It was a sunny Friday morning when the group rounded the corner onto Main Street on their bikes. There were about a dozen of them, and they were ready for coffee and pastries after a ride along the Manhan Rail Trail.
They were part of Happy Valley Coffee Ride (HVCR), a queer-centered biking group that meets weekly at 7:30 a.m. on Fridays, weather permitting, to ride to local coffee shops. Though the group has a focus on queer riders, it’s also open to allies, provided they understand that queer members and queer culture are the group’s default.
“I wanted a space where trans people felt safe and didn’t have to explain ourselves or do a lot of extra work around that,” said Sebastian Barr, the group’s founder, who is trans himself. When he started the group two years ago, he wanted to meet other trans people who also liked to bike, and he wanted to create a cycling-focused community that didn’t have an “athletic focus or a kind of bro culture that, even if they want to be welcoming, isn’t.”
HVCR rides go at a pace of 8 to 10 mph, though the group also operates with a “no-drop” policy, meaning that they match the pace of the slowest person and no one gets left behind. They also have a designated person, known as a “sweep,” who rides in the back, wears a high-vis vest, and carries a first aid kit. Their job is to keep an eye out for any issues, like if anyone has a technical issue with a bike or is falling behind.
“A lot of what is intimidating about group rides is, ‘Will I be able to keep up with the group?’ … We can go as slow as anyone needs, so we set a slower pace, but we can go even slower; we can take breaks. The idea is for the ride to be comfortable, and we don’t need it to be speedy,” Barr said. He took inspiration in part from the local chapter of the group All Bodies on Bikes, which centers plus-size cyclists.
Faster-paced “drop rides,” by contrast, leave behind, or “drop,” any rider who can’t keep up. Barr noted that some riders do choose to take part in those rides, “but you can imagine, it does not feel good to get dropped,” he said.
“I want this ride to be fun, and I want it to be accessible to as many people who can get on a bike as possible,” Barr said.
Happy ride
Barr started biking regularly when he moved to the Pioneer Valley in 2021. “I’ve known how to ride a bike my whole life, but I didn’t live in a community where it felt safe and accessible,” he said. When he lived in Boston, the streets weren’t safe enough to navigate on a bike; in Louisville, his bikes kept getting stolen. Being able to ride on rail trails here in Massachusetts instead, he said, was “transformative.”
He got the idea for Happy Valley Coffee Ride from a friend who leads a similar bike ride in the San Francisco area, which began during the pandemic as a way of supporting queer-owned businesses and facilitating social gatherings outdoors.
“I would message all the time and be like, ‘This is so sweet. I love this.’ And then they were like, ‘Well, you live in the queerest, sweetest place — you should just start one.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, maybe, maybe, maybe,’” he said.
Barr made an Instagram post announcing the first HVCR ride in June 2024. At first, he called it the Easthampton Coffee Ride, but he wanted to spread out elsewhere in the area as well. He also wasn’t a fan of the term “Pioneer Valley,” so he chose a different name that he thought would be a better fit: “I’d heard other people refer to this [area] as the Happy Valley, and I do feel like that’s the vibe that I wanted — a sweet, happy ride,” he said.
No one else showed up to the first ride, or so it seemed initially — the one person who turned up to Familiars Coffee & Tea in Northampton had taken a different route from the one Barr had taken to get there. He posted again the following week to announce a second ride on the same route. That time, three people showed up.
“I would post photos from the ride, I would tag the coffee shops, and then it slowly built from there, ” he said.
On Sept. 11, about a dozen people (and a dog in a bike trailer) gathered at Millside Park in Easthampton to ride to Tunic Coffee in Northampton via the Manhan Rail Trail, about 4 miles total. They began with introductions — names, pronouns, and one thing each person was looking forward to about fall. Several people were wearing T-shirts that offered a different definition of LGBTQIA: “Let’s Go Bike Together Queerly In A Group.”
Barr had predicted the ride would take them about half an hour, and they made it to Tunic a few minutes earlier than that, joined by a few people who opted to meet them there without taking part in the ride. A number of HVCR regulars have jobs that allow them to choose their own hours — Barr, for instance, is a psychologist; Tim Dwyer is a professional video game designer; Andrea Leigh is a therapist; Jaime Taylor is a librarian on sabbatical. Other people take personal time on Friday mornings or shift around their hours so they can take part.
“I don’t think that we’re all early risers. I think there’s a real commitment. People will get themselves out of bed to do it once, and then it’s pretty intoxicating to be in this vibe, so people make the effort,” Barr said.
Alex Siegel, who has been part of HVCR since its second-ever ride, said that biking “adds a level of whimsy to your life that makes you feel like you’re young again, and it really brings me back, particularly to my childhood of biking around my neighborhood and not having a care of what time it is or where I need to be. And it makes me feel very alive.”
Leigh said she likes biking because it’s an “incredibly joyful movement that lets me feel connected to the world, and it never feels punitive. … It doesn’t feel like a ‘should.’ It feels like something I am so happy to get to do all the time, especially in this area.”
Both of them spoke highly of the sense of community that the group fosters. Leigh said she’s met a number of her closest friends in the group and that it’s been “such a gift” that is “inextricably linked” to her life in the Valley.
Siegel echoed the sentiment: “When I broke my ankle, they dropped off food. When I’m feeling down, I reach out … and we get outside, so it’s become so much more than just a bike ride. It’s become a real sense of community,” they said.
Leigh said she hadn’t been on a bike in years before she joined — “I was as newbie as one can get [as someone] who knows how to ride a bike.” Even with what she called a “$50 garage bike,” she felt welcome: “We’re all genuinely excited when folks show up.”
When asked what advice she might give to someone who’s on the fence about taking part in one of HVCR’s rides, she offered a new take on a popular gay meme phrase: “Be gay and ride bikes!”
For more information about Happy Valley Coffee Ride, visit instagram.com/happyvalleycoffeeride.
