Bear porn

Gay porn starring bears: big, hairy, bearded men with chests and bellies, and the cubs, otters and chasers around them.

Bear porn is gay porn starring bears: big, hairy, bearded men, with chests, bellies and thick legs, the opposite of the smooth gym body that ruled gay porn for decades. It covers the whole bear family, from cubs and otters to muscle bears and chubs, and the men who love them, the chasers.

It feels different from mainstream porn, and fans like it that way. The bodies are real, the fur stays on, the sex tends to be warm, sweaty and a little rough, and nobody is apologizing for a belly. For many of us it was the first porn that looked like the men we actually fancied.

Where it comes from

Bear as a gay word for a hairy, beefy man goes back at least to 1979, when the Advocate described bears as "hunky, chunky types" with big chests and bellies. The scene took shape in San Francisco in the 1980s, and in 1987 Richard Bulger and his partner Chris Nelson started BEAR magazine there, first as a homemade zine. That magazine, with its photos of real hairy men, did a lot to turn a taste into a tribe, and bear porn grew out of the same world: small producers shooting men who looked like the guys at the bar, not like models.

What you find in it

• Bear on bear: two big hairy men together, the heart of the genre.
• Bear and cub: the bigger, older bear with a younger, smaller one, overlapping with daddy porn.
• Muscle bears: gym-built bodies with the fur left on, the most commercial end of the range.
• Bears in gear: leather, rubber and jockstraps, where bear porn meets fetish porn.

Why it matters

For years gay porn sold one body: young, smooth, toned. Bear porn quietly insisted that other bodies were sexy too, and it found a huge audience. Today bear creators do well on subscription sites, studios cast hairier men than they used to, and "bear" is a standard category on every tube site. Not bad for a scene that began with a homemade zine.

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