About the participants

David Bergman is author or editor of a dozen books, including Cracking the Code, which won the George Elliston Poetry Prize. His work has also appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review, Men's Style and The New Republic. He edited the biennial series Men on Men: Best New Gay Fiction until its year 2000 edition, and with Joan Larkin he edits the book series Out Lives: Lesbian and Gay Autobiographies. He teaches at Towson University in Baltimore.

Michael Bronski is author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom and Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility. His writing has appeared in many publications, including The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, and Gay Community News, as well as in the anthology Home Towns: Gay Men Write about Where They Belong. He has been involved in the gay liberation movement for thirty years.

Introduction

This discussion on bear culture was the first I conducted; in fact, it was intended for and eventually saw publication in Les Wright's Bear Book 2. At the time, it seemed that no "serious" writers were considering the implications of the bear phenomenon. The piece contains a wealth of insight into so many aspects of bears, it's not surprising it also saw print as three discrete (but not discreet) excerpts in Art & Understanding (A&U), Gay Community News, and American Bear magazine . Its appearance in A&U brought on a slew of responses - including one from Tom Bianchi himself, who defended his common definition of "beauty."

Following separate conversations about bears with David and Michael, neither of whom, as it turned out, particularly identify as bears, the three of us came together online for a somewhat hairy but fascinating discussion about bears in May 1998. In our little cyberden we typed furiously for two hours about the good, the bad, and the grizzly. As Les had requested that we consider the topic of "literary bears," I wanted first to discuss what I then considered the only bear literary tradition I knew - that of the fictional men of the 1960s gay sex pulp series, Song of the Loon, written by Richard Amory. The Loon books had just been republished online at the time of our cyberchat.

Some of the notions presented here about various features of bear subculture were dated before they first saw print (such as that of the bear contests, which had been underway but somewhat undeveloped for several years), as is to be expected of an emerging subculture. Nonetheless, this conversation is especially valuable for its initial insights into the underpinnings of bears and masculine gay men in erotic literature.

Ron: Let's start by talking about the Song of the Loon pulp sex novel trilogy by Richard Amory (published 1966-8, and now out of print). These books were early representations of bear types: frontiersmen, cowboys, and Native Americans, most of whom were hairy, bearded, strong, well-endowed, sexually available, and primarily concerned (other than minor plot constraints) with male-to-male love. Are the men of the Loon series anything like a bear archetype?

David: Amory clearly thought he was dealing with an archetype. The Loon trilogy is a melding of the cowboy novel of Zane Grey and the classical pastoral romance of Longus - both of which rely more on archetypes than on psychological realism . Gregory Woods, in his book, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition, has a very fine chapter on the homoerotic element of the pastoral romance, and the Native American has always been associated in the Western mind with male-male sex. The Spanish explorers noted with horror how Native Americans engaged so freely in sodomy. So I think both the Loon books and bear culture are overdetermined by very stong cultural vectors that have shaped it and brought it into being. The myth that developed was of the natural Native releasing the positive aspects of the white man's homosexuality . This mythic sense of the natural powers the appreciation of the hairy, thicker male bodies of bear culture.

Ron: Were the readers of the Loon books back in the '60s anything like the readers of Bear and American Bear today?

Michael: Before the Loon books, in the 1950s and '60s, there was very little openly gay material available for gay men to read. There were some quite depressing and even homophobic books that appeared as mainstream novels and then were published as pulps. And they were quite, quite different from the first porn books that appeared in the mid-1960s, which had explicit sexual activity and were not burdened with unhappy endings, but they were not real novels. They were jerk-off books. The Loon books were openly gay, sexy, and written as novels. The Loon books were read by lots of different people - men looking to read about gay relationships, as well as men looking for writing about sex. They were a revelation because they were very positive about gay lives - but I think that their enormous readership was drawn to that, not to the types of men in the books.

Ron: Can we discuss the genre of writing - the gay pastoral - that these books represented, and its relevant symbolism?

Michael: You have to place the Loon books in the larger context of a tradition of U.S. writing that presented the West, the wilderness, the forest - the pastoral in a larger sense - as a symbol of the natural, the healthy, and even the morally right. This tradition is the cornerstone of U.S. writing and includes James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, Melville's Moby Dick, and even Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. In all of these novels, men have to leave civilization and go into the wilderness either to find themselves or to find freedom. In the process they also discovered deep feelings - and love - with other men: Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim. The homoerotic strain in all of this literature is completely self-evident. Leslie Fiedler talks about it at length in Love and Death in the American Novel. His famous essay on Huckleberry Finn, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey," was published in 1949. This is no secret. And certainly the Loon books fit right into this - they are, in essence, a continuation and even at times a parody of it.

Ron: How does the conspicuous absence of women affect the male characters in these works?

Michael: There are two things to keep in mind with this. The first is that in this tradition, men have to leave civilization because women are preventing them from being full human beings. This situation is predicated on "civilization" being repressive because men can't act out their inner feelings, and "the forest" being good because it is natural - no women present. There is a clear understanding in all the works that women make unreasonable, repressive demands upon men to act better - that is, not to be so sexual - and therefore women are to be avoided.

David: I agree with Michael that the absence of women is central to these representations of entering the natural. Of course, this also corresponds to the demographics of the American West, in which the society was dominated by men and women were scarce.

Michael: It is interesting to look at how people relate to the books now and how they see that context. And, I think, that this context has to include an observation of all the aspects - historical, social, sexual - that make up the tradition. Why might bears be attracted to the Loon books? Is it just because some of the men have beards - well, lots of men in the Bible have beards and live in the wilderness. Hell - the book of Hosea even describes God as a female bear protecting her cubs.

Ron: Earlier in the Old Testament actually, in Genesis, the character of Esau, Joseph's hairy older brother, might be the first biblical bear. In order to receive their father's blessing, Joseph impersonates Esau by wearing a pelt. Esau is depicted as a very instinctual and sensual man, and a loving brother, who is in essence Joseph's shadow.

Michael: But to get back to the Loon books: Do bears relate to these books because they are about men getting together away from civilization and being free of social restraints? Some bears may see these restraints now as getting away from repressive aspects of gay male culture - the gym body , the enforced hairlessness of some porn magazines. But it is also important to think about what it means to indulge in the fantasy of men alone to be sexually free in a broader context as well - can men only be free and sexual without women present? What are the conditions and the fantasies that make all-male - even bear - groups special, and what does that mean?

David: I think you're falling into the trap of regarding any culture outside of the West as being without constraints, as being without a culture. But the Indians in the Loon books have a very elaborate legal and religious system. It just isn't sexually repressive. The Loon books and the bear movement are not escapes from culture, but a desire to find a culture that is not repressive of sexual desire and not offended by the realities of the human body, its hairiness, tendency to sag, its mortality.

Michael: Good point. It is vital not to essentialize non-Western cultures as "freer." Certainly Edward Said, in Orientalism, has made clear what happens with this process. And certainly non-white cultures, in this case Native American cultures, had complex legal, religious, and moral systems. But what I was speaking about was how the white-male-Eurocentric writer and reader construct this fantasy world. In the Loon books, the freedom - embedded in the complex legal and religious codes (which are, as far as I can tell, pretty much invented by the author) - is predicated on the absence of women, which allows a pervasive homoeroticism.

Continue to Part 2

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