WEST HOLLYWOOD : Skaters Rolling Coast to Coast to Fight AIDS

Motorists found an unusual source for a traffic backup Wednesday morning on Sunset Boulevard: A small group of colorfully clad in-line skaters was bound east for New York, hoping to raise AIDS awareness along the way.

“AIDS has become part of the noise, just another one of society’s ills. (Yet) people are still being infected with HIV, even in the communities hardest hit by the disease,” Brent Nicholson Earle, organizer of the Rainbow Roll for the End of AIDS, a cross-country skate aimed at promoting AIDS education and prevention, said at a news conference in William S. Hart Park.

Earle, a longtime New York-based AIDS activist, is best-known for running a 9,000-mile solo marathon around the perimeter of the United States in 1986-87 to raise AIDS awareness. This time, he is doing the same thing with in-line skating, popularly known as Rollerblading.

Earle and six other skaters, including West Hollywood resident Roddy J. Shaul, began their trek in San Francisco on April 29, and hope to arrive in New York by mid-June to coincide with the Gay Games IV, a sporting event for the gay and lesbian community.

The crew has charted a winding course through other big cities such as Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago and Philadelphia, where they hope to pick up more funding and skaters.

Sometimes they ride in a van over harsh terrain--”Finding skateable roads is very difficult,” Earle said--but their spirit never wanes.

Shaul, a 38-year-old junior high school teacher, sees the trek as the culmination of a personal attempt to come to terms with his sexual orientation.

“When I came out of the closet several years ago, it changed my life completely,” he said.

Before leaving Los Angeles for the next stop, Palm Springs, the skaters received a proclamation from the city of West Hollywood and unfurled a signature square from the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Earle knelt and wept as he scrawled a message in memory of Swen Swenson, a Los Angeles AIDS activist who died of the disease.

“I liken this to the children’s crusade,” he said as he prepared to lace up his skates for the morning jaunt on Sunset. “We’re flying without a net--on a wing and a prayer, you might say.”