Out on a Limb

by Andrew Sullivan

  It was Bear Week in Ptown. Bear Week? Well, where do I begin? Every time I try and write a semiserious sociological assessment of the phenomenon, I find myself erasing large amounts of text. Part of being a bear is not taking being a bear too seriously. And almost every bear and bear admirer I asked during the festivities came up with different analyses of what it is or might be to be a “bear.” But no one can deny that bears are one of the fastest-growing new subcultures in gay America—and that their emergence from the forests into the sunlight is culturally fascinating. Quite what it means for the future of gay America is another thing entirely. But my, er, gut tells me it’s, er, a big deal. So here’s my own idiosyncratic, CIA-unapproved take on what this new and obviously growing phenomenon in the gay sub-subculture amounts to.

  Bearism grew up in San Francisco at places like the revived Lone Star bar in the early 1990s and has metastasized since. From a bunch of heavy, hairy fellas getting together casually, it’s now a full-scale phenom, with American Bear magazine, a “bear flag,” bear conferences, a Bear Book, “Bearotica,” and on and on. Perhaps the most obvious place to start is physical appearance. “Bears” almost all have facial hair—the more the better. Of all the various characteristics of Beardom, this seems to be one of the most essential. The Ur-bears have bushy beards that meander down their necks and merge with a large forest of chest and back hair to provide a sort of all-hair body environment. Bears are also big guys. Yes, I know that might come off as a bit of a euphemism. A townie friend of mine suggested making T-shirts for the week, with the slogan “Fat Is the New Black.” But obesity, while not unknown, is not that widespread. Bears at their most typical look like regular, beer-drinking, unkempt men in their thirties, forties, and fifties. They have guts. They have furry backs. They don’t know what cologne is and they tend not to wear deodorant. One mode of interaction is the occasional sniff of each other’s armpits. Nature’s narcotic.

  Bears are known secondly for their attitude. They’re friendly—more Yogi than “Bears Gone Wild.” They’re mellow. They’re flirtatious in a nonimposing kind of way. If a bear sees another hot-looking bear, his most likely expression will be the one word: “Woof.” (Yes, I know that sounds like a dog. But somehow it makes sense.) The sexual tension isn’t that tense, because the sexual imperative is less present than in other gay subcultures. This came home to me this year in Provincetown, because in a gay resort town in the summer you get to see the various sub-subcultures intermingle or follow one another. The contrasts can be quite severe.

  To give one example: we have what the locals call Circuit Week over July 4 when all the party boys show up to take drugs, dance, and drink bottled water for days on end. I have no problem with that. But the perfect torsos, testosteroned rivalry, crystal nerves, and endless egg whites all make for a somewhat overwrought time. When the bears arrive, all that unease evaporates. They’re cheerful; they don’t give a shit what others think of them; they’re more overtly social than sexual; they drink rather than do drugs; they seem, on the whole, older and far more grown-up than their party-boy cousins. They eat and drink and joke and cuddle and stroke and generally have a great time. And their mellowness is wonderfully infectious.

  Whence the name? Well, it’s obvious in a way. They kinda look like bears. Big and burly and friendly, they are legions of Yogis, followed by quite a few Boo-Boos. The smaller, younger ones tend to be known as “cubs.” The more muscular ones go by the name of “muscle bears.” Some leaner types who aren’t that hairy but enjoy the atmosphere that follows the bears are known as “otters.” There are other nuances. Bears like to enjoy the outdoors and organize joint camping trips and festivals in the forests. They tend not to have kids, and they avoid politics. To the outside world, they are largely invisible, because they don’t fit the obvious stereotype of gay men, the kind that is featured prominently, and somewhat offensively, on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Boy Meets Boy. These bears look more like the straight guys than the queer eyes.

  But their masculinity is of a casual, unstrained type. One of the least reported but significant cultural shifts among gay men in recent years has been a greater ease with the notion of being men and a refusal to acquiesce in the notion that gayness is somehow in conflict with masculinity. In the past, gay manifestations of masculinity have taken a somewhat extreme or caricatured form—from the leathermen to the huge bodybuilders. Bears, to my mind, represent a welcome calming down of this trend. They are unabashedly masculine but undemonstrative about it. They are attractive precisely because they don’t try so hard. And they add to their outdoorsy gruffness an appealing interior softness. They have eschewed the rock-hard muscle torso for the round and soft and hairy belly.

  As always, Camille Paglia gets it just about right, when she writes: “In their defiant hirsutism, gay bears are more virile than the generic bubble-butt junior stud, since body hair is stimulated by testosterone. But the bears’ fatness resembles not the warlike Viking mass of a Hells Angel but the capacious bosom of the earth mother. The gay bear is simultaneously animalistic and nurturing, a romp in the wild followed by nap time on a comfy cushion.”

  That captures something of their unforced maleness. But Paglia underestimates, I think, a rebellion among many gay men both against the feminizing impulses of the broader culture on the right and left and against prevailing norms in gay culture as a whole. In recent years, after all, men have come under withering attack—not just from the PC post-modernist left, which tends to view all forms of unabashed maleness as oppressive, but also from the nannying right, which views men as socially irresponsible sexual miscreants.

  Bears are simply saying that they’re men first and unashamed of it. More, in fact. What they’re saying is that central to the gay male experience is an actual love of men. And men are not “boys”; they’re not feminized, hairless, fatless icons on a dance floor. They’re grumpy and kind and responsible, and also happy to be themselves. There is no contradiction between being a gay man and being a man as traditionally understood. And if that includes cracking open a six-pack and watching the game, or developing a beer-and-nachos belly, or working in a blue-collar job, or having the clothes sense of the average checkout guy, or preferring the company of men to women, then so be it.

  But what bears also do, of course, is take this frumpy, ordinary image of undemonstrative masculinity and eroticize it. Instead of sexualizing the perfect abs or the biggest bicep, bears look at a mature man’s belly and see in it the essence of maleness and the mother lode of their sexual attraction. What women (and, now, the gay men on Queer Eye) often do to their men—clean them up, domesticate them, clothe them properly, groom them, tame them—is exactly what bears resist. Go to the Dug-Out at the edge of the West Side Highway in New York on a Sunday afternoon, and you’ll find a den of cheerful, frisky, thick, and hairy guys, all enjoying a few beers and their own gender. Or check out the club XL in London and find hundreds of big, fat, hairy blokes dancing to their hearts’ content until the early hours of the morning, without the slightest sense of self-awareness or embarrassment. In London, even the “potbelly” is becoming formally eroticized.

  Bears also resist the squeaky-clean and feminized version of manhood that appears in most gay magazines and even pornography. Take a look at The Advocate and Out and you will barely find a man over thirty with a gut or a hairy chest anywhere. But that’s what most men—including gay men—end up like! Bears in this sense represent the maturation of gay male culture. For the first time, we have a critical mass of older generations of gay men who have always been out but who don’t identify with the boyishness and effeminacy of the old-school gay subculture. And they’re not looking to replicate or mimic the male-female relationship in any way. Yes, there are “bears” and “cubs.” But you are just as likely to find two mature, big guys who are simply into each other. As equals. As men.

  Some of this aesthetic, of course, is rooted in class. Upper-middle-class and middle-class bears tend to idealize the wo
rking-class stiff; and working-class bears, for the first time perhaps, find their natural state of physical being publicly celebrated rather than ignored. I made a point of asking multiple bears during Bear Week what they did for a living. Yes, there were architects and designers and writers. But there were also computer technicians, delivery truck drivers, construction workers, salesmen, and so on. Again, what we’re seeing, I think, is another manifestation of the growth and breadth of gay culture in the new millennium. As the gay world recovers from AIDS, and as the closet continues to collapse, the numbers of gay men keep growing and the diversity of what was once called the gay experience is exploding.

  At some point, in fact, it might be asked if bears are a subset of gay culture or simply a culture to themselves. From Ptown, it’s pretty clear to me that the “circuit” set, for example, has next to nothing in common with bears and vice versa. Even the leather bars recognize bears as a discrete subculture. The impression of gayness that you get from, say, The New York Times’ “Sunday Styles” section is light-years away from what the bear subculture represents. In this sense, bears might be “post-gay” inasmuch as their fundamental identity is far more complex than any simple expression of their same-sex attraction.

  And, as with most developments in gay culture, they could well influence straight culture as well. Bears, after all, are the straight guys in gay culture. Their very ordinariness makes them more at ease with regular straight guys; but their very ordinariness in some ways is also extremely culturally subversive. Drag queens, after all, are hardly the cutting edge anymore. Straight people love their gay people flaming, or easily cordoned off from the straight experience. Bears reveal how increasingly difficult this is. Their masculinity is indistinguishable in many ways from straight male masculinity—which accounts, in some ways, for their broader invisibility in the culture. They are both more integrated and yet, by their very equation of regular masculinity with gayness, one of the more radical and transformative gay phenomena out there right now.

  But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s a lovely exchange in the invaluable book Bears on Bears that captures some of the weirdness of trying to explain such a natural and cheerful development too abstractly. Rex Wockner, furry gay journalist, is talking to Wayne Hoffman, another bear follower:

  REX WOCKNER: A few intellectual eastern bears may think it’s about subverting the dominant paradigm. Here on the West Coast, it’s about sex.

  WAYNE HOFFMAN: It’s more about ignoring the dominant paradigm than rejecting it actively, in my humble opinion.

  REX WOCKNER: It’s more about not using words like “dominant paradigm.”

  I take Rex’s point. In some ways, bears represent gay men’s long-delayed embrace of their own masculinity in its simplest and sexiest form. In other ways, they represent gay men’s desire for normalcy, for a world in which their natural state of being men is neither constrained nor tortured nor contrived. In a strange and undemonstrative way, it’s therefore a sign of the extraordinary fluidity of a gay male culture that is changing out of all recognition before, perhaps, with accelerating integration, it disappears for good.

  Integration Day

  May 17, 2004 | THE NEW YORK TIMES

  Today is the day that gay citizens in this country cross a milestone of equality. Gay couples will be married in Massachusetts—their love and commitment and responsibility fully cherished for the first time by the society they belong to. It is also, amazingly enough, the day of the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that ended racial segregation in schools across America. We should be wary of facile comparisons. The long march of African Americans to civil equality was and is deeply different from the experience and legacy of gay Americans. But in one respect, the date is fitting, for both Brown and this new day revolve around a single, simple, and yet deeply elusive idea: integration.

  It is, first, a human integration. Marriage, after all, is perhaps the chief mechanism for integrating new families into old ones. The ceremony is a unifying ritual, one in which peers and grandparents meet, best friends and distant relatives chatter. It’s hard for heterosexuals to imagine being denied this moment. It is, after all, regarded in our civil religion as the “happiest day of your life.” And that is why the denial of such a moment to gay family members is so jarring and cruel. It rends people from their own families; it builds an invisible but unscalable wall between them and the people they love and need.

  You might think from some of the discussion of marriage rights for same-sex couples that homosexuals emerge fully grown from under a gooseberry bush in San Francisco. But we don’t. We are born into families across the country in every shape and form imaginable. Allowing gay people to marry is therefore less like admitting a group of citizens into an institution from which they have been banned than it is simply allowing them to stay in the very families in which they grew up.

  I remember the moment I figured out I was gay. Right then, I realized starkly what it meant: there would never be a time when my own family would get together to celebrate a new, future family. I would never have a relationship as valid as my parents’ or my brother’s or my sister’s. It’s hard to describe what this realization does to a young psyche, but it is profound. At that moment, the emotional segregation starts, and all that goes with it: the low self-esteem, the notion of sex as always alien to a stable relationship, the pain of having to choose between the family you were born into and the love you feel.

  You recover, of course, and move on. But even when your family and friends embrace you, there is still the sense of being “separate but equal.” And this is why the images from Massachusetts today will strike such a chord. For by insisting on nothing more nor less than marriage, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has abolished that invisible wall that divides families within themselves. This is an integration of the deepest kind.

  It is, second, a civil integration. That is why the term “gay marriage” is a misnomer. Today is not the day “gay marriage” arrives in America. Today is the first time that civil marriage has stopped excluding homosexual members of our own families. These are not “gay marriages.” They are marriages. What these couples are affirming is not something new; it is as old as humanity itself. What has ended—in one state, at least—is separatism. We have taken a step toward making homosexuality a nonissue, toward making gay citizens merely and supremely citizens.

  This is why I am so surprised by the resistance of many conservatives to this reform. It is the most pro-family measure imaginable—keeping families together, building new ones, strengthening the ties between generations. And it is a profound rebuke to identity politics of a reductionist kind, to the separatism that divides our society into categories of gender and color and faith. This is why some elements of the old left once opposed such a measure, after all. How much more striking, then, that the left has been able to shed its prejudices more successfully than the right.

  I cannot think of another minority whom conservatives would seek to exclude from family life and personal responsibility. But here is a minority actually begging for a chance to contribute on equal terms, to live up to exactly the same responsibilities as everyone else, to refuse to accept what President Bush calls the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” And, so far, with some exceptions, gay citizens have been told no. Conservatives, with the president chief among them, have said to these people that they are beneath the dignity of equality and the promises of American life. They alone are beneath the fold of family.

  But this time, these couples have said yes—and all the president can do (today, at least) is watch. It is a private moment and a public one. And it represents, just as Brown did in a different way, the hope of a humanity that doesn’t separate one soul from another and a polity that doesn’t divide one citizen from another. It is integration made real, a love finally come home: after centuries of pain and stigma, the “happiest day of our lives.”

  Log Cabin Re
publican

  How Gay Was Lincoln?

  January 12, 2005 | ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM

  How gay was Abraham Lincoln? By asking the question that way, it’s perhaps possible to avoid the historically futile, binary question of “gay” versus “straight.” Futile, because we are talking about a man who lived well over a century ago, at a time when the very concepts of gay and straight did not exist. And C. A. Tripp, author of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, was, despite the crude assertions of some reviewers, a Kinseyite who believed in a continuum between gay and straight. If completely heterosexual is a Kinsey 1 and completely homosexual is a Kinsey 6, Tripp puts Lincoln as a 5. Reading his engrossing, if uneven, book, I’d say you could make a case that Lincoln was, in fact, a 4. It’s going to be a subjective judgment, and I’m no Lincoln scholar. In any particular piece of evidence that Tripp discovers, I’d say it’s easy to dismiss his theory. But when you review all the many pieces of the Lincoln emotional-sexual puzzle, the homosexual dimension gets harder and harder to ignore. As conservative writer Richard Brookhiser has noted, all we can say with complete confidence is that “on the evidence before us, Lincoln loved men, at least some of whom loved him back.” That’s a pretty good definition of the core truth of homosexuality.

  That Tripp has an “ax to grind” is to my mind unfair. Yes, he sought to understand the homosexual experience better. But he was a Kinseyite social scientist, not a New Left propagandist. His database of Lincoln material is regarded as superb and invaluable to Lincoln scholars everywhere. He had a PhD in clinical psychology, and a mastery of the facts of Darwin’s life as well. Yes, he was gay. But being gay can also be an advantage in this respect. The contours of a closeted gay life—the subtle effects of concealed homosexuality on behavior, public and private—are most easily recognized by other gay men, for the simple reason that many have experienced the same things. And the very nature of a closeted life is that it is hard to discern from the surface. I don’t doubt that my own view that Lincoln was obviously homosexual is affected by my personal recognition of some aspects of the story, especially in his early years. The danger, of course, is overidentification and projection. But the danger of underidentification is also there—and it may well have impeded real research into what made Lincoln tick. Certainly if you’re looking for clear evidence of sexual relationships between men in Lincoln’s time in the official historical record, you’ll come to the conclusion that no one was gay in the nineteenth century. But of course, many were.