AIDS LifeCycle: Gay Airman Randy Phillips wants young people to talk about AIDS

Editor’s Note: This is one in a series of posts this week about AIDS LifeCycle which will conclude Saturday in Westwood.

If you want to ride in next year’s event, you can save $40 on registration by using codes GayStarNews or GIH by Monday, June 11.

******************

On the day that the military’s anti-gay Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy officially ended last September, Airman Randy Phillips decided to come out to his father – live on YouTube.

Their conversation went viral and has been viewed by nearly 6 million people. Phillip’s father took it well and assured his nervous son that he would always love him and that he was ‘very proud’ of him. (See second video below).

Phillips is using his newfound internet fame for a good cause: He is one of 2,225 riders participating in this week’s AIDS/Lifecycle, a 545-mile bike ride that is the world’s most successful HIV/AIDS fundraiser.

‘I kind of wanted to parlay what little attention I got from YouTube into something that I think is taboo for our generation,’ he says in a video taken during a break from riding. ‘Not very many people [in their] early 20s like to think about AIDS. It’s such our parent’s generation. We kind of like to think we have it under control. But we don’t. It’s still very big and it shouldn’t be taboo. It should be something we talk about and discuss and fund raise for and try to fight.’

While on the ride, Phillips met a 24-year-old fellow rider who is HIV-positive.

‘AIDS doesn’t have a face,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t have an age, it doesn’t have a demographic. It can happen to anybody.’

By the way, Randy’s mother didn’t take the news of him being gay nearly as well as his dad: “She couldn’t think of any, couldn’t relate to another gay person who had had a normal life, who grew up healthy and had a successful life and a career and lived a long life and maybe got married and found somebody and possibly had some kids. She didn’t think that’s what my life would be like. She thought it would be absolutely a horror story and that I’d die 10 years later alone, a drug addict, from HIV.”