Continued from Part 1

Ron: Turning our attention to more recent times: some consider the Bears to be one of the first movements following the onset of AIDS to provide gay men with healthy images of sex. It was a way, in part, for some men to reconnect with images of strength and power and virility, and to some extent longevity - qualities connected with masculine Bear body traits: beards, fur, fat, and sexual prowess.

Michael: I wonder what you mean by a "movement" - as opposed to a bunch of guys that felt good about how they looked and hung out together and their good feelings about themselves, all of which helped them to have safe sex. That is great, but is not a "movement" to feel good about sex. Which is not to say that the Bear thing did not come into being and evolve as a response - directly and indirectly - to AIDS.

Ron: Perhaps not a "movement" in a political sense, but in the way it created community, art, and identity that tens of thousands of men around the world can relate to.

Michael: But I'm not sure that I'd call this a movement in a traditional political sense. A movement toward what? It seems to me to be a cultural response or a reaction to social conditions. But as I use the word, a "movement" is more organized in a, even nascently, political sense. Are bridge clubs a "movement"? The Junior League? The Boy Scouts - at least as founded by Lord Baden-Powell - was far more of a movement because it did indeed have a political agenda. I would not personally use the phrase "Bear movement." In fact, when people even begin talking about the "oppression of Bears," I view it as being even offensive. I rather see it as a "phenomenon" - a sort of varied, multilevel, mostly grassroots (although increasingly commodified) response to many factors, especially AIDS.

David: I think AIDS is an important part of what brought about the Bear groups, but I think its origins go back further to a desire in certain gay men to find something especially beautiful and sexy in their own masculinity. I think it is also a response to certain cultural images of gay men that gay men produced of themselves which emphasized (perhaps overemphasized): youth, hairlessness, gym bodies, and wealth.

Michael: Of course, that is true. And I think that historically this is an American as opposed to a European image. This is reflected in the Loon books and in colonial and post-colonial American literature and we see it today with the Bears vs. the Calvin Klein look. It is natural vs. unnatural or manufactured.

David: I was just looking at the Tom Bianchi book of photography, In Defense of Beauty - and it represents exactly the problem that the Bear subculture was supposed to respond to. Bianchi can conceive of only one kind of beauty, and that is a sculptural dehumanized beauty in which people look like they are marble rather than flesh.

Ron: Bears naturally reacted as outsiders to this dehumanized gay ideal - it was just plain unworkable for Bears to live up to that standard. Nor did they feel they ought to.

Michael: I think it is interesting to call Bianchi's work a problem - for whom? Not for the men who look like they do - wouldn't they like it? There may be a larger social problem, such as social interests prioritizing and promoting one type of body over another. That has been a feminist critique of the media for years. And certainly the Bear thing has been a response to that. Bianchi is not interested in defending "beauty" - which can mean almost anything - except for a special type of socially approved beauty. Of course, Bianchi - and other photographers, such as Bruce Weber, and so on - dehumanize. That is one way to deal with how scary sexuality is. That is why they are not real or true artists - the purpose of their work is to view the world through a limited, narrow lens, not a broader one that shows its complexity.

Ron: As you said earlier, Michael, this "enforced hairlessness" would seem to point to some exclusion of Bear-type images, as reflected in the types of body images the gay media produces - print, broadcast, photography, advertising, porn. Has queer media tried to suppress Bear images? Why have Bear images been largely excluded from the gay media, porn in particular?

Michael: I don't think "suppress" is the right word. It isn't like TV refusing to hire African Americans as newscasters or reporters. Or only covering negative news that happens in minority neighborhoods. The word suppress implies a conscious decision not to show something, and probably for a clear political or social reason. Let me clarify this a bit. In the past (and, I am sure, even now) people in the media have said, "Well, we'd use more images of African Americans but they don't really help sell the product." This may have been in part true and sounds close to why Mandate or Honcho may not print more photos of Bears. But it is vital to remember that while the excuse is the same, the social reality is quite different. Black Americans were, and to some degree still are, excluded from a whole range of activities and opportunities because of a pervasive racism. This is simply not true of men who identify as Bears - there is no systematic discrimination of Bears - and because of this the idea of the suppression of Bear images sounds silly.

Ron: I disagree with the idea that Bear types have not been excluded from certain types of activities and opportunities. It's like saying that there has never been a stigma attached to being fat, or hairy, or even bearded. TV stations in fact did not hire men with beards, or big men, for the most part, until the 1990s. And in gay culture, at least as much as in straight culture, this exclusion is reflected in the types of body images that the media produces - print, broadcast, photography, advertising, porn. And if you've ever been the only bearded man cruising in a bar full of clean-shaven guys and clones, you know by experience that particular kind of exclusion, which I call "smoothism."

Michael: This seems to me to be very tricky territory. It is certainly true that certain types of physical types have been excluded from the realm of public presentation, particularly in positions of ostensible authority - newscasters is a good example - and this is true across the board, not just about men with beards. We live in a society in which looks are made to matter and "good" looks have been traditionally defined as: thin is better than heavier, white is better than nonwhite, feminine is better than butch for women and the reverse for men. Feminists have been complaining about this for decades and have waged legal fights to stop discriminatory actions like dismissing airline stewardesses (as they were called then) for being too old - at age thirty-five. In this sense Bears - defined, at least in this case, as men with beards - were not hired as newscasters on television. But there is, in my way of thinking, a huge difference between "types" of men being excluded from being showcased on the media and women or African-Americans being discriminated against being "women" or "black."

Ron: It seems to me that those aging stewardesses took legal action not merely because they were women, but because they were a "type" of women.

Michael: There are studies that show that people who are perceived as "overweight" are discriminated against in the workplace, often being passed up for jobs they are qualified for, but even this is not the same thing as Bears - men with beards - being overlooked because there is an accepted "uniform look" that the media or workplace unreasonably enforces. And in fact, in the past fifteen years, many of those prohibitions against facial hair or hair length have been changed, in part through legal (or implied legal) challenges but also because of changes in fashion. I am extraordinarily uncomfortable, in fact outright reject, making any direct correlation between the exclusion that Bears may face and the real discrimination that women, African Americans, Latinos, or gay people as distinct groups face in the workplace and in many social situations. The paradigms that we use to describe racism, sexism, or anti-Semiticism simply do not apply here in the same way. We have never lived in a world of "Bear-only" drinking fountains.

Ron: Your point is well-taken, but I do feel that we still live in a world of "twink-only" gay spaces where intense social stigma exists that oppresses Bear-men's bodies and way of being. In any case, let's return to the notion of representations of men in porn and gay media.

Michael: The reason why there are few Bear images in some magazines and books is because they are seen as not popular. You know that the minute Bianchi thought he could sell Bears he would; the minute that the fashion world decides that the Bear look is in, the images will be there. The minute Bears become marketable, Bears will be sold as such.

David: Bears are being marketed already, but not as successfully as the buff. However, I think we should be glad that someone isn't marketable and rejoice in that failure.

Ron: Amen to that, David. So, the question then becomes - why doesn't it sell?

David: Part of it is technical. It's harder to photograph hairy bodies and get the same sort of physical definition. Light does not come off a hairy body in as photogenic a way as it does a smoothly oiled one. Then there are the class issues of thinness - the rich can afford the diets and exercise one needs to stay thin. But I think there is something else. Hair is a deeply psychological symbol of both sexuality and mortality. Remember, Samson loses his power when he gets his locks shorn - and society in its attempt to control power wants to have us all shorn. But body hair especially is part of the abject - part of the dirty, smelly, detachable parts of the self that are associated with being mortal. And today especially, American society in general, and gay culture in particular, is torn by its feelings about its mortality. So along with the Bianchi models who look like marble statues, we also have the anorexic male models who look like they're on speed or heroin - gaunt figures of the nearly dead.

Continue to Part 3

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