Bear Pride and the Inevitability of Human Prejudice

This weekend marked my first ever Bear Pride event. It was just as fun as I could have hoped. Saturday was a dance party and "Mr. Bear Pride" Contest, and Sunday was Wet n' Wild at Steamworks. There were plenty of very attractive men, and the variety of temperament and attitude was a wonderful deviation from the traditional view of what "Bear" has to mean.

All too often "Bear" is held up as this standard of gay masculinity both inside of the Bear community and inside of the larger Gay community. The Bears look at it as a badge of pride to be carefully gaurded and the larger community sees gruff, demanding exclusion.

The truth, of course, is very much more complicated and precarious. For being a small sub-community the Bear community is surprisingly diverse in its constituents. There were black men and white men, latinos, asian men. Some men were hairy as sin while others didn't have anything but smooth skin from the neck down. Ages ranged from 21 all the way to a few men who must have been 80 or older. Of course there was a spectacular range of body types from lithe, lean, and defined to thick, chubby, or just plain bulbous.

There was, as I mentioned before, also a delightful variety of humors. It seemed that everywhere you looked there were stern, overtly masculine men. That's to be expected, honestly. But in every glance you also got the fun queens and the men who aren't ashamed if you know that they knit or cook or the like. It's like any large group of people, I suppose. You have your social butterflies and your loners. Most people, of course, are somewhere in between. There's always a wide range of mannerisms to be found, although sometimes that creates schisms.

You can imagine that the Bear community isn't exempt from plain old human prejudice, as much as it pains me to say it. One hopes that when a community forms outside of "normal" social boundaries that said community will be peaceable inside of it's own construct. This is almost never true, of course. The Gay community is already composed of the outcast, the hated, the irregulars. The Bear community then subjects itself to even further classification and boundaries. If the Bear community was internally peaceable this further division wouldn't necessarily be an issue, but there are still problems inside of the community.

The young sneer at the old, the old scoff at the follies of the young. The chubs resent the otters and the muscle bears pretty much snub everyone. The leather bears look down on those of more mainstream sexual tastes. There's so much more. I could list these various prejudices for countless lines. I don't really feel like doing that.

The problem here isn't that the young cubs prefer sexual trysts with other young cubs. That's a matter of personal preference, and it's not even true across the board. Personal preference is not to be confused with prejudice. It becomes prejudice when a young man can't even bring himself to talk with someone more than 10 years older than him, or when a cute little muscle bear doesn't want to dance next to the big chubs on the dance floor. As in far too many human interactions personal preference quickly becomes prejudice through rudeness and insensitivity.

I have my own personal preferences. I prefer men not much larger than myself in girth. I generally don't enjoy the sexual company of men more than twice my age, though this is more of a case by case situation as time goes on. I'm not often into men who consistently wear makeup or do crazy things with their hair. I don't like it when men wear scented product. There's more, of course. Little things that sometimes matter, sometimes don't. I try not to let this become prejudice, though. There's no need to be rude or hurtful. Kindness can go a very long way in preventing harm by silly prejudice.

I'm admittedly a grumpy ass, but I'm very rarely unkind. I never aim to actually hurt someone, and I don't really understand how people can actually intend it.

I do believe I'm beginning to ramble. Long winded isn't my normal style. To surmise, I had a fun weekend. The only downside was that I couldn't help but notice just how egotistical and rude so many of these otherwise wonderful men are when they meet someone who doesn't fit their personal definition what what a Bear should be. It's an enormous pity and we're better off without.