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The Bear Book is a composite portrait of gay bearsusually big, hairy men who favor full-face beards and prefer to wear jeans and flannel shirts. This emergent social phenomenon and new sexual iconography is burgeoning across America, Western Europe, and other parts of the gay global village. The first-ever book on the gay bear phenomenon, this book offers readers a collection of first-person observations and historical and critical investigations by participant observers within and outside the bear community. This exciting book is organized in an ideologically revealing manner, including sections on history, identity, social spaces, iconography, and the bear phenomenon abroad. Because of the dialectical position of this work, it inevitably both describes and, to a lesser extent, may prescribe various parameters of this subculture-in-the-making.
List of contents
Contents
Foreword
- Introduction: Theoretical Bears
- Section I: History
- Chapter 1. A Concise History of Self-Identifying Bears
- Chapter 2. Bear Roots
- Chapter 3. The Bear Clan: North American Totemic Mythology, Belief, and Legend
- Chapter 4. Aroused from Hibernation
- Chapter 5. Bearphernalia: An Exercise in Social Definition
- Chapter 6. Academics as Bears: Thoughts on Middle-Class Eroticization of Workingmen’s Bodies
- Section II
- Chapter 7. Male Images in the Gay Mass Media and Bear-Oriented Magazines: Analysis and Contrast
- Chapter 8. Beardom
- Chapter 9. The Natural Bears Classification System: A Classification System for Bears, and Bearlike Men Version 1.10
- Chapter 10. John Rand, Photographer: An Interview with Les Wright
- Section III: Bear Spaces
- Chapter 11. The Original Bears Mailing List: An Interview with Steve Dyer
- Chapter 12. Front Range Bears: A History
- Chapter 13. The Bear Essentials of Country Music
- Section IV: Bear Spaces: San Francisco
- Chapter 14. The Bear Hug Group: An Interview with Sam Ganczaruk
- Chapter 15. BEAR(in ital) Magazine
- Chapter 16. Bear Mecca: The Lone Star Saloon Revisited
- Section V: Bears Abroad
- Chapter 17. Bears in the Land Down Under
- Chapter 18. Kiwi Bears
- Chapter 19. Atlantic Crossing: The Development of the Eurobear
- Chapter 20. A French Bear Asks: Are Bears an American Thing?
- Index
- Reference Notes Included
About the author
Les Wright
Summary
The Bear Book presents a comprehensive collection of writings covering a significant, but previously uncharted phenomenon of gay male life. Covering every aspect of global bear culture, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding contemporary male homosexuality or aspects and expressions of masculinity in general.
