THIS 6’ 9”, 400-pound man starts lifting his massive, furry body out of the oceanside pool. The heather-gray briefs he’s using as a makeshift bikini suction to his comparatively tiny ass.
“No laughing!” he shouts to me and my two skinny pals, watching the scene unfold like a competitive sport. “No laughing!”
Laughter isn’t a reaction we could even conjure. It’s more disbelief. We are three lesbians in a sea of bears. Yes, bears. We have unknowingly arrived in Provincetown for the kickoff of its annual Bear Week celebration, which draws thousands of pot-bellied, pelted, bearded gay men from around the globe to come and hunt one another. We are like visitors at a zoo, studying the various members of the species, trying to interpret their behavior.
“They are fat,” my friend says dryly, “but it looks like they work out. There’s muscle underneath.”
Most seem shorter than your average man, or perhaps their bellies are creating a disproportionately stout look. Many are older; others have enough ink on them to write a novella. If they were dressed in jeans and work boots, they could be your electrician, plumber, uncle, mechanic. They are dudes to the extreme. And they just want to *** the snot out of each other, which probably scares the crap out of your average straight man.
“That guy can get his dick sucked tonight,” I whisper to my friend as the man completes his exit from the pool.
“It’s not fair!” she protests, plagued by a prolonged bout of *** celibacy. “It’s like the world has been turned upside-down.”
For those of you reading this article who still think I’m referring to large, carnivorous mammals, you’re close. The bears I’m talking about are actually a subculture of the gay community that originated sometime in the 1980s in San Francisco. They began as sort of an offshoot of the biker and leather communities, and are known for shunning stereotypical effeminate gay behavior with their displays of über-masculinity, ranging from excessive facial and body hair to extreme muscle and girth. When not dressed in Speedos and rubbing lotion on one another’s matted backs, they can likely blend easily into a straight world.
You can read all you want about so-called “subcultures,” but until you witness them in their natural habitat, you’ve got no clue. And despite the fact that I’m a member of the “gay community,” there are a million little facets and subcategories around which I still need to wrap my brain.
Fortunately, we had two gazelle-like gay basketball players to give us some insight.
“If I woke up next to that man,” one said, “I would set us both on fire.”
Surveying the scene, he pointed out husky former collegiate cheerleaders, an Asian bear who was too “queeny” for his liking, retired linebackers, and muscle men.
My friend piped in. “Where are the black bears?”
Turns out the bear community has been criticized for being racially limited, but in my observation, a) there aren’t a ton of openly gay black men to begin with; b) fat, gay black men probably don’t want to have sex with other fat, gay black men; and c) Barry White is dead.
As the afternoon progressed, our curiosity remained piqued. “What if you want to be a bear but you’re naturally thin?” my friend wondered. Is this simply a clique for gay men once they become old and heavy? How does one determine a “top” in a physical match-up of this caliber?
After their pool time, large men once clad in bathing suits appeared wearing T-shirts with slogans like “Hairy 69” and “Bear411.” Some sported a military aesthetic, with combat boots and fatigues. Many wore Tommy Bahama shirts, cargo shorts, and Teva sandals. If you lopped off their heads, they could have been bull dykes.
I asked one bear from Montreal about a rumor I’d heard that his city’s pride parade had been canceled.
“Good,” he said. “I think the parade just perpetuates negative stereotypes of gay people.”
I laughed, assuming he was being sarcastic. “Look at you in your fatigues and combat boots, with your shirt that says, ‘You Were Hotter on Bear411,’ ” I said, “complaining about stereotypes!” He wasn’t kidding. I love how some gay people go to such extremes to fit a certain stereotype and then balk at being stereotyped. You are a big, fat, hairy gay man who likes having his boots licked. Own it.
Perhaps my impressions of the bear community seem ignorant or naive. I don’t really care. While the larger world might view the gay community as one big, frolicking love fest, it’s really not. Some of the fags hate the dykes. Some of the dykes hate the fags. Some of the bears hate the twinks, and vice-versa. Our worlds are segregated. There’s a Bear Week, a Women’s Week, a Circuit Week, a Women of Color Week, a Leather Week, and so on. We know a lot less about one another than people might imagine.
Maybe if we blended together more often, we could learn a little bit about each other. And then the dykes wouldn’t all go running for the hills when the frenzied circuit boys come to town. And the men wouldn’t bolt the doors to their guest houses when the lesbians arrive.
Or maybe this is exactly how people like it. Maybe we should just stay out of each other’s hair. @
Jeannie Greeley is a clean-shaven freelance writer. She can be reached at jeannieg@comcast.net.
