“They call it coming out of the second closet,” he says. Waters first realized how big the movement was when he happened to be in San Francisco for its annual bear festival. In the film, a “family” of overall-clad bears moves into suburbia, scaring the locals.
And then there’s the otter, who’s cublike in age and, perhaps, disposition but thin-a not-so-hairy younger guy who’s looking for a “daddy bear.”ĭirector John Waters used the Handbook when researching his 2004 sexually utopian farce, A Dirty Shame. Body types can be difficult to categorize firmly, but a more muscular, hairy man who styles himself as being more sexually aggressive is known as a wolf (especially online, where these distinctions are key for personal erotic marketing). The assumption is often that a cub’s more submissive (Boo-Boo to his Yogi “husbear”) but that he’ll likely grow into a bear. Some consider themselves cubs-usually younger, though that can also just mean smaller and younger-looking. Most bears are bears: big and often balding, with bushy beards and beefy arms the look is distinctly blue-collar and unfussy. Bears have been a fully fleshed-out alternative gay identity for at least a decade, but it seems the growling’s louder than ever.Īnd like any subculture, the bear community comes with its own distinct taxonomy-its minorities within a minority within a minority. It’s a quasi-intellectualized, entirely merchandized subculture of “those who are husky, hairy and homosexual,” as the Bear Handbook ($14.95 at your local Barnes & Noble) puts it.
The Dugout is the city’s best-known bar for bears-gay men who look rather like middle-aged straight men who haven’t been metrosexually harassed into banishing carbs from their diets and hair from their shoulders.
But everybody’s having a pretty good time, even the skinny guys who wandered in for the $3 Buds at the Sunday-night beer blast and find themselves outnumbered, and largely ignored, by the husky men around them-the bears. The place doesn’t smell much like gay men are supposed to, either: beery, sweaty, like a frat party gone on way too long-in some cases, at least judging by the bushy gray facial hair in the dank room, for decades. Gay men aren’t supposed to look much like the balding, hairy-belly-up-to-the-bar crowd at the Dugout in the far West Village.