Bear Tracks: Tim Barela

In this installment of Bear Tracks Les K Wright tells us about Tim Barela, the beloved cartoon artist and creator of Leonard and Larry.

Frontiers (1981-2016) was a major Southern California-based magazine that covered local, national, and international news relevant to the LGBTQ community, including entertainment and AIDS/HIV-related topics. When Frontiers expanded its distribution it became very popular in San Francisco, second only to the Bay Area Reporter. At the time Frontiers was running a comic strip series called Leonard and Larry. which they had picked up after The Advocate declined to continue running it in 1990.

Cartoon artist Tim Barela took inspiration from Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City for Leonard and Larry. The first strip appeared in a 1984 issue of Gay Comix. Barela recounts the domestic life of a middle-aged gay male couple–Leonard is a fashion photographer and Larry is the owner of a leather shop on trendy Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. Fans immediately embraced blond and bearded Larry as a leather bear.

Barela also identifies himself as a bear. He is noted for his attention to detail and one follower of Leonard and Larry, Alison Bechtel, described his renderings as “the most fabulous beards—he seems to draw each individual strand of hair.”

In the course of over 300 installments, Leonard and Larry’s social circle expanded to include an increasingly diverse collection of friends—of different gender identities, sexual orientations, ages, and sexual preferences. Barela addressed topical issues of the day, including committed relationships, gay fatherhood, same-sex marriage, gay priests, and queer offspring.

Barela portrayed his characters in the context of their queer community (something mainstream media had never done). His characters aged, another change from the cartoon universe where characters remain forever the same age.

Barela has always been associated with the leather community and was once a Harley-riding biker. He got his start as a cartoonist drawing cartoons for motorcycle magazines. Bikers, leather, and some kink appear throughout his comics. He also has another passion which he describes as his “cowboy fetish.” In every comic strip at least one character appears in cowboy gear.

Barela has also been a lifelong fan of music. He discovered classical music when he was ten, listening to it on a transistor radio. He’s had many musician friends who make pop and rock music, did art for album covers in the ’70s and ’80s, and was a voting member of the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, attending the Grammy Awards several times. “But personally,” he told a reporter, “I have no musical talent or inclination to play a musical instrument, whatsoever.” Barela’s fondness for classical music is evident in two of his four published comic books, Kurt Cobain & Mozart Are Both Dead (1996) and Excerpts from the Ring Cycle in Royal Albert Hall (2000).

Barela was born in 1954 in Los Angeles. He has had little formal training in drawing–he has a natural talent for drawing. Despite personality clashes (described as “significant artistic differences with one of his teachers”) Barela prevailed and was recognized

with that teacher having to present him with the school’s top awards for painting and drawing. In 1997 he was honored with a nomination for the Lambda Literary Award for Humor for his second book, Kurt Cobain and Mozart Are Both Dead. He is a longtime resident of Temecula, located half way between San Bernadino and San Diego. Some of his artwork is archived at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California.

Leonard & Larry has been released in four different collections published by Palliard Press, which include Domesticity Isn’t Pretty (1993), Kurt Cobain & Mozart Are Both Dead (1996), Excerpts from the Ring Cycle in Royal Albert Hall (2000), and How Real Men Do It (2003). They have been collected and republished as The Complete Leonard & Larry Collection (2021). Some of the strips were part of Out of the Inkwell, a four-segment play presented in 1994 by San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros.