SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – This Sunday marks the final California AIDS/LifeCycle ride.
The fundraiser is a multi-day, 545 mile bicycle ride along the California coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise money for AIDS research and services.
Over the past 30 years, it has raised more than $300 million for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center.
However, the ride’s organizers say it has become too expensive to put on and not enough people are taking part.
Because of that, 2025 will be the final year of the ride – an event that had become a historic staple of the Bay Area.
KCBS’ Holly Quan met up with some of this year’s participants and saw the time and energy it takes for the riders to get prepared for the trip.
The Preparation
It takes some preparation to take on a seven-day bike ride.
A group of riders met up in Marin to get ready for the last AIDS/LifeCycle ride.
This gathering featured a wide range of experience with the event. Some have been doing it every year for many years.
Others, like 70-year-old Dipti Ghosh from San Francisco, are doing it for the first time this year.
“The first time I actually attempted to do something was 25 years ago and I got sick and couldn’t do the ride,” Ghosh said. “It just seemed too much to do seven days of camping.”
That was ultimately the dealbreaker for Ghosh from taking part most years. This year, she found a solution to that.
“Booked a hotel room for every night,” she said with a chuckle. “So, I’m good to go. I am princessing all the way.”
Ghosh spent her career in the healthcare industry. She said she wanted to take part because of her concern over the future of research and services.
“The sign of the times right now and how much funding is being cut from healthcare and AIDS research in particular, I feel like there is no better time to be doing this.”
Other people have also gotten involved in the ride because of healthcare.
Lori Chudacoff from San Anselmo said she has been concerned for the people who can’t get the help they need.
“I was in my privileged little white healthcare, people who have insurance bubble, working in cardiovascular risk management,” she explained. “And then, all of the sudden, I got an HIV-positive patient.”
She said that she had the mindset that HIV is manageable with testing and treatment.
“But that is sort of a white castle approach to really what’s going on,” Chudacoff continued. “There are a lot of people on the streets, there are a lot of people who don’t have access to healthcare. And even people who have healthcare, they have insurance and they still couldn’t afford to buy their prescriptions.”
It’s a reason why she is taking part in the fundraiser – to help raise money for people with HIV or AIDS who need the financial help to get the testing and treatment they need.
Some people get involved in the event because of the event itself.
“It’s the only place I know on the planet where you can be surrounded by people who just encourage you and love you and support you no matter who you are,” Dillon Roe from Berkeley said. She said she was a recovering alcoholic.
“It really is a ‘love bubble’. The first time I heard that, I thought, ‘Oh please, really?’” she stated. “But then I did my first ride.”
She wasn’t alone.
“We do this thing, ‘Why you ride’, and a lot of people had different answers for that,” Andy Philips said.
He had battled cancer. His answer to the question of why he rides took some time.
“I finally found the one reason I do. Everyone has their demons and mine disappear when I am helping other people. It matters a lot.”
Whether it was their first time, or just their most recent time, this group had one thing in common: they lived through the AIDS epidemic. They understand the neverending need for the financial and moral support for those with the disease.
But what about those who did not live through that time?
The next generation
As this group got set up with their bicycles for the day of training, there is a memory for many of them about why they were in Marin, preparing for the lengthy trek down south.
They made a stop for a lunch break outside the Woodacre Market.
“In the ‘80s, you lost friends to this disease,” Ghosh explained to KCBS Radio. “It was young people in people of color communities, I lost a lot of friends. For me, it’s always been a cause that I thought that we should be working toward a cure.”
June 5th will mark 44 years since the first reported cases of what would become known as AIDS.
Since that time, there has been progress made in detecting and managing it and HIV.
“There’s complacency because it’s being managed,” Ghosh continued. “That fervor we had to find a cure has not reached the next generation. I think that younger folks are just not that interested in the cause.”
She pointed to who was there training with her.
“You look at the age of the people who are on these training rides and they are all older. That urgency? I don’t know what will bring it back, but I feel the urgency for a cure has escaped people since we have management.”
Ghosh’s personal memories are what brought her to this ride.
Jennifer Villaneuve of Berkeley can remember her first ride 18 years ago.
“The first year I did it, we were wearing things on our jerseys about people we have lost,” she said. “And 10 years ago, it was less of that because of the medical advances. And people had a different connection to the cause. Now it’s much more prevention and all of that. But as a community, it’s bittersweet.”
Andrew Sweeney from San Francisco also did his first ride at a similar time – back in 2008. For him, this perceived lack of fervor or urgency is part of a broader cycle.
“There are a lot of riders that are 25, 30. HIV is 35 years old,” he explained. “So they have lived with it, so priorities have shifted and changed. That’s a totally normal world.”
One of the two main beneficiaries of the California AIDS/LifeCycle is the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
Its co-founder, Cleve Jones, started the foundation back in 1983 at the onset of the AIDS crisis and sees the same trends many of the participants in the charity see themselves.
“It’s frustrating to me,” Jones told KCBS Radio. “I was at an event not too long ago where a group of old-timers were talking about how many people died in San Francisco. A couple of young people had been eavesdropping. When they heard us say that probably 20,000 to 25,000 gay men died in San Francisco, they accused us of exaggerating. When that immediate confrontation with death and disease is not right in your face, people tend to move on.”
For Jones, it is both a challenge and an opportunity. It’s a challenge because he – and those taking part in this final ride – say this current mentality can leave people and populations vulnerable.
“This isn’t about shaming or blaming people,” he added. “It’s a little bit like me listening to my grandmother tell stories about World War I. It seems like a very distant past.”
The opportunity, though, is finding new ways to communicate with people about the history and the impact of HIV and AIDS.
“We have to come up with better strategies and I am very much right now engaged in trying to understand what is the best way to reach particularly young, gay and bisexual men, particularly young people of color, people who are at greater risk to try to figure out what is the best way to get to them. What are the trusted sources of information that can be used – what are the communication strategies? It’s critically important.”
The “Love Bubble”
The end of the 545-mile-long journey comes with cheers from crowds congratulating you on finishing the coastside trip.
To be ready for it, it requires lots of miles before it – like this training ride in Marin.
“Ready?”
“Yup!”
The sounds of ticking bicycle gears pick up as this bit of training gets underway.
While not officially part of the AIDS/LifeCycle itself, it is a very important step of the event and it is where most of the magic happens.
Riders bond with each other as they each look out for one another as they wind their way through lonely backroads.
“We get so attached to things. Things are always going to be the way they are. No, they’re not,” Charlie Jonas of San Francisco said, preparing for his 13th LifeCycle ride. “The folks have been talking about ending the ride for a decade now. It is going to end. How do we move into something else? It’s not an end – it’s not this binary either there’s a ride or there’s not. It’s, ‘How do we take what the essence of what the ride is and carry that into the rest of our lives?’”
The essence is what people here say they want to hang on to.
What may have been raising money for AIDS research and assistance may now be a place of community
“This is my third ride and I’m sad that it’s the last ride because it is such a magnificent event. But everything has a lifecycle,” Roe said. “I’m an alcoholic and I’m in recovery and there used to be giant [Alcoholics Anonymous] meetings in the ‘80s and giant conferences that were thousands of people. They run their course and they get smaller. I think it’s gonna morph. I think people are going to put their energy into this. I think there is too much energy to die and I think, given this administration, you can’t. You can’t let this energy die.”
And for Andrew Sweeney, it’s rides like this that help him restore his faith in community.
“At the end of every ride, I want to put my bike up – I don’t want to see it for a month or two,” he explained. “And, I love all of my friends, but I don’t want to see them for a little while. I want to reconnect with the rest of my communities. So, I don’t have to start missing it until August or September. But there are other rides. I know a whole crew of people coming down from Toronto, the Frosty Beavers – that’s their team name – and they have a ride from Toronto to Montreal. Beautiful. I’ve done it twice.”
While the full California AIDS/LifeCycle will come to an end – the riding will not be stopping.
The San Francisco AIDS Foundation is organizing a three-day ride from San Francisco to Sonoma and back next spring, hoping to raise a more modest $1.5 million.
Jones, an activist and co-founder of the foundation, said he will be continuing his work to maintain the institutional knowledge about the AIDS epidemic.
“I’m also engaged in efforts to preserve the AIDS Memorial Quilt as a record of what happened during that time so people might understand and perhaps act on the lessons of the past,” said Jones.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt is a 54 ton piece of art that memorializes those lost in the early years of the crisis. Some of those AIDS patients were denied funerals.
And for the people helping people get ready for this week-long trek – they are not done either.
Ron Hirsch has spent 20 years leading training rides. And he’s not stopping.
“We plan to continue riding every Friday,” Hirsch told KCBS Radio. “It won’t be specifically sanctioned by the AIDS Foundation, but we’re going to ride anyway because those of us who lead it – and also a lot of riders – we like it and we want it. And we’re going to keep up the attitude of community where it is important for us to take care of each other and be with each other and be safe. And that’s way more important to us than being fast riders. There’s a real sense of community.”
The next steps
“Yeah, I'm incredibly emotional.”
Dr. Tyler TerMeer is the CEO of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
This event started in 1994 as the California AIDS Ride in Los Angeles and became the AIDS/LifeCycle in 2002.
“I mean, this is a very bittersweet moment for me personally,” he explained to Quan. “This is my 17th year associated with AIDS/LifeCycle. Long before I was the CEO of the ride, I found AIDS/LifeCycle as a young HIV positive person and I found a community of really amazing people that became my chosen family. I've come back year over year, every single year – the first full week of June – to this community known as the ‘Love Bubble’ and knowing that it was going to be there was just such an amazing part of my year, each and every year.
Dr. TerMeer had seen himself the passion and care within the event that drew him in.
With the event ending, he said the relationships formed have been about more than just the ride itself.
“It's about movement, not just the movement of our bodies, but the movement of our stories and the movement of our hearts and the things that have kept us bonded together,” the organization’s CEO stated. “And that has existed over the last 31 years and I think will exist long beyond the final 545. I have met so many amazing people and captured so many moments.”
One of the special things he noted about AIDS/LifeCycle is that the event meant so much to so many people. Often, it was a complex relationship that people had with the event – and their view of it.
“You're going to hear these magical moments about the people they met along the ride. The physical challenge, the emotional toll,” he explained.
But the event also had a financial impact – benefitting the organization Dr. TerMeer leads.
“AIDS/LifeCycle has made just such a profound impact financially on both San Francisco AIDS Foundation and Los Angeles LGBT Center. In 1994, Los Angeles LGBT Center launched California AIDS Ride. And that first year there were about 500 cyclists that set out on the first ride from San Francisco to LA. They raised about $1.5 million and they had a life changing, life altering experience.”
He said they then reached out to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation to join in on the experience.
“So, we did that second year and we grew the ride to about 2000 folks. We raised over $5.5 million that second year and we've only been growing ever since,” Dr. TerMeer said. “And that was our story until the COVID-19 pandemic. But a lot changed during COVID, not only for the ride, but obviously in the world around us.”
He said the pandemic affected many aspects of the ride. It became more expensive. The way people attended events changed. Some of the vendors went out of business, while others had to increase prices to keep their businesses running when large events were not allowed.
“And we also saw several of our businesses unable to follow, unable or unwilling to follow our COVID-19 policies in 2022,” the foundation’s CEO explained. “We had a vaccination requirement of all of our vendors and participants in 2022 and we had a handful of vendors unable or unwilling to follow our vaccination requirement.”
He said that drove up costs to run the ride dramatically.
“In that particular year, it wasn't as noticeable for us because we had such excitement for the relaunch of an in-person event. There was like a yearning of the community to come back together and we had record-breaking attendance and record-breaking fundraising having our highest events fundraising to date.”
That year, Dr. TerMeer said the ride raised about $17.8 million.
Those dollars go to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center – which he said gets invested directly back into the HIV community.
He added that that money helps those organizations offer HIV support groups, provide HIV screenings and help the community as nimbly as possible.
“Unfortunately, what happened in 2023 is that we saw a pretty drastic decline in participation,” said Dr. TerMeer. “We were down about a thousand participants and the event cost remained very high. That again happened in 2024 and we went from raising about $17.8 million to about $11 million in both of those years.”
The margin became too thin to continue the event.
“We wanted to remain a very good steward of our donor's dollar. And we decided it wasn't the most ethical way for us to continue raising dollars for our community. And the last thing we wanted to do was to disappear overnight and not allow the AIDS/LifeCycle community the love bubble to have the closure that they needed and deserved.”
He said they announced the end of the ride nine months before this year’s event to give people plenty of time to plan.
“And we sold out almost immediately.”
Dr. TerMeer said fundraising this year has been outstanding so far – hopefully setting up both the San Francisco and Los Angeles organizations with enough funds to get them to what is next.
So, what is next?
“That's a great question,” Dr. TerMeer responded. “Both agencies have spent a lot of time staying connected to the AIDS/LifeCycle community. We want to launch something next that will keep us engaged with the community that has supported us so long.”
After some surveys and focus groups, the community said it wanted to just give back to the organization and make sure clients and patients are being taken care of.
The Los Angeles LGBT Center is expected to announce its plans in the near future.
However, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation did announce its plans.
“We are thrilled to announce that following AIDS/LifeCycle 2025, we will be launching a series of endurance-based events starting with a three-day cycling event in 2026,” Dr. TerMeer told Quan.
That event will begin in San Francisco and go to Guerneville.
“It will include a really fun Wine Country loop and then head back here toward San Francisco on the third day.”
There is also a separate single-day cycling event.
Along with the bike events – there will be a running event.
”We're bringing back an old, but fun separate running event that used to be a part of our world here at San Francisco AIDS Foundation called the Big Gay 10K,” Dr. TerMeer announced. “And so we're excited to launch several endurance-based events that are just filled with the ability to stay physically fit, stay connected to our mission and – of course – be all things glitter and gay.”