The month long cycling event takes place this May, with ride challenges, prizes from Zoka Coffee and Primal Wear, and funds raised benefiting Attain Housing. Wes and his mother were living in Vladivostok, on the far eastern edge of the Soviet Union near China and North Korea. The USSR was teetering towards collapse and their lives were hell: Wes, a closeted gay kid, lived in such fear for his life that he carried a knife to school. His mother, Elena, worked at a prison and was ordered to falsify medical reports to cover up the beating deaths of prisoners — if she refused, she was told, an “accident” might happen to her.