Sully points to a 1999 short answer from Camille on bears.
Dear Camille:
I've searched through your archives for guidance and wisdom. Many, many thanks. However, I've found no reference to "Bears," those big, fat, hairy gay men who meet in their own bars, have their own porn mags and even star in their own porn videos. A decade ago, the lean, smooth, muscular body was the gay ideal of manly perfection. Now it's acceptable (and sometimes more desirable) to be fat and hairy in the body-conscious gay world. What do you think about that?
Yours most humbly,
Bearmuffin
Dear Bearmuffin,
You raise a fascinating question. What is the subliminal symbolism of sexual attraction? Any gender theory worth its salt would deal head-on with these issues instead of dallying in the choking thicket of poststructuralism.
Depilation has become highly fashionable in the gay male world, as shown by the many ads in the gay press for total body waxing and tweezing. Pinpoint shaving of the genital and anal areas has become a gay beauty profession unto itself. Not since Greek athletes scraped their oiled, sandy bodies with the strigil (see Lysippus' fourth-century B.C. statue, "Apoxyomenos") have men had such a fetish for girl-smooth skin. The current fad has come from competitive bodybuilding, where depilation clarifies the outline of well-cut muscles.
In their defiant hirsutism, gay bears are more virile than the generic bubble-butt junior stud, since body hair is stimulated by testosterone. But the bears' fatness resembles not the warlike Viking mass of a Hell's Angel but the capacious bosom of the primal earth mother. The gay bear is simultaneously animalistic and nurturing, a romp in the wild followed by nap time on a comfy cushion.
The Greek-style pretty ephebe is a cold visual icon, tauntingly remote and ultimately ungraspable. The bear, however, offers warm, soothing regression to what Freud calls the polymorphous perverse, the whole-body tactility of early childhood. My working theory is that the gay bear as a sexual persona is a mythic father-mother, a parental fusion like the androgynous Egyptian river god Hapi or the Roman Father Tiber, bearded and jovially recumbent amid his swarm of rollicking cherubs.
SALON | March 17, 1999
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