Van Buckley grew up in a small town in Southern Missouri and now lives in Kansas City, Missouri. After receiving a degree in mass communications, he spent five years working as a reporter and editor for newspapers in Missouri and Pennsylvania. For the past thirteen years, he has worked in public relations for a university. Van serves on the board of directors and as media coordinator for the National Institute for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Education; he also writes for the Institute's on-line magazine, www.authenticity.org. In his spare time he enjoys reading (everything from lurid murder mysteries to the latest books on queer theory), herb gardening, fixing up his house, and political activism. His interest in activism stems from his participation in the 1993 March on Washington.
Photo: Mark Erickson

Steven Evans is an artist living in New Jersey who was born in Key West, Florida. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Atlanta College of Art, and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He has taught a course on "Gender, Representation, and Sexuality" at NSCAD, curated a contemporary art exhibition on the subject, and written for various art magazines as well as STH (Straight to Hell). Steven's artwork deals with issues of identity, gender, and sexuality. His latest exhibition, at the Rupert Goldsworthy Gallery in New York, also touched on Evans' self-image during a bout of alopecia areata. In 1994, he and three friends founded New York City's MetroBears, a Bearclub serving the New York Metropolitan area. The club has since grown to approximately two hundred members. Evans left his position of helping to guide the club in 1996. Evans pays the rent working for a museum in New York, has a lover, Mike, of ten years, and drives a pickup truck for the butch factor.
Photo: Jayne Evans

Tim Morrison is originally from the St. Louis, Missouri, area. Self-described as a "regular kinda guy with some twists," he divides his time between a career in information technology and his main passions of music, film, spending too much time online, and comic-book collecting, as well as dabbling in writing. Currently single, Tim lives in San Francisco, California.
Photo: Lynn S. Ludwig <www.ludwigphotos.com>

Eduardo (Ed) Chavez is a twenty-six-year-old who lives in Mexico City, openly gay to family and friends. He works as a software developer and client-programming manager for an Internet service provider. He has visited the U.S. several times and is especially fond of Orlando and San Francisco. Ed is also a founder of Osos Mexicanos, which is Mexico's first Bearclub, and is currently partnered to a Beary guy.
Photo: Eduardi Gil/Difracta

Seumas Hyslop was born in Gladstone, Australia, and now resides in the Inner Western suburbs of Sydney in New South Wales. Seumas is a college student, currently pursuing a Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery at the University of Sydney. As a founder of Harbour City Bears in 1995, he has been heavily involved in the development of the club, and through it, the Bear community in Sydney and Australia, and has also developed Bear Essentials, Australia's premier Bear festival. He is a contributor to The Bear Book II, detailing the history of the Australian Bear Community since 1995. Seumas' interests include medical informatics (the use of computers and technology in healthcare). He plans to travel extensively over the next few years. Check out his Website at <www.hyslop.org>.
Photo: David Hart

Xavier (Xavi) Navarro was born in 1975. He belongs to the first generation that has lived in full democracy in Spain. He has lived through the explosion of gay life and AIDS in his country in the '90s. Xavi is studying at college for a degree in computer engineering and works in a bank-computing department, speaks several languages. He came out at eighteen, with the help of a gay organization. He worked in another gay association for two years, where he first heard news about the U.S. Bear movement. Some time later, through the Internet, he was one of the first members of the IRC [Internet Relay Chat] Bear channel and the Spanish Bears Webpage. In 2000, he became one of the founders of Bearcelona, the Barcelona Bearclub.
Photo: J. A. Siverio

Marcelo Perales was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1967, and has a degree in business administration, but now works as a computer instructor and Webpage designer. He is currently very happy with his husbear, Cristian, who lives in Chile. Marcelo is a founding member and current President of Osos de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires Bears), Argentina's first Bearclub. He participated in this panel with the assistance of his former boyfriend, Gabriel.
Photo: Gabriel Enriquez

Glen Purdon was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1971, then left for South Africa (S.A.) in 1980. After his family lived four years in Johannesburg, they moved to Port Elizabeth in 1984, where he has since lived. After Glen completed high school, he joined the South African Navy, where he served for seven years as an officer. He's traveled extensively: seen five continents, a hell of a lot of South America, as well as Europe and the States. Glen left the Navy in 1997 and joined a national company that runs port operations in South Africa. He and his partner Stephen started Ibhayi Bear in their community. He is now employed as a captain of a harbor tug, where he admires the many Bears who work on ships!
Photo: S. N. Robinson

Mehmet Ali (Mali) Sahin was born in 1968 and brought up in Ankara, Turkey. He graduated from Faculty of Arts in their Ceramics and Glass department. In 1994 he turned his computer-aided graphics hobby into a profession and started to work as a graphics designer. Now he works in a multimedia company producing educational CD-ROM titles as graphics and interaction designer and Webmaster. His hobbies are reading, movies, music, and Internet. He is founder and president of Bears in Turkey, the country's only Bear group, which he initiated with five other guys in 1998. He contributed an article to The Bear Book II, "A Bear Voice from Turkey."
Photo: QBLI

Woody Shimko was born in 1956 in New Jersey, with the given name George. His college major was Forestry and his nickname has been Woody ever since. Oddly, rather than pursuing a career as a park ranger, he ended up in NYC in the creative field for almost fifteen years. He moved to Cape Cod in 1992 to open an environmental store in Provincetown, while maintaining his job as Creative Director at various NYC stores: Bergdorf Goodman, Armani, and then Tiffany. In 1996, Woody accepted an offer to work as Creative Director for a Japanese department store. He closed his store in December 1999 and nowadays splits his time between Cape Cod. Palm Springs, and Tokyo, Japan. He is currently single and prefers that, due to his travels, but always keeps his fingers crossed.
Photo: courtesy of W. Shimko

Justin Spooner is an Internet and e-commerce designer and consultant, and his partner Neal is a music technology specialist. He has traveled to most of the United Kingdom and lived in Hong Kong, and he and Neal have covered most of Europe and been to the U.S. quite a few times. They live in a large house in a town of 50,000 in Wales, U.K. Justin has been active on the Bear scene for several years - not tarting around, however, just chatting, meeting, and online conferencing. Justin and Neal are slowly dragging the local Welsh Bears out from their small caves and into the light.
Photo: Neal Tomlinson (Welshbear)