Bear Studies: Visibility, Intersectionality & Next Steps Keynote: Les K. Wright, PhD
Good morning from New York, good afternoon, good evening, and good middle of the night. I know we have attendees in Australia and New Zealand. That shows real commitment. I today am excited and grateful to be here and to see you here.
I open my remarks today by posing the question “Where do we go from here?” As American poet Maya Angelou put it, “If you don’t know where you’ve come from you don’t know where you’re going.” Historians have no doubt been saying this since Herodotus, considered the first historian, wrote down what he saw and the stories he heard during his extensive travels in the Greek world some 2500 years ago.
People typically believe that the world they are born into is how the world has always been. I know that was true for me. I have occasionally spoken to college students in queer history and queer literature classes–as a Stonewall era gay activist in the 1970s and as a long-term AIDS survivor. I serve as an eye witness to what life was like for us queer folks iUS n the back in the “bad old days.” And I share what it was like to live through the AIDS epidemic at ground zero in San Francisco. For good measure, I share what it was like being one of those infected with HIV from the start, as someone who
never expected to reach the age of 35. I am now 72. Students are learning queer history from books and documentary films. They often react with astonishment, even disbelief, that queer life had literally been like that. They gain an understanding, appreciation, and respect for their forebears, for how what they take for granted had been fought for, and how recent those wins have been. Being a lifelong student of German history, I have also tried to communicate my wariness of how secure these advances are. Hitler erased the first gay community and homophile political movement in the blink of an eye. And he dispatched gay men to his death camps, branded with a pink triangle and lesbians, branded with a yellow triangle, calling them Asoziale, people who are withdrawn from society, are uncomfortable in social situations, and are hostile to other people. I am now witnessing my concerns not far from the mark.
Jacques Barzun, the French-born American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and both high and low cultural history, echoed Herodotus when he said, “There is nothing personal about facts, but there is about choosing and grouping them. It is by the patterning and the meanings ascribed that the vision is conveyed […] Linking is particularly important in cultural history, because culture is a web of many strands; none is spun by itself, nor is any cut off at a fixed date like wars and regimes.”
Queer work is inherently political. The first generations of gay and lesbian historians devoted themselves to unearthing or recovering our history. They revealed where we had come from, they undid the erasure from the historical record by a profoundly homophobic culture. Many historians were oblivious to their own blindness to their bias. A few kept the queer parts of the story that they knew a secret, knowing it would not be welcomed or that they might find themselves marginalized and ostracized by their colleagues. As recently as the 1980s, when I was a graduate student at the notably progressive UC Berkeley, all my gay professors urged me to not do any gay work until after I had tenure, warning me I would destroy my career before it even got started. Nonetheless, I persisted.
In the mid -1980s I unexpectedly found myself “the right person in the right place.” Some gay men in San Francisco were starting to call themselves “bears.” Two monthly sex parties were organized—Bear Hugs and Leather Bears. Richard Bulger started BEAR magazine, originally a photocopied ‘zine sold in gay bookstores in San Francisco and available by Subscription worldwide. ‘Zines were a kind of mall photocopied newsletter created to bring adherents of a specific common interest together. They were never profit-oriented. Only forty copied of BEAR magazine issue number one were
printed.
The Lone Star Saloon opened South of Market, catering to these new bears. Several of these self-identifying bear worked in high tech. They created a LISTSERV for their fellow bears. A LISTSERV was an email address that facilitated cross-communication among a group of people. Everyone emailed the moderator, who then distributed the messages to each person within the list. Many of us fondly remember Steve Dyer’s BML–Bears Mailing List.
One night I looked up and surveyed the Bear Hugs orgy I was in the middle of and realized bears were not just that year’s fashion in the San Francisco gay community. I began taking notes, collecting flyers, BEAR magazines, and other ephemera. Bear Expo was started as an annual event for bears from all over the world to socialize, network, and sell their wares. Every year I facilitated a discussion group I called “What Is a Bear?” To this day there is no agreed upon definition. When I started documenting bears I followed my friend Allen Bérubé’s approach (what he called “grassroots history” or history “from the bottom up”). I captured the voices of participants and observers, letting them tell what they were doing and why. I was adamant about documenting the history as it was unfolding, before the inevitable revisioning would change the narrative to suit future purposes. As my trans friend Mildred/Jeffrey Dickeman, a social anthropologist, often said, “The natives can speak for themselves.”
The birth of bears, the who, what, when, where, and why of bear identity and bear community, is of both historical and symbolic significance. Our Urgeschichte, our origins, will remain murky and contested. The earliest mention of bears I have found are in the minutes of a meeting in 1966 of the Satyrs, a gay motorcycle club in Los Angeles. Author, editor, and leather historian Jack Fritscher has pointed out his inclusion and promotion of proto-bears in his homomasculine publications, beginning in the 1960s. The Advocate claims to be the first to introduce bears in George Mazzei’s 1979 tongue-in-cheek story, “Who’s Who in the Zoo.” My research turned up gay men in numerous places calling themselves bears in the 1980s. It struck me that that was the Zeitgeist.
Bear identity coalesced in San Francisco due to several circumstances specific to the gay community there. At the time the standard of sexual desirability was the Castro clone—young, smooth-skinned, and gym-toned muscles. Those of us who were older, fat, and hairy were often barred from gay bathhouses and publicly shamed. When gay men with AIDS experienced wasting syndrome, their bodies aging and shriveling to the degree that they looked like Holocaust survivors when they were liberated from the Nazi death camps, the clones erotized heavier bodies, reading girth as a sign of heath, of being AIDS-free. As a kind of camp send up of the color hanky code (a way gay men signaled their preferences in sexual activities), some guys put a small stuffed teddy bear in their back pocket to signal they were into cuddling. It was a rejection of self-objectification, of reducing one’s value to mere sex acts. The genius of place of gay San Francisco lay in the fact that the Castro was a geographical home for community, where we all crossed paths, and our numbers were “just the right size” — large enough to be a community and small enough to not be invisible in the vastness of a megacity like New
York or London.
Intersectionality
A gay man recently polled his Facebook followers. He asked, “What do gay men not talk about?” The answers formed a long list: financial education, loneliness, politics, biphobia, aging, alcoholism and drug addiction, HIV, misogyny, internalized homophobia, racism, sexual / domestic violence, spirituality, ableism, community, classism, materialism, transphobia, and fat-shaming. These are also all things generally not discussed in the bear community. And they are also things not generally talked about in society at large. They tend to be discussed in small, specialized circles and addressed by those in the helping professions, spiritual communities, academic circles, and social justice activist groups.
The bear community is a microcosm of society at large. Studying and recording bear culture and bear history has sometimes given me the false impression I am working my way toward a comprehensive overview. Sometimes I am amazed at how diverse we are. Our bear community is a site of convergence and interconnectedness. As a graduate student training to become a literary scholar, I repeatedly discovered social dynamics that were not being mentioned in the scholarship or noticed by my academic peers. This was apparent when I tried to articulate homoerotic undercurrents or dynamics of social class. This absence or invisibility shouted at me whenever my perspectives as a gay man or as a gay scholar were dismissed, trivialized, or blocked. I left literary studies behind to pursue gay history and do so in a community of fellow gay and lesbian historians. I was invited to join the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian History Project, a mutual learning and support community, where we studied, discussed, and analyzed our findings. Since queer work is inevitably political, we were all also gay and lesbian activists.
In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in her essay Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics” as a way to help explain the oppression of African American women. The idea of intersectionality existed long before Crenshaw coined the term but was not widely recognized until Crenshaw’s work. She created a way to think about our identities within a framework that describes how our overlapping social identities relate to social structures and oppression. Intersectionality identifies the interconnectedness of social categories, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability, all of which shape our individual and group experiences and opportunities. Crenshaw identified (1991) three aspects: structural, political, and representational intersectionality. Her approach calls us to examine power, elevate emotion and embodiment, rethink binaries and hierarchies, embrace pluralism, consider context, and make labor visible.
Among the earliest gay and lesbian scholars who used this approach were my friends, colleagues, and mentors: Allen Bérubé, Gayle Rubin, John D’Emilio, James Steakley, and Jeffrey Escoffier. Allen was an activist-scholar who researched and wrote about gays and lesbians who served in the US military during World War II, wrote essays on the intersection of class and race in gay culture, and about growing up in a poor, French-Canadian working-class family.
Gayle’s 1975 essay “The Traffic in Women” influenced second-wave feminism and early gender studies. Her 1984 “Thinking Sex” is considered a founding text of gay and lesbians studies. She has written extensively about the politics of sexuality, pornography, lesbian literature and sadomasochism. She is noted for her anthropological approach to studying urban sexual subcultures, particularly the then-contemporary gay men’s BDSM subculture in San Francisco.
John’s 1983 Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 demonstrated how the rise of capitalism made homosexual relationships among working-class people possible and laid the foundation for the rise of gay community.
Jim’s 1976 Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany was the first English-language account of the early twentieth-century gay community and political movement in Germany. His 1974 essay “Homosexuals and the Third Reich,” published in The Body Politic (Toronto, Canada), introduced the English- speaking world to the situation of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Nazis’ use of the pink triangle to identify homosexual men in the death camps. As one writer observed, “Perhaps no other TBP article has jolted the imagination and political consciousness of gay activists and other readers.”
Jeffrey served as executive editor of Socialist Review, a democratic socialist journal, cofounded OUT/LOOK: A National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, one of the first joint lesbian ad gay cultural journals, and created OutWrite, a series of conferences that brought gay and lesbian writers together.
As I mentioned, bears—bear identity, bear community, bear culture—are a microcosm of the broader queer community and even of society as a whole. Bears are arguably the first queer community to emerge through the internet. My recent research shows that the idea and the performativity of bears have spread to nearly every corner of the globe. Who identifies as a bear, how bear community takes shape, and what bear cultural practices may be are all inflected by the individual country’s mores, customs, social practices, and sex and gender norms, among other factors. Along with the intersectionalities of race, class, gender and gender relations, ability (as in ablism), body image, the effects of homophobia on self-acceptance, among others, the sociocultural, socioeconomic, and other dynamics of each country calls for research and understanding of both native and cross-cultural manifestations of “beardom.” No doubt, there are other aspects of “beardom” to be explored. (Pardon my academic German paragraph-long sentence.)
Visibility
Self-identifying bears began meeting at Bearhug play parties, through personal ads in BEAR magazine, at the Lonestar Saloon, and through the internet LISTSERV Bears Mailing List. Under the banner of “beards, bellies, and body hair” we found ourselves creating community. We also connected through a gentleness, playfulness, cuddliness, protectively looking out for each other, and attempting to be (at least) relatively nonjudgemental. Word spread through the gay grapevine. Bears in distant places came to San Francisco to indulge in the soon legendary underground play parties– or to be photographed for BEAR magazine, hang out at the Lone Star Saloon, or otherwise be slutty sexual tourists.
American school children are taught the legend of Johnny Appleseed, an actual person from Massachusetts, who set out in 1802 with a canoe full of apple seeds to sell to pioneers settling the then Wild West—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The moral lesson of the legend of Johnny Appleseed is “to give generously and without discriminating, even if the gift is simple.” Rather like Johnny Appleseed, bear visitors to San Francisco brought their experiences back home—to other US states, to Australia, Germany, England, Japan. Bear clubs and publications soon proliferated. Gradually, bears gained visibility in a loosely connected world-wide community.
In the United States awareness of gay bears percolated to creative types in mass media. For example, the Canadian sketch comedy show Kids in the Hall (which aired 1988-1995) included a skit featuring a gay man being chased by a gay bear he had brought home from a bar. An early episode of the adult cartoon show Family Guy (which began in 1999) included a non sequitur scene of a gay bear expressing jealousy of his husbear’s new bear friend. Such appearances in mainstream entertainment established the gay bear as a trope. Tim Barela’s Leonard and Larry cartoons (1984-1992) found a special place in the hearts of the early bears. Barela showed characters of different gender identities, sexual orientations, ages, and sexual preferences as a community, and was noted for his representations of queer family structures. Incorporating themes of domesticity and unique family structures. Readers recognized the blond and bearded Larry as a bear and took an epicurean’s delight in Barela’s renderings of beards.
We bears have become increasingly visible to each other through bear runs and weekends, websites, apps, and Facebook pages, Bear World Magazine, and other social networking. Several documentary films have been made about us. Numerous narrative films have been made. We have been celebrated in the Bear City Trilogy and seven seasons of Where the Bears Are. Many of us feel the time is right for the heterosexual mainstream be educated about our existence—who we are and why we are. Los Angeles-based filmmaker and bear chaser Andy Langdon is currently working on a feature-length documentary about gay bears. He is taking great pains to present bears to the heterosexual world, balancing what straight audiences are likely to be open to learning and to portraying us as we understand ourselves, accurately and honestly. If Andy succeeds, this film will be a major next step in our and history.
Six years ago I returned to my bear history work and have been documenting the evolution of bear identity (under the ever-expanding umbrella of trans, gender-fluid, non-binary, lesbian, heterosexual women, two-spirit, and other queer folks who self-identify and find a home in the bear community) sin e the publication of Bear Book II in 2000. The vastness of our community and culture now is far beyond the scope of any individual scholar’s ability to research and document. As the organizers of this symposium have put it, “[B]oth inside and outside of academia, scholarship on Bears remains both scarce and fragmented.” I am heartened and excited to witness and participate in this next, very important step today’s symposium is taking. Like Johnny Appleseed, the organizers are seeding the soil for academic and non-academic scholars, students, and researchers to create a multidisciplinary Bear Studies.
Where Do We Go from Here?
Tomas Hemstad, an activist, journalist, and self-identifying gay bear from Sweden, recently interviewed me (31 January 2025) me for the OTTAR, an online Swedish-language journal. One question he put to me was, “What does the future of bear culture look like?” I replied, “This is kind of a Rorschach question—what I hope, what I fear, and what I think is most likely to happen, are different things.
Humans are social animals and we always organize into social hierarchies. What I hope is that bears will continue to grow and become more accepting, embracing the diversity of our own sexual multiculturalism. What I fear is that we will splinter further into rivaling factions, fighting over our places within the bear social hierarchy.
What I think is going to happen in the short run will be determined by what is currently unfolding in society at large. We are living through the unanticipated reemergence of fascism all over the world. Queer people have long been one of the first demonized targets of far-right rulers. In some places we have already been recriminalized, are being persecuted, and the desire to exterminate us is getting closer to being more than a desire. This has already happened in countries like Hungary and Poland (both in violation of the laws of the EU, of which they are members), Russia, Nigeria, Uganda, and the usual suspects in the Middle East.
This is rapidly becoming the law of the land here in the United States under the increasingly fascist and increasingly chaotic and mindless rule of Donald Trump. In times of need people come together and help each other. I strongly believe the bear community and the queer community as a whole will pull together for safety, protection, mutual aid, and in organized resistance.
In my April 14 draft, I wrote:
We live in a dangerous and volatile time. From the time I began contemplating what to say at this symposium, the Id Monster in the White House has been steamrolling his way to making the US a fascist police state (some would say we’re already there), ending globalism, throwing the world economy into chaos, and paving the way to removing everyone he doesn’t like, dispatching them to concentration camps, such as the prison in El Salvador. I doubt this is news to anyone here today. Political, economic, and social situations vary from natin to nation. In the US Trump has already started kidnapping students and other “undesirables” from the streets in broad daylight. That has happened several times here in Syracuse and in the farmlands north of Syracuse. He has been freezing or cancelling funding to the most prestigious universities. He is already chilling academic freedom, threatening intellectuals, and has started a brain drain. Three Yale professors have already left for appointments at Canadian universities.
Today, May 14, just one month later, I must add:
Trump has been ordering DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) removed from all workplace policy, university culture, and course content in US higher education. Harvard was the first university that did not immediately capitulate to Trump’s orders and has initiated a lawsuit to challenge him. Trump is already fully underway in dictating course content and funding for scientific research. The US has been classified as a police state since Trump’s 2024 election. Last Sunday the new Pope Leo XIV warned that we are now in a “’piecemeal’ third world war.”
The short-term future for queer academics, researchers, independent scholars, writers, and intellectuals is coming into focus. Bears are a minority community within a minority community. And we bear scholars are finding each other for the first time here and now. Sharing our passion for bear studies with each other is becoming, either by choice or need, the opportunity to network, to connect, to build an academic community, and to commit to keeping critical thinking and independent research going.
In recent years the bear community’s practice of living in relative harmony in a multicultural queer community has been hailed by some as a model for both queer community and society at large. We are forging a new path in the academic world. And we can set an example for how to keep critical thinking and independent research going under even the most challenging of circumstances.
As a wise and wizened old AA friend once advised, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Follow where the pursuit of knowledge and truth leads you. And may you find joy, as I do, in our individual and collective enterprise.
