Bear

A gay man with a big, hairy body and usually a beard, masculine and easy-going: belly welcome, body hair essential.

A bear is a gay man with a big, hairy body and, more often than not, a beard. Bulk is welcome, belly included, and body hair is the whole point. The look is masculine but easy-going: flannel, jeans, a cap, boots, and a hug that lifts you off the floor. A bear looks like the guy who fixes your car, not the guy on the cover of a fitness magazine, and that is exactly the appeal.

Bear is also a scene, not just a body type. Around the word grew bars, weekends, contests, a flag and a whole family of words: the younger cub, the leaner otter, the bigger chub, the gym-built muscle bear, the white-haired polar bear, and the chaser who loves them all. What a bear is not: automatically a top, automatically a daddy, or automatically fat. What holds the tribe together is hair, size and a refusal to shave, starve and wax yourself into somebody else's idea of a gay body.

Where it comes from

Nobody invented the bear in a single day. The oldest use found so far turns up in the 1966 meeting minutes of the Satyrs, a Los Angeles gay motorcycle club. In print, Green's Dictionary of Slang dates the gay sense to The Advocate in July 1979, which described bears as "hunky, chunky types reminiscent of railroad engineers and former football greats". That was George Mazzei's tongue-in-cheek guide to gay types, "Who's Who in the Zoo".

The word turned into a movement in San Francisco in the eighties. Jack Fritscher's California Action Guide put "Bear" on a cover in November 1982, Bay Area men met at Bear Hug parties and on an early internet mailing list, and in 1987 Richard Bulger and his partner, the photographer Chris Nelson, launched Bear magazine. In 1989 the Lone Star Saloon opened South of Market and became what bear historians call the first bear bar in the world. The first Bear Expo and the first International Mr. Bear contest followed in 1992.

How it is used today

Today "bear" works three ways. It is a description ("he's a total bear"), an identity people put on their profile and their T-shirts, and a label for a whole world of bear bars, bear weekends and bear prides. It is also the root of an adjective, bearish, for a man who is getting there: a bit of belly, a decent beard, chest hair peeking out of his shirt.

Inside the tribe, bears mostly hook up with bears, but there are well-worn pairings: the bear and the cub, the bear and his chaser, and the classic odd couple, the bear and the twink. On the apps "bear" is one of the standard tribes in the profile menu, and in porn bear porn is a genre of its own, with studios that cast nothing else.

Who gets to be a bear

Not every big hairy man calls himself a bear, and not every bear is big. The word is an identity as much as a description, so the polite move is to let him tell you. And the scene has had its arguments, about men who are too fat or too muscular, too young or too femme to fit the picture. The original idea was the opposite: a place for gay men who did not fit the gym-and-razor ideal, which is worth remembering every time somebody draws the borders too tight.

Related terms