Bears: We’re Everywhere Now

A version of the following essay appeared as “Bears: We’re Everywhere Now” in Bear Tracks 2006:3 (page 5):

Back in the 1980s when the idea of gay “bears” emerged, it was a rather vague, undifferentiated, and not quite defined notion. “Bear” was more a loose umbrella under which many different kinds of gay men began to forge a new way of connecting. “Gay,” which had become a radical identity in the late 1960s was out, and “queer” was the new radical “in.”

As “gay” came increasingly to mean “white, male, and urban middle-class,” gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer folk cast about to articulate a new group cohesion. In the 1980s “tribe” was a way to undo the growing divide between gay and queer. And “tribe” captures the essence of the early bear “group cohesion,” hearkening back to 1960s gay liberationist ideas of cohesive community; even all the way back to Walt Whitman and his notion of the sexual adhesion of Calamus lovers. Walt Whitman was a prototype for gay bears.

In San Francisco in the 1980s bikers, leathermen, long-haired hippies (early 1970s gay settlers in the Castro, quickly usurped by the new clone crowd), Castro clones, gay truckers, and blue-collar and rural men who did not identify with “gay” but who loved men, chubbies and chaser friends (Girth and Mirth), and others in short, all sorts of non-straight men were coming together, at play parties, via contact ad magazines, over computer BBS’s. And, in San Francisco, the pre-earthquake Lonestar became the original bear bar.

Who was a bear at the Lonestar? If you wanted to know if a man was a bear, the only way to find out was to go up and ask him. Once upon a time, not that long ago, and in this very same City, bears began telling each other stories about how different we were from the majority of the gay community, how welcoming and open-hearted we were. Even bear publishing began as a humble, do-it-yourself enterprise. In the very late 1970s’ Jack Fritscher’s Man 2 Man contact ‘zine declared that “what you’re looking for is looking for you.” And in the 1980s, BEAR magazine would describe itself as the place to find “masculinity without the trappings.”

The world has been transforming more rapidly than anyone can keep up with – little surprise then to find the gay communities so changed. Even bears have changed tremendously in the short quarter century or so of its existence. As a collective identity, bears emerged under the heavy, dark, terrifying shadows of AIDS. Those were uniquely different times. We were not sure anyone would survive the disease, and many openly feared the gay community itself would collapse and gay culture would become an odd footnote in future history books. Reaching out to one another was a very difficult and unusual thing, to do around 1983. We did it in spite of, or rather because of, a great deal of fear. We felt a deep appreciation for each other that is hard to explain today. It’s hard to remember that we are missing most of that generation today.