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Bear Stew #8
Tasty Manbytes Served Steaming Hot by Ron Suresha
With our baseball caps off, we note the three-year anniversary
of September 11, in honor of our SF hero, rugger, and bearlover
Mark Bingham, whose story was told in Jon Barrett's excellent
biography, The Hero of Flight 93, which you can order through
www.markbingham.org.
Topping my, um, reading pile these days is the (s)lavishly
illustrated coffeetable volume, International Mr. Leather:
25 Years of Champions, compiled by esteemed leatherman Joseph
Bean, for the IML organization and the Leather Archives &
Museum in Chicago. Hose me down, men - this book packs
more than manheat than a solar flare in a dungeon.
Whether you're into leather life, or just like to read
about gay/bi/queer male subcultural history, or looking
for incredible jackoff material, this 200+ page book will
capture your imagination and lay out a chronology of
organized leather contests, exposing a sometimes hidden,
always out/rageous history: get it at
www.leatherarchives.org.
Clearly, gay/bi bears are the Next Big Thang in cinema.
The September theatrical premiere of the new John Waters
movie, A Dirty Shame, features a scene with a number
of AmaBear DC-Baltimore bearpals. In fact, Waters, gay
filmmaker of Hairspray and Pink Flamingoes,
chatted enthusiastically about bear subculture on Air America Radio's
"Unfiltered" show, even mentioning The Bear Handbook,
cubs, and otters. With the iconic Waters wagging his tongue
like that, we can be sure that the topic of ursine
masculinity will be hot chat this year. As reported in
Bear Stew #5, the Spanish movie Cachorro (Bear Cub)
also is in selected theatres nationwide, and available early
next year from TLA on DVD. Also of note is a forthcoming
feature-length flick, Angora Ranch, which Austin filmmakers
Tim Jones and Paul Bright shot this spring. Personally,
I can't wait to see the action figures.
On the Sept. 14th "Tough Crowd," Comedy Central's late-night
political yak-fest, "Kids in the Hall" comic Scott Thompson
again declared his preference for hairy guys. I met Scott
and his bearish manager four years ago in Boston - he
jokingly claims to have invented bears. Each of the
"Tough Crowd" panel of pun-dits was assigned a popular
magazine to review. Scott, clutching a copy of the
glossy pop-cultic pro-wrestling mag, WWE Smackdown,
enthused over the musclebound god bods but complained,
"I don't like that they all shave their bodies. I like
the hairy guys - you know, I really like the bears," he
said, rolling a flirtatious eye toward Colin. "I even like
some women, you know, with mustaches." Sure ya do, Scott.
Colin Quinn, former SNLer and not shy to flash his chestfur,
recently use the word "homoerotic" no less than ten times
in one show - suppose he's trying to tell us something about
himself? Also regularly appearing on Tough Crowd is the
bearish and bear-friendly comic Dave Atell:
recent Insomniac
segments featured a gay foot-fetish club, and a big hairy
shaved-head guy with a bear-paw tattoo who grabbed Dave
and proclaimed his dream of being on Dave's show fulfilled.
The shaved-head burly guy called Dave "handsome," pulled
him into a hug and pawed him all over, to which Dave
cowered and yalped, "Now it starts becoming a prison
film!" Quelle suprise. Comedy Central is so freaky-ass
gay already - how many of you now regularly choke the
chicken watching Larry the Cable Guy
on "Blue Collar TV," hmmm?
When I squealed on the phone to my old bearpal, Dan Jaffe,
author of the bearish novel The Limits of Pleasure, that my
Utilikilt had just arrived by UPS, he quipped, "Oh, aren't
we trendy!" Truthfully, I wanted to get one when I saw
BOSF's Jeff Glover's kilt five years ago. I'm no stranger
to a dress, myself: I wore a lungi when I traveled in India
in the early eighties; I've also been known to don a
dancing skirt when balance-and-swinging other similarly
dressed bears at GLBTQ contra or international folk dances.
But a recent photo fashion spread in the September issue of
queer UK mag Blue asks, "Are You Man Enough to Wear a Skirt?"
features macho dudes in fancy threads without pantlegs. Too
late to order for the holidays, but why not git yerself
one when the warm weather returns?
. Tell 'em SpunkDaddy sent ya.
The metrosexual mag Details feature, "Gay or _______?" has
been running an excellently done send-up of the confusion
we often face when trying to figure out on which side
another dude dresses: does it hang down to the straight
side, the gay side, or somewhere bi-tween the two? The
best so far is "Gay or Trucker," featuring one hot
bearstud: "One gets paid to cruise; the other does
it for fun. But when it comes down to it, both are
masters of the big rig." Sadly, Advocate's totally
clueless send-up of the Details feature, "Bear or straight?"
was stupidly conceived and executed: "Shades: These
bug-eyed numbers don't really flatter anyone besides
NASCAR's Jeff Gordon, yet their awfulness somehow adds
to the manly allure of this look." Note to Advocate: Skip the stereotyping satire of subcultures or masculinities you don't get, alright? We'd all appreciate it.
This column, Bear Stew #8, first appeared in American Bear magazine #63, Dec 2004/Jan 2005.
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