We’ve Come a Long Way, Cubsters

by Les Wright © 2006

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.

A version of the following essay appeared as “Bears: The Birth (“A Reflection”)

in Bear Tracks 2006:4 (pages 4-5):

A version of the following essay appeared as “Bears: We’re Everywhere Now”

in Bear Tracks 2006:3 (page 5):

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Les Wright founded the Bear History Project in 1994. From that came The Bear Book (1997), Bear Book II (2000), four Bear Icons art exhibitions in the Northeast (1999-2002), the Nashoba Institute (501©3 nonprofit), and the online cultural journal of “non-hegemonic masculinities” Verisimilitude. Cornell University provides permanent repository for the BHP archives.

A founding member of the SFBA GLBT Historical Society, he taught humanities for 12 years at Boston-area College. In the 1970s he was involved with gay left activism in Germany, lived through the AIDS epidemic in the Castro during the 1980s and 1990s. He left Boston to return to San Francisco in 2005.

Currently he is a freelance writer, photographer, and independent scholar. Current goals include: re-launching the BHP (http://www.bearhistory.com), Verisimilitude, re-instating the Homo Macho art series, and curating the “History of Homo-Masculinities.” He is training to become a grant writer.

Contact: leskwright@thinkingbear.com.