Ron Suresha

Recently, we chatted with author Ron Suresha

 

TheCompleteBear: Welcome Ron.  For our readers, how about a little background?

 

Ron: OK. I've always been attracted to bearish men, so it was no surprise when I moved to San Francisco in the mid 80s that I would end up getting involved with the Bear magazine guys.  Also at that time I met Les Wright, who would later go on to found the Bear History Project.

 

TheCompleteBear: When was that?

 

Ron: I was there 1987-1992, if memory serves me...

 

TheCompleteBear: Were you writing at that time?

 

Ron: Well, for a while I was working as a typographer at a high-end ad-and-design-agency type shop, but I was also doing odd jobs, manual labor, gardening, plumbing assistant, freelance calligraphy - and I was wrote a newsletter for the Lone Star Saloon called the Lone Star Gazette.

 

TheCompleteBear: Did you always want to be writer?

 

Ron: Yes, pretty much I always was writing. In college I pursued a creative writing concentration, and won awards in high school and college for my really depressing poetry.

 

TheCompleteBear: What was your first bear piece?

 

Ron: Lots of the Gazette content was bear-focused, but the first real articles I put down were two essays for Wright's first anthology, The Bear Book - One was called "BearRoots," and the other was "The Lone Star Saloon Revisited."

 

TheCompleteBear: What inspires your writing?

 

Ron: I usually try to find subjects that nobody else seems to be writing about. Since I write creative nonfiction more so than fiction, I try to wait until I have a slant on something that nobody else seems to have attempted.  I wanted to write about the Bear experience, so I did interviews with folks in the Bear community. I got curious about bisexual men, so I decided to edit two anthologies about bi men.

 

TheCompleteBear): Do you have a favorite character or subject?

 

Ron: What I do is study masculinities as queer men express their manhood/maleness/masculinity, and I edit books about these men. I'm an independent men's studies researcher and writer, and I also dabble in men's erotic fiction.

 

TheCompleteBear: How many books have you had published?

 

Ron: Seven and one half. In quick order: Mugs o' Joy (hot drink recipes), Bears on Bears: Interviews & Discussions; Bearotica; Bear Lust; Power-bären, a German translation of Bear Lust; Bi Men (nonfiction); Bi Guys (fiction); and I have another book about to hit print next month (December).

 

TheCompleteBear: Any insights into the new book . . .

 

Ron: The new book is a really sex-geeky anthology, a special issue of the academic Journal of Bisexuality, called Kinsey Zero through Sixty. It commemorates the "sexagennial" (60th) anniversary of the publication of the Kinsey Report, aka "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male."  But it's really cool, because we have a contribution from the last surviving member of the original Kinsey research team, plus lots of other just amazing writing on all aspects of Kinsey's life and work.

 

TheCompleteBear: and we hear something about photography?

 

Ron: Yes, I took some shots of the celebrations in New Haven and West Hartford, and Bay Windows (Boston glbtiq weekly paper) will be running those. Yesterday was Marriage Equality Day here in Connecticut, and so I went to photograph the couples who got their marriage licenses, and two couples who got married right then.  It was a magnificent and joyous day, and it was so gratifying to experience this victory for marriage equality just after that horrible Prop 8 debacle.  My husbear and I got married in Provincetown, and we got a civil union a year later in Hartford.

 

TheCompleteBear: Congratulations

 

Ron: Thanks, we just had our 4th anniversary.

 

TheCompleteBear: Tell us about Bear Bones?

 

Ron: Bear Bones Books is a new book imprint that I started up in conjunction with Lethe Press. Because of weird circumstances, almost all of the dozen or so bear-themed books that came out from Haworth Press and Alyson Publications went out of print.

 

TheCompleteBear: So, you'll be featuring all the older titles, as well?

 

Ron: Bear Bones will keep these classic bear titles in print as well as publish fantastic new works.  We've launched our humble site at www.bearbonesbooks.com. The first title we're releasing is Lammy-winner Jeff Mann's book of essays, "Edge: Travels of an Appalachian Leatherbear."  Edge will be out before the holidays, we hope. Even though the emphasis on " Bear Media" is on the magazines and pornos and the occasional documentary, we felt that our community's literary contributions have been significant, and that it is vital to keep these works alive to benefit folks who are just now coming into bear community.  Bear Bones Books will serve the Bear community, and we hope that the Bear community will support us.