my hat runneth over

I was really worried about fundraising for the Friends for Life Bike Rally. The minimum fundraising required to participate was a daunting amount, and I was afraid that the cause would be considered too marginal. Too gay.

I remember the really bad days in the early days of AIDS. I remember reading Proud Lives in xtra!, the Toronto gay biweekly paper, where I would regularly see the obituaries of people I knew. I was in my early 20's, and your peers are not supposed to be dying when you're in your 20's. Every day I would see emaciated forms in wheelchairs, the same sad story written in Kaposi's Sarcoma across so many gaunt faces.

It was all made much more complicated by all the blame. There was talk of quarantine, of God's judgement. For many parents, this was how they found out that they had a gay child. Being rejected by your parents because of your sexuality is certainly not uncommon, but it is an especially crippling blow to be dealt while facing one's own mortality.

Things are better now than they were then. The new drug cocktails mean that people living with HIV/AIDS are living both healthier and longer. Being gay, at least in a big city like Toronto, is nowhere near as marginalized as it once was. The face of AIDS itself has changed. With a much-raised global awareness of the terrible burned of the disease in Africa (thanks to Stephen Lewis and others), it's no longer simply "the gay disease".

But still, I worried.

It turns out, though, that I was completely wrong, and I've never been happier. Okay, that's hyperbole, but you get the point. As my pledge page shows, I had nothing at all to worry about. I've not only met the minimum required to participate, I've even been encouraged to increase my fundraising goal, due in large part to the completely outrageous generosity and support of the fibre arts blog community. I'm exceptionally grateful, both for the money raised for the Toronto People WIth AIDS Foundation, and for some of the ghosts that I get to lay to rest. My thanks to you all.