Interview With Dan Pallotta

Yeah, it was 1993 when we started organizing it, and 1994 when it happened. I've never looked at a graph, but those were probably the peak years of AIDS deaths in the United States. I had lost friends and a former lover; there was a tremendous sense of a mission on everybody's part.

I remember just being on my bike and coming into the closing ceremony and bawling. There's a beauty in each of these things that's unspeakable. When I'm around our events, the minute I hear the music and see the people standing in the pledge office line, or waiting for the safety video, this motley collection of people who refuse to give up on the possibility of life, I get all choked up, without fail.

I think that the greatest crisis that faces the gay and lesbian community is a crisis of faith. It's a feeling of being separated or disenfranchised from God, and certainly the church and religion. There is a Lone Ranger mentality that is divorced from spirit and God and something larger than ourselves.

I think the spread of AIDS is by and large a result of a lack of self-regard, self-esteem. People drink, do drugs. They do things sexually that just aren't safe. They have a need to reinforce that feeling of being worthless, because it's the only feeling that's familiar. A fish knows water: You gravitate toward that which is psychologically familiar without really assessing whether it's healthy. In the absence of God, there doesn't seem to be any other choice.

The impetus of the ride was always to demonstrate the forgotten possibility of humanity. Raising money [only] measures the extent to which we achieve that. So if the message in the video of hope and kindness seemed different, it's only because we're becoming more willing to directly express and articulate that.

I would completely agree with that. The playwright Lanford Wilson has a play that talks about a civilization in some outpost galaxy--could be Earth--they've been searching the stars forever. He says, "After they have explored all the stars in the universe and all of the planets around each sun, they realize they were alone and they were glad because they now knew they would have to become all of the things they had hoped to find." Which I think is identical to what you're saying.

Well, I didn't go crazy. I have always been terrified of the death of my parents. I never knew if I could count on myself. I never knew if that would send me over the edge. And Alan died, and I was besieged by what-ifs. I wasn't besieged with a hatred of God or an obsession with why. Alan's death became almost a step into a place of transition for me, into another way of living, being, seeing.

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