Otter

A slim or lean gay man with plenty of body hair: hairy like a bear, but built like a swimmer.

An otter is a slim or lean gay man with plenty of body hair. Think of a bear who swapped the belly for a swimmer's build: hairy chest, hairy legs, often a beard, but a narrow waist and not much bulk. He can be any age, though the word tends to suggest someone between the young twink years and the heavier bear ones.

What an otter is not: smooth (that is a twink or a twunk), big and soft (that is a bear or a chub), or pumped (that is a muscle bear if he is hairy, a gym body if he is not). The otter is the hairy guy who still fits into skinny jeans.

Where it comes from

Otter is one of the animal words that grew around bear culture, the same family that gave us the cub and the wolf. The picture is easy to read: an otter is furry, sleek and playful, smaller than a bear and quicker in the water. Nobody has pinned down the first time it was used for a gay man, and the slang dictionaries we checked do not record it, so we will not invent a date.

What we do know is that it had made it into the mainstream of gay life by the 2010s. When Grindr launched its "tribes" in 2013, letting men tag themselves by type, otter was one of the twelve on the list, next to bear, daddy, twink and jock.

How it is used today

Mostly as a self-label on the apps, and as a type people say they are into. It is friendly and a bit flattering: few men mind being called an otter. Some guys use it as a stepping stone ("otter now, bear by forty"), others stay otters for life because they never gain the weight.

In porn, otter is a handy tag for the hairy, lean performers who would look lost in a bear scene but too furry for a twink one. Expect the beard, the treasure trail and the swimmer's shoulders.

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