Bears

Bears refers to a subculture of the gay men's community that celebrates being large and hairy, though many of its members suggest that bearness is more a state of mind characterized by friendliness, a down-to-earth attitude, and sex positivity. The idea of a bear as a certain type of gay man was influenced by “chubs” and “chaser” groups, such as Girth and Mirth, and homo-masculine working-class gay icons, such as leather-men, bikers, and cowboys, but also the radical “faerie” subculture that advocated gender ambiguity and a resistance to commodified notions of sex and masculinity.

What began to congeal from these eclectic influences was that a bear man was all or some of the following: bulky, bearded, hirsute, and usually middle-aged. Thus, the more of those qualities any one man had, the more likely it would be that he would be called a bear, but the relationship to masculinity has always been harder to characterize.

Bear has also been defined by what it is not: the idealized gay man put forth in most gay pornography and other gay media, basically a young, fit, and smooth-skinned club-hopping guy who looks like a Calvin Klein model. These types are referred to as “WeHo boys” in Los Angeles and “Chelsea boys” in New York, “twinks” when they are particularly young, and “circuit boys” if they are part of the traveling dance parties known as “circuit parties.” Bear has always been somewhat of an umbrella term, and the bear scene has been a meeting place for iconic bears and their admirers but also a space where older men, working-class men, large men, hirsute men, bearded men, and their admirers have felt welcome. Admirers have generally been considered part of the community, and the line between bear and admirer is more blurry than the lines between members of other sexual subcultures, such as chubs and their admirers.

Les Wright is generally regarded as the first writer to document the history of the bear scene. He has edited two volumes on bear identity and bear culture, The Bear Book, published in 1997, and The Bear Book II, published in 2001. He places the origins of bear identity around 1980, when men in San Francisco and a few other U.S. cities began to place little teddy bears in the pockets of their jeans or on their knapsacks. He states that this was in reaction to the practice of placing handkerchiefs in one's pocket to signify sexual roles or fetishes and signified an interest in cuddling.

The bear community started to come together in the mid-1980s as a significant number of self-identified bears and bear admirers began interacting on early computer bulletin boards and having parties. In 1986, Bear Magazine, a homemade magazine that would later become more polished, debuted in San Francisco, and a few years later, “The Lone Star Saloon” opened in San Francisco's SOMA (South of Market) district; it not only became a home for bear culture, but attracted many tourists as a sort of bear mecca. Gay bars across the country began to feature “bear nights,” and a listserv has continued until the present, the “Bears Mailing List.”

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