BC Woman Magazine

August, 1999

by Lesley House

Lesley Gering has not only been around bikes since childhood, but has been riding them for that long. A 27-year-old Vancouver artist, Lesley started riding dirt bikes at the age of 11 soon moving on to trial bikes. She’s been on a road bike now for five years and ridden a variety of different makes, but her present machine of choice is a Honda.

Lesley has managed to combine her love of motorcycles and her creativity into a budding career. She has produced a 1999 calendar called Women and the Art of Motorcycles, with the proceeds going to breast cancer research, through the British Columbia Cancer Foundation. The calendar, which adorns the walls of many motorcycle enthusiasts, generated great exposure for Lesley’s work. As a result, she has shot covers for Canadian Biker and Cycle Canada, this issue of B.C Woman Magazine. “I shot the first real biker woman for
Canadian Biker – not just another model in a bikini,” she says with pride.
She is currently riding a Valkyrie, Honda’s large new touring bike, as a
courtesy from the company for her photography work. Lesley can talk bikes
as well as any guy, and professes that she “loves everything about bikes and
the way they feel.”

Lesley also loves being gawked at by little girls when she’s on her bike.
That’s what made me want to ride when I was a kid – seeing a woman on a bike…
…For Lesley, it is also sensory. I love that when you’re riding you can
smell everything, feel everything.

We’ve come a long way from burning our bras and riding to love-ins on the
back of someone else’s bike to riding wherever we want, for whatever reason,
all by ourselves. So that girl you knew in grade eight who rode her brother’s
bike around their yard wasn’t such a tomboy after all - she was a trailblazer.