My experiences...
I'm a fairly big rider - 5'8 and nearly 300lbs - living in San Francisco. My first ride was a mile, about 2 years ago. Since then I've had cars curse at me for no reason. Bikers curse at me after cutting me off. Car doors open in my face. And yes, even fat hate.
But more that that, I've also found encouragement. For every time anyone has cursed me, 20 have yelled a supportive, "keep going, you're almost at the top of this hill!" The people who matter to me view me in a new light. Now people want me to take them out biking. There's something about starting at the bottom and overcoming obstacles that makes people trust you when you give advice.
Now two stories. First the bad one.
I've been training for the Aids Lifecycle since the beginning of the year. (For those of you who don't know, it's a 545 mile ride over 7 days from San Francisco to Los Angles.) This will be the hardest thing I've ever done and every weekend of training this year has been the hardest athletic weekend of my life.
About a month ago, I was on the longest ride I've ever done - 70 hilly miles that would ultimately take me nearly 11 hours, including rest stops and lunch. I'm slow and was riding alone. I was 3/4 of the way up a hill I had never climbed non-stop and I noticed that I had just passed the 50 mile mark - a half century and still twenty miles to home. And that's when an SUV with 4 ******bags drove by and started yelling insults. "Try weight watchers before wearing spandex" and "Stop hogging the road lard-ass!" are the ones I remember.
This senseless act of violence (and this was violence) did sting. But somehow the sense of pride I had in myself from my accomplishments was even greater. I met up with some others in my group near the golden gate bridge and in their outrage, I realized that I had better people on my side than the f*ckwits in the car could ever understand.
Now this doesn't mean that I didn't want to pound these sub-humans to a pulp, just that I think I have something better. And that's probably a healthier way to look at things.
Now a second, shorter story, that also explains why I could have pounded them to a pulp.
Most mornings I bike to the gym and do olympic lifting or boxing. On my way back home, I stop by a coffee shop. About a month after a new woman started working there, I kind of sensed that there was a joke going on at my expense. Obviously I assumed that it was a fat guy in spandex joke - but I let it slide. Finally I was talking to one of the barristas and I asked her. The joke was that this woman had been working for a month and saw me almost every day and had never seen my eyes. I never took off my sunglasses in the coffee shop, so she had started joking that I had no eyes.
I guess the lesson here is that yes there are major asses out there. But most people see other things than just a fat guy on a bike.