Originally published in the New York Native, August 1994.
ONE OF THE MOST interesting revelations in George Chauncey's seminal book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 is the depiction of a society in which men were not rigidly polarized into "homosexual" versus "heterosexual" identities. Instead, men-who-loved-men could be found in a range of groupings such as "fairies," "queers," "trade," and "gays." "Each," Chauncey notes, "had a specific connotation and signified specific subjectivities." And for the most part, as used within the emerging gay world, these identifications lacked the pejorative connotations they would later acquire.
While such "subjectivities" still exist today, the topic is nearly taboo. For although politically correct lesbigay activists make a lot of noise about "inclusion" within the "lesbian, gay, bisexual, drag and transgender community," the "diversity" they have in mind is extraordinarily homogenized. Not only are lesbians and gay men expected to merge into a more or less single cultural continuity (unisex yet ideologically feminist), but variations among male homosexuals are likewise amalgamated. One people, one culture, one "queer" nation.
Moreover, the lesbian and gay hierarchy's embrace of feminism's war against all-male institutions often manifests itself in a drive to obliterate whatever remains of pre-lesbigay gay male subcultures.
In previous columns, I've pointed to some of the resulting absurdities: gay men and lesbian S/M folk expected to "play together" in mixed-gender, "pansexual" spaces, or combined Mr.-and-Ms. Leather contests, sometimes with a drag queen moderating. Murmurs of discontent from the male masses (expressed in letters-to-the-editor in Drummer and other publications) are met with lectures about the need to destroy barriers within the lesbigay community (even if unique - and distinctly masculine - subcultural worlds are thereby lost).
One of the last true holdouts against the lesbigay tide is the "bear" phenomenon, probably because gay leftist PCers and lesbian feminists just don't understand what's afoot.
Gay men of a bearish persuasion tend to be big, masculine males - usually hairy, often hulking, wanting to socialize within a community of like-minded males without necessarily the kinks of SM or the 'uniform'-ity of leather (although there certainly are leather and S/M bears). Many of the letters to Bear magazine read like they're from desert wanderers who've stumbled upon an oasis - or like earlier coming-out pieces. The "I didn't know there were other men like me" sort of thing.
One of the better explanations of beardom I've come across is a document posted on the GayCom computer bulletin board's "Hirsute Pursuit" conference, accessible on many gay-oriented Bulletin Board Services. The article is by John Topping, who just completed a documentary about his seven-week, cross-country "Bear Journey." His film includes interviews with bear club members and footage of bear gatherings.
When Topping talks about his own early self-discovery, it sounds almost shamanistic - as in the selection of an animal spirit guide. "I thought I looked like a bear," he writes. "I thought I moved and picked things up like a bear ... I began to meditate on the thought that I really was a bear, or that I had bear spirit ... I felt better about myself. I felt more confident. I felt more powerful."
Topping describes a visit to the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, "a celebration of alternative sexual lifestyle" in which he met "a lot of bears, not just people who looked like them and acted like them, but people who actually identified themselves as bears as well." During that city's annual Bear Expo, he remembers, "I would see a hot man and say, 'Wow, he's hot.' And instead of getting the incredulous You've Gotta Be Kidding stare, I got enthusiastic agreement. ... That was something I'd never had in my life, and it was no small thing for me to have it now."
During a Bear Hug Party, Topping looked around at all the men he had met that weekend, and all the men he had seen but not met, and remembered thinking, literally, "These are my people. I had found them at last. And they were bears."
Spontaneous, grass-roots, sexually-charged yet atavistically spiritual, the Bear Movement is unique - and, as I said, a holdout against lesbigay homogenization and one of the last preserves of a masculine-affirmative, self-avowedly gay male community. But not all gay men are bears, and those who aren't attuned to its particular "subjectivities" might ponder the value of reinvigorating fraternal male culture within the larger gay community.