BEARTY 2026: UNEXPECTED ADVENTURES
As I ponder my recent experiences at BEARTY in Estonia, I’m challenged by trying to separate the professional (doing bear history work) from the personal (my purely subjective take on my experiences as an attendee.)
My trip to Estonia was highly educational and filled with amazing peak experiences, but also marred by some awful experiences. Travel is always filled with unexpected adventures. BEARTY in Tallinn was my first experience of a bear event outside the American bubble.
I am not one of the jet-setting bears who can afford to make the rounds of the international. Alvar Ameljushenko’s invitation to me to give a lecture on early bear history was manna from heaven. I have long wanted to visit the Balticum (Estonia bear circuit, Lithuania, and Latvia).
I especially wanted to visit and photograph Vanalinn (Tallinn Old Town), which dates back to the 13th century. Stockholm’s Gamla Stan and my beloved Altstadt Tübingens also date back to the 13th century. They are products of the High Middle Ages.
Alvar’s invitation gave me the motivation to prepare an updated slideshow presentation on the formative years of beardom. It justified me spending a minor fortune (thanks to maxing out all my credit cards and a debt I will never be able to pay off) to finally experience a bear weekend in a European country.
I asked my Swedish boyfriend Tomas Hemstd to join me for a vacation together, which is a rare treat since we see each other only once or twice a year. I was thrilled at the prospect of speaking to a large, thoughtful, informed, and attentive audience. (I had no idea that I and my work are well known and respected.) I was also one of three bears, who are long-term HIV/AIDS survivors, on a panel addressing HIV and Stigma in the bear and queer community.
When I speak as a survivor, I open myself up and speak openly and honestly from the heart. It is always an emotionally raw and draining experience. Again, I was heartened by the large, thoughtful, informed, and attentive audience. It culminated in an open discussion among the attendees.
The visionary behind BEARTY is Alvar Ameljuhsenko. He has an effervescent personality that rejoices in the bear community. BEARTY is clearly a labor of love. (I encounter this commitment over and over with other bear organizers.) He reports that after attending his first bear pride event in Cologne, Germany, he wanted to see a bear event happen in Tallinn.
Fifteen years went by. Then Alex Gratch, co-founder of the St Petersburg Bear Club (Russia), reached out to Alvar, and they ran with the idea and expanded it into a weekend event that included all the bear clubs around the Baltic Sea. This was in 2013. That year he also met Alex’s husband Dimitry Bear Lukyanev who has been a co-organizer of BEARTY ever since.
BEARTY is a mission-driven NGO nonprofit whose aim is to advance equal rights across borders, social or political. They support and cooperate closely with the Estonian LGBT Association, recently worked with the radical faeries, foster BEARTY-style community with other bear communities (Norway, Poland, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine), and educate the larger world about bears and LGBTQ people in general.
BEARTY features all the party aspects of a bear weekend, from nightlife with dancing and DJs in the bars, a pool party meet-and-greet, and a communal Sunday brunch. What speaks to me is the gravitas BEARTY’s Raul Medina describes as the “evolution that takes center stage.” He goes on to describe Tallinn BEARTY Tallinn as “building something deeper with an intentional space where community care, education, and visibility are just as important as celebration.”
There is a focus on visual arts, music, and cinematography that rotate on a three-year basis. (Only Provincetown and Rehoboth Beach also feature an art exhibition.) This year, it was music. It included dancing and celebrated DJs such as POP.OP Studio 53, Bearanoid!, DJ Richie4Fingers, and DJ LCB. This was complemented by the The Salon D’Ours concert featuring bassist Ulrich Burda and pianist Przemek Winicki. You can find Przemek’s breathtaking mastery of the piano by following him on Facebook: (Click here to follow him on Facebook)
Before seeing him perform live, I thought his flawless execution was actually a clever AI invention. The concert was held In Valge Saal, the main concert hall of the House of Blackheads/Tallinn Philharmonic.
Of the 200 or so attendees, many, if not most, have been coming back year after year. They comprise the heart of the BEARTY family. Alvar celebrates the conviviality, the warm fellowship, and the reconnections at the BEARTY family reunion.
For newcomers, the place to find their way into the family is at the late night dance parties. I am 73 and have aged out of the late night bar and dance club scene. I’m relying on my boyfriend Tomas (who is a part-time a DJ) telling me that that is where connections were being made. I observed that my own bear family in the spirit of BEARTY is the Rehoboth Beach Bear Weekend where I reconnect with my Mid Atlantic bear family.
Rehoboth Beach Bear Weekend has a host hotel with a restaurant on the ground level overlooking the Atlantic, a vendor market, and all events (dance, stage show) taking place within the hotel. This optimizes the opportunities to meet new people.
Outside of the organized events at BEARTY, I had no idea where to find any of the bears. The saving grace for me was the final event: the Sunday brunch, where I finally got to socialize.
[Warning: major rant starting] For full disclosure, some of my unexpected adventures were quite awful. It took me three days to fly from Syracuse, New York to Tallinn. I spent four hours sitting in a LOT Polish Airlines plane on the tarmac waiting out a hurricane in Chicago. I then sat in my seat on that same crowded LOT Polish Airlines plane for 14 hours to get to the next airport.
Because of that four hour delay in departure, I missed my connecting flight to Tallinn by two hours. I found myself unceremoniously stuck at the Warsaw airport. EU law requires airlines to provide overnight accommodations, meals, and vouchers for travel to and from the airport, but for at least an hour, I asked one LOT Polish Airlines employee after another how I could get those legally required accommodations in Warsaw.
Everyone’s attitude was “not my problem.” Yet I pressed on until I found someone who followed through when I reminded her this was required by law. My hotel stay was a bizarre detour into a Twilight Zone episode. I had dinner in the hotel restaurant. The decor was a tribute to French Classical style. There was not a single woman among the diners.
I heard Polish, German, French, and American English being spoken. Black tee shirts seemed to be the fashion. When I asked for a table of one, I was told none were available and I was seated at the bar. (There were plenty of empty tables.)
Soon enough, a waitress stepped in and gave me my choice of tables. Service was slow, but at least the food was very good. The maître d’ apologized several times for the slow service. All the hotel staff were gracious and I realized they understood I was an inconvenienced traveler passing through their country.
I arrived in Tallinn one day late. I was severely jet-lagged. I didn’t fall asleep until after 6AM, slept twelve hours at a stretch, and felt exhausted the entire week that I was in Tallinn. While photographing in the Old Town, I tripped over a stone statue low to the ground and landed on my left brow, getting a goose egg that turned into a black eye. I also broke my glasses in the fall and got a mild concussion that lasted two days.
Tomas taped up my glasses and led me by the hand those two days, steadying me and giving me verbal guidance such as “two steps down here,” “uneven pavement here,” and “car coming.” I felt shaky on my feet and woozy in my brain from the concussion, and was on the edge of rage from being frustrated over the fucking apartment app-and-code system. Nonetheless, I put on my best extrovert persona and tried to get into the spirit.
I concur with Raul Media. “Events like Tallinn BEARTY 2026 are no longer just about escape. They are about visibility, responsibility, and transformation.” The bear community continues to expand, evolve, and mature.
In my growth in the bear community, I appreciate the deepening understanding within that we have history to pass down, we are having dialog in community, and we are maturing. I welcome our commitment to the arts, and I personally find deeper connotation in what I call “bear spirituality.” My home is the Bear Your Soul retreats at Easton Mountain, after all.
My fondest memories of BEARTY 2026 include Tomas treating me to a mug of Vana Tallinn Glögi, a spiced mulled wine made of the local Vana Tallinn liqueur (because I am in recovery, Tomas made sure I got a Shirley Temple Glögi.), breakfast every morning with Tomas at NOP, an organic restaurant around the corner from our apartment which Alvar had recommended (it had a very Berkeley vibe), and fellowship at the Sunday brunch.
My most special memory was the conversation following my bear history talk with two young queer folks, one a transman and another a gender-fluid woman. They are both artists and queer activists, and taught me about the local queer community, politics, and Estonian culture. They asked me what I, as a queer elder, could advise to the young generation. They seemed nervous about talking with me and kept apologizing for taking up my time.
I don’t think they understood what a gift it was for me to talk with and learn from them too though. They are our future.
This was my best unexpected adventure.
