Rehoboth Beach Bear Weekend 2024
Les K Wright shares his personal experience as an attendee/ exhibitor at Rehoboth Bear Bear Weekend which took place from September 12-15, 2024.
In a recent article Bear World Magazine named Rehoboth Beach (DE) as one of “6 small bear-friendly cites” in the US. The other five they named are Provincetown (MA), Guerneville (CA), Asbury Park (NJ), Asheville (NC), and New Hope (PA). No doubt there are several other small bear-friendly cities worth noting. I’m curious to know BWM’s take on Palm Springs (CA), Fort Lauderdale (FL), and Key West (FL). I knew Guerneville (or “Castro Street North,” as I used to call it) during my early San Francisco days in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. When I lived in Boston in the 1990s and 2000s, I was a frequent visitor to Provincetown, staying with year-rounder bear friends there. Of these other bear-friendly cities I knew the Asbury Park of the 1950s, when my grandmother used to take me to the boardwalk on day trips with relatives from Trenton. When I revisited Asbury Park in the mid-1990s I was shocked to find the boardwalk reduced to a pile of ruins–abandoned shops and arcades and a decaying pier.
Before arriving in Rehoboth Beach earlier this month, I knew nothing about the place, not even where it’s located. Although I’m usually very good at geography, I wasn’t sure whether Delaware had beaches on the Chesapeake Bay or not. (It doesn’t. The state faces the Atlantic Ocean.)
I rode to Rehoboth Beach with Charlie Hopwood and Jesse Meyer, bear friends from Baltimore. We drove across central Delaware, which is flat farm country. Most of the buildings I saw along the way—houses, barns, strip malls—date back only to the post-World War II era. Rehoboth Beach architecture is of the same vintage and reminds me of coastal Florida beach towns.
The only advanced warning I had had about Rehoboth Beach was the snarky remark that “Rehoboth Beach is a strip mall.” The town itself is beset upon by encroaching outlet malls, those said “snarky” strip malls, chain restaurants, and an increasing amount of suburban housing developments along Route One. Entering the town by crossing over the Rehoboth/Lewes Canal, the streets are laid out on a grid pattern. Rehoboth Avenue, the main street, has two wide lanes in each direction. It has the feel of a hopeful grand avenue, with the pairs of lanes separated by a series of grassy strips. At the east end is a grandstand (with public bathrooms) that terminates at the boardwalk and the beach.
Rehoboth Beach has many restaurants offering a wide range of seafood and ethnic cuisines, boutique shops catering to straight visitors and residents alike with the requisite souvenir shops clustered along and around the boardwalk. There are intriguing shop-filled pedestrian passages between the streets to explore. Compared to over-the-top Ptown or Palm Springs’ price gouging, Rehoboth Beach is a real bargain, plus Delaware has no sales tax. Definitely “bear-friendly,” if not a “bear Mecca.”
The first Rehoboth Beach Bear Weekend was held in 2015. The event was so popular that the local bears decided to make it an annual event. It is now the most popular of several events they hold each year. As a result, (also in 2015) the Rehoboth Beach Bears incorporated as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, dedicated to “providing inclusive fellowship and fraternity while raising money for the charity whose missions provide for community development.” The organization provides scholarship opportunities to the local schools for the graduating seniors in the LGBTQ+ community continuing education. OIN 2024 they awarded 11 scholarships.
Since 2015 they have been fundraising for the Delaware Humane Society and Saved Souls Animal Rescue, AIDS Walk Delaware and Sussex AIDS Clinic, Harry K Foundation (dedicated to ending childhood hunger in Delaware), endow a scholarship fund to support scholarship opportunities for members of the local Gay-Straight Alliance. They also fundraise for the Rehoboth Beach Film Society, CAMP Rehoboth and Clear Space Theatre Company. CAMP Rehoboth has a beautiful community center building with performance and exhibition spaces.
The Rehoboth Bears are a formal organization with no formal membership. It is overseen by a board of seven. The smaller size of the Rehoboth Beach Bear Weekend (as compared to Ptown) makes for an intimate sense of community. The 2024 weekend had plenty of events and activities for bears to reconnect with old friends, make new friends, socialize, party, play, sunbathe on the beach, and go shopping in town or at the host hotel’s vendors market.
When I formally interviewed Jeff Donovan, the current president of the Rehoboth Beach Bears, the Rehoboth Beach Bears extended an open invitation to me to attend, to interview and document at will, and even offered me a table at the vendors hall. This event was my first time as a vendor. I actually sold a dozen books. (I had learned from my first—failed—vendor experience in Ptown.) It turns out bears do take time off from eating, drinking, and (ahem) being merry, when they go shopping. I also discovered that being stationed at a table was the ideal way for me to do my bear history work. People knew where to find me. I did extensive professional networking. I had numerous substantive conversations. New projects were discussed. Memories were shared. I was able to collect materials donated to the BHPI archives.
When Charlie and Jesse invited me to come down to Rehoboth Beach with them and share a hotel room, I had no idea what a home-coming Bear Weekend would turn out to be for me. I was astounded to discover I have so much bear family in the Mid-Atlantic (DC/Baltimore/MD/DE), aka DMV area. When I came down to Baltimore a year ago to interview Charlie about his work with the Chesapeake Bay Bears in Baltimore and his bear writings, we clicked instantly.
A dozen years ago I moved away from California, leaving all bear—and generically gay—community. It was a long, slow, and very painful experience for me to adjust to the emotional, social, and sexual isolation of rural upstate New York. It felt as if I’d jumped off the top of the Empire State Building, landing face-first on the sidewalk and waking up in a nightmarish episode of The Twilight Zone which never ended. I feared I’d never escape and I wondered if the warm connection and affection of the early bear spirit even existed any more. Meeting Charlie and Jesse was a heartening return to the bear community I had previously known and had long missed.
Months before meeting Charlie and Jesse I had reconnected with Ali Lopez, stumbling across his Facebook page by accident. He and the Centaur Motorcycle Club had supported my Bear Icons art exhibit in Washington, DC twenty years before. In Rehoboth Beach I finally met his husband Enrique Méndez. Ali was and still is very active, and he and Charlie were old friends. When Charlie introduced me to Jeff as someone I should interview about the Rehoboth Beach Bears, Jeff responded with keen interest and enthusiasm. He offered to research the early history of the group from the time before he got involved. He talked to other group members and gathering old tee shirts and other ephemera for the BHPI archives. By the end of the weekend I felt I had become family with Jeff.
I also met up with two other longtime friends–J.S. (Jim) Adams and his husband Jospeh, whom I had last seen twenty years earlier. Our scheduled reunion had been postponed a year due to Charlie’s unexpected health issues this past year. Jim is a noted DC-based artist who had participated in my Bear Icons exhibit and contributed s cover blurb for my recent photography book. Jospeh (as “JD Adams”) ) is one of the first bear porn stars, appearing in the premiere issue of American Bear issue 1, its 1996 calendar (June), Bear Magazine 64, (April 2001), EuroBear, and in two Manhunter video releases (“Backwoods Bears II” and “Xtreme Fur Fest”). It turned out all these bears have been friends for many years. When they say the Mid-Atlantic bear community is small, it turns out they weren’t joking.
And the plot thickens. My neighbor in the vendor hall was Baltimore-based artist and archivist Tim Goecke, was selling vintage bear magazines and tee shirts. I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t recognize him at first. As we started chatting about old bear magazines and artwork he had done for Provincetown Bear Week years ago, he mentioned he had done the poster I used as a fundraiser for the Bear Icons exhibit at that Ptown Bear Week.Tim proved to be a walking encyclopedia of bear magazine publishing history. (I’m still encouraging him to write about that history.)
I finally met Paul Witzkoske in person. Paul had designed four bear flags, including the design that won in a Chesapeake Bay Bears charity contest and became the International Bear Brotherhood Flag the bear community embraces today. The flag emerged from a collaboration with Craig Byrnes—Craig had an idea to create a flag to unite the bear community and Paul executed four designs in Adobe Illustrator 88.
I reconnected with BEARPAD, two San Francisco Bay Area-based bear artists Jordan Fickel and Patrick Stephenson, whom I had met at this year’s Bear Your Soul retreat at Easton Mountain. I had posted a photo of their art installation— a one-story-high red bear balloon tethered to the main lodge at Easton Mountain. When Jeff Donovan texted me that he wanted it, I asked him, “the artwork or the artists?” It turned out he wanted both. When I got to Rehoboth Beach BearPad was already dispensing their big queer punk bear hugs and art. Interviewing them informally, off-camera, our talk revealed a mutual interest in and commitment to developing and promoting bear art and culture as a part of the bear events beyond eating, drinking, and (ahem) being merry. I had been inspired by Charlie Hunter’s art exhibition at Bear Week in Provincetown. And I enjoyed and appreciated the Grin and Bear It Art Exhibition at Rehoboth Beach Bear Weekend, attending the artists reception there at CAMP on Saturday afternoon.
A bear named Mike Parente stopped by my table the first day of the weekend and offered to introduce me to the BearCity filmmakers, Jay Barry Azzato and Joe Amorin. I had been trying to arrange an interview with Joe and Jay late last year, but their project had been derailed by numerous problems. The late Doug Langway had directed Bear City, the first American feature film about gay bear life. He went on to make two more BearCity films. Following Langway’s death in 2022, Joe and Jay have been working hard to bring the project back to life as the BearCity Trilogy.
To my surprise, Mike actually came back with Joe and Jay. The conversation was a blend of Joe and Jay’s project, my current bear history research, and Mike’s involvement with the bear community in southern California—serving on the board of Bears LA, working in post-production television, and know “all the bear filmmaker sin southern California.” As we were talking I suddenly noticed that Mike was not just talking to the bear historian (he later confessed to being “star-struck” by men), but to me personally. He was somehow seeing the real me and touching my soul. With all the casual friskiness of the Bear Weekend, I never expected to be courted by a gentleman. Mike asked me out on a date. I hadn’t gone on a date in over twenty years. I accepted immediately. Dinner would reveal that I was meeting a very special man. And that is how a whole new chapter in my life has begun. You’re never too old to fall in love.
