he to do? I only could listen and try to understand.
For many years I had followed the spread of the plague in the papers and discussed it with friends as an interested outsider. It was different experiencing the epidemic through the intensity of this gay event. On the Ride I was among a community who had experienced the terror of the mysterious new epidemic in the early 1980s, suffered staggering loss and grief with tens of thousands of AIDS deaths in the 1980s and 1990s. This community had responded by transforming themselves into caregivers and political activists who fought the disease.
Many AIDS riders were infected with HIV and others, young gay men, were at high risk for infection. When I struck up conversations with other riders and listened to the speakers at the Ride’s evening programs, I heard big life stories about AIDS, about suffering and redemption, about the Ride as a spiritual and political journey.
On the third day of the 2016 Ride, as I wheeled up to Rest Stop 4, I was directed into bicycle parking by a lovely young man in a bold maroon and black dress, stiletto heels, Marilyn Monroe wig, come hither lipstick and cheeks rosy with blush. On each Ride I’ve been delighted, and sometimes scandalized, by the extravagant themed rest stops. The most entertaining display in 2016 was on the grounds of Mission San Miguel, between King City and Paso Robles where Rest Stop 4 crew, including the winsome Marilyn look-like, played drag queen models. They performed salacious songs and dances, sauntered about displaying their wares, and snapped pictures with riders in naughty poses.
I’ve wondered about the propriety of this bawdy merrymaking, a gay descendant of the Sixties counterculture with costumes and performance and a shameless flaunting of sexuality, all in public, even on the sacred grounds of the host Mission. But year after year the Mission’s robed Franciscan Friars comfortably chatted with cross-dressed rest stop crew and costumed riders. I decided that the Catholic Church must regard the Ride as blessed work.
David was my guide to this fantastic bash. Over the years in our tent in the evenings, prompted by my questions, we had a continuing conversation about the significance of the Ride, what made it gay, the role of straights, the rest stop performances, the evening programs, and the meaning of Red Dress Day. I was trying to understand the Ride and why I joined it a second time, a third, and again and again, despite the daunting physical demands of the week-long bike ride to Los Angeles. As our voices floated outside the tent, neighbors sometimes shushed our frank exchanges about the Ride and sexual orientation.
In recent years, David and I discussed whether I should ride in a red dress on Red Dress Day. The pros: in a red dress I would be part of the symbolic red ribbon, and transgressing this gender taboo would be daring. The cons: it was so flamboyant and so not me. I never had worn a dress. Over the years I had become comfortable as an AIDS rider. But wearing this red dress might make me look like a woman. Or a fairy, an effeminate man. Or perhaps worse, a man dressing as a woman. This would be outside, in the open, where people would see me. I could not picture it, even as I debated it.
Other riders frequently assumed David and I were partners. When it first happened I felt misperceived, weird, and compelled to explain that I was straight and married to a woman. Several gay friends claim to have “gaydar,” the ability to intuit whether another person is gay, and I always expected to appear as a straight blip on the gaydar screens of other riders. I’m shy and quiet and serious, unstylish in dress, wooden in bodily movements; I’m not a bit touchy-feely, and, by my reckoning, not perceptibly gay by any stereotype. None of this seemed to matter. In a gay event, I found, it’s not so easy to appear straight or to explain that you really are straight. So, over my years on the Ride, I finally shut up and accepted being seen as a gay partner.
No man has made a pass at me on the Ride, but I did feel uneasy about showering. Showers were available in sex-segregated shower trucks with partitioned shower stalls and a common changing area. The insides of the trucks were hot and steamy with naked men showering, drying, and dressing in close proximity, like the infamous gay steam baths in 1980s San Francisco. I could not tell who was gay and who was straight in the shower trucks. But male bodily beauty was celebrated on the Ride – you saw many handsome faces and buff male bodies, you heard many jokes and much innuendo about male beauty. About the showers, I was self-conscious over how my exposed uncultivated aging physique would withstand scrutiny. In reality, there was no scrutiny in the shower trucks, and little talk or eye contact either. But every year that I rode, approaching the showers in our Santa Cruz campsite at the end of day 1, I wondered if I would shape up as a flabby straight man compared to the gay hard bodies.
On my third Ride in 2005, a young woman rider flirted with me. She was in her late 20s, slim, blond, and pretty. She struck up a conversation as we walked our bikes out of a rest stop, and she continued throughout that day’s ride. I realized I was being hit on, I enjoyed it, and then, after that day, I never saw her again. I liked the attention of this attractive young woman. Youth, like beauty, was prized on the Ride, and I was flattered.
But as I pondered our encounter over the following days, some anomalies crept in – she was the only woman riding in a group of young men, her body was straight rather than curvy, and her voice was several registers low. Finally, it dawned on me that I had been cruised by a transwoman. Or, I thought the next day, was she a transman? Or somebody else? All possibilities left me confused – she was feminine and attractive as I recalled her, and now she seemed exotic too. I had strayed. I had been attracted to someone somehow queer, and it was forbidden, fun, and strange.
My life has been entirely in the straight world, at home with family, in schools and legal workplaces, in social movements of the Sixties, and in social settings with friends, gay friends included. When I grew up in a suburb in the 1950s and early 1960s, I was oblivious to the gay demimonde in north side Chicago and other big cities, but I knew that calling a boy a “homo” was a charged insult, one I’d much rather deliver than receive.
Living in the Bay Area in the 1970s and the 1980s, with the public emergence of a San Francisco homosexual world and a gay rights movement, I had reservations about these developments. I still considered myself sympathetic to Sixties radicalism: a supporter of civil rights movements and diversity struggles, a questioner of convention and authority, a partisan of social freedom and experimentation. That included my own “summer of love,” 1971, when my hippie girlfriend Katie and I lived together, unmarried, ignoring old Fifties taboos that prohibited sex outside procreation in marriage. But my Sixties commitment to “free love,” to sex for pleasure outside marriage, stopped when it came to gays. Through the 1980s I still believed in heterosexuality, marriage between sexual gender opposites, and heterosexual procreation as an affirmation of the future. And so long as I believed sex was justified by the birth of children, my world view had no place for gay sex, gay lifestyle, and gay liberation.
My views changed only gradually, first through friendships with gay men and women, particularly some long-time comrades in my Chamokome ranch collective. I came to recognize the legitimacy of gay alternatives as I saw people I liked and respected in committed gay relationships, finding meaning in gay community life, and advocating for gay rights.
My beliefs followed. I wondered, “What’s wrong with gay alternatives? Why hold gays to this antiquated standard of sex for procreation that I had long ago stopped applying to myself?”
And then came the Ride. I was set topsy-turvy as a straight minority participant in the AIDS Rides of the 2000s. Year after year, for one week I adapted to a world of gay political and health preoccupations, a smorgasbord of possibilities for sexuality and gender, public displays of same-sex sexuality, outlandish gay antics, inside gay humor, obscure gay slang, and gay bravado. As a straight man on these AIDS Rides, I variously felt apprehensive and cautious, intrigued and dazzled, sympathetic and moved, surprised, puzzled, overshadowed, and outwitted. I felt colorless and humorless. I felt stiff and asexual. I felt very straight.
During my years on the Ride, I observed this gay culture permeating my straight world, from politics and civil rights issues to literature, fashion and television sitcoms. It was all around me – homosexual cowboy romance, metrosexual guys, lesbian comediennes, gay marriages. And then came Caitlyn Jenner, former men’s Olympics decathlon gold medal winner, now become national cover girl, introducing us to the fantastic new world of gender fluidity.
I heard a gay friend speak with regret about the loss of gay specialness with the emerging bland cultural integration of the gay and straight worlds. And, having lived as a straight minority misfit on the AIDS Rides, I wondered about my place as a straight older man in this emerging new mainstream society with its galloping gayness, sexual orientation mysteries, and disintegrating gender rules. I foresaw more straight strangeness ahead, that is, my feeling out of sync as a straight man, not just on the Ride, but now in my own straight world.
But there was more to it: “First you commit yourself; then you know.” That’s how it was with me and the Ride. Over years I gradually realized that I was not just a sympathetic straight outsider at an AIDS fundraising event. I had become a participant in one of the great civil rights struggles of my era. I had rejoined the postwar movement for expansion of individual freedoms, diversity, and democracy that had been fueled by my own Sixties movements.
In 1999, when David said it would be good for me to do the Ride, I did not understand that I was signing up for life membership in the battle against AIDS and the campaign for gay equal rights. Through my Rides, I discovered I had become a valued straight partner in the gay civil rights movement. And this was my kind of movement, an offspring of the Black civil rights movement and the social movements of the Sixties: for equality, social justice, and public health too; smart, serious, funny, and – better than my Sixties movements – dedicated to a long-term crusade. I was in it, and I was surprised, and I was proud to be back in the struggle to expand civil rights.
In 2016 I took another step: I decided to ride in a red dress. I disrobed from my usual riding regalia and joined the gender-bending exhibition of cyclists on Red Dress Day. When I first did the Ride in 1999, wearing a red dress on Red Dress Day was unthinkable for me. But over the years growing numbers did it, celebrating all day, and they became puzzled by my straight riding clothes. Feeling left out, I wondered, “Can I do that?” For three decades I had worn only dark suits to work. Now I wanted to join the technicolor dress-up party. I never had defied any gender convention, but in solidarity with the Ride, I thought I should be part of this public show of gay presence.
I could not do full drag. No red pantyhose, padded bra, blond wig, ruby heels, or bold lipstick. I did wear a red flapper dress, with shining red sequins and shimmying red fringe, made by my amused wife. I wore it over my black Lycra riding tights and jersey, with bright red bead necklaces.
And I was surprised. Riding in public in a red dress was big fun. I liked being part of the spectacle of two thousand red-dressed riders in a red ribbon on the road. I liked being looked at, laughed at, honked at, and, yes, admired. At a Lompoc restaurant two teenage girls spotted me in my red dress, asked if I was on the Ride, and praised me.
I decided I looked good in a red dress. And I felt…well, I felt attractive, with that shimmering red fabric clinging to my body. And it made me wonder: “What would it be like to wear clothing like this every day: soft, silky, colorful, feminine.” If “clothes make the man,” was I a different man in my red dress?
I received many compliments from other riders on Red Dress Day, and, at the lunchtime rest stop I was invited to perform in a red dress show organized by the irrepressible crew of Rest Stop 4. I was flattered, I felt happy, kind of giddy actually. After all, I was in a Lompoc public park, in a flaming demonstration of gay civil rights, in my sparkling red dress. Someone could have called me “homo,” and I didn’t care.
And that invitation to perform in the park? No, I was not ready to appear on stage, vamping in drag before a boisterous gay audience.
Not yet. Maybe next year’s Ride. I’ll pack my red heels.