Beardom Two

[vianegativa]

Subcultures do not exist in a vacuum.

Most things, particularly such high-minded concepts as sub-cultures, are affected simply by people's perception of them. The individual fits his understanding of a sub-culture within the contextual framework he's already got scotch-taped up on the walls of his head. In fact, to say there is some Platonic ideal out there of ANY subculture is somewhat crazed as each person perceives things uniquely.

When you "mainstream" any subculture, and by that I mean mainstream media or general society at large notices it, it becomes changed by the perception of outsiders and begins to change as people with cultural values that deviate from the original dive into the subculture.

Do you think that after 1969 there weren't hippies grousing about people joining them just to do LSD & get laid?

I'm sure the Black Panthers never thought that the Civil Rights Movement kowtowed a bit, right?

Nobody in Hip Hop gets into gun battles over real street cred, right?

The point is this: the moment general awareness of a sub-culture within larger cultures is reached, that sub-culture is partially perceived through the eyes of folks who have no direct interaction with or understanding of that culture. If new members of a sub-culture are drawn from more mainstream populations, the ideals of the sub-culture they adopt are going to morph from the original firebrand ideals that the sub-culture was founded on.

Spun quick for Beardom, here it is: I choose to enjoy the Bear subculture because it appeals to me as a source of potential camaraderie and attraction. I remember the halcyon days of early beardom, but rather than let some exclusionist asshats redefine Beardom as a clique I choose to embrace the inclusive beliefs that brought me so much comfort when I came out. It's easy to reject a group or sub-culture you want to be in based on a few bad interactions, especially in the current "Me: First, Last and Always" age we're in. Personally I don't mind practicing the ideals of a sub-culture I enjoy & value; it's more work, but I get far more in return than I would if I merely heckled my little group of hairy homos from afar.

So fine. Be post-post-post Bear. Start up a Prog Rock band to talk about how badly you were treated. Focus on not expending any energy or will to correct what you perceive as a wrong & get LOTS of wood for that cross you'll want everyone to admire from a distance. Personally I'd rather discount the obviously foolish and create a supportive & nurturing atmosphere like the one I desire around myself. Or I could just bitch because I expected a whole wonderland of fuzzy acceptance delivered in a neat flannel package at my doorstep, free of charge.

Comments

[userid1999.livejournal.com]

For me, I think that I'm more concerned that the bear community may be dissolving around the edges due to this phenomenon rather than people explicitly labeling themselves as "post-bear". How long can a community persist that ceases to attract members that have those original ideals that it stood for? I think there may even be a few kinds of people that we're conceptualizing as "post-bear" in this discussion... (I wrestled with going into this in my post last night, but I couldn't get a handle on it enough to describe what I was thinking...) I'll try here though... There may be ones that are a little more pretentious about it and explicitly labeling themselves as "post-bear". However, there may be another group of people that are "post-bear" without attaching the label to themselves or maybe even realizing it themselves. (This would be more of the phenomenon that I was delving into in my original post.) I'm more troubled by the effects of the long-term removal of the latter group than the former one.

[baeritone.livejournal.com]

Hm. Should I feel slapped? ;)

Let me put it this way - I'd rather put away the whole bear thing, and affiliate with anyone of any type, so long as a person is kind, than to force myself to change a movement for which the tide is turning anyway.

So I'll still hang out with the bears I like, and not hang out with the ones I don't. The only difference is that instead of calling myself part of the bear community...I guess I'll just call the people that I like "my friends", no matter what they look like. That, to me, is what "post-bear" means - stepping out of one's self-made pigeonhole.

For my part, I would never castigate you for attending a bear event. Everyone should do what they can to have a good time. :)

[vianegativa.livejournal.com]

No, but I do think you get my point.

You act like the whole bear thing is an "either or" proposition. Why is that?

[baeritone.livejournal.com]

It DOES read that way, doesn't it? I think it's more that I'm just going to affiliate with everyone, and not let the bear label stop me. :)

I have a great deal of respect for you, Matt, and for many other self-identified bears. That stays the same, no matter HOW I term myself.

Part One

[bigbear4xl.livejournal.com]

My initial reaction to discovering the whole bear thing in late 1989 when I was 22 was that I had finally found the thing to which I felt I could associate and belong. For most of my life to that point, especially once I hit high school, I felt very much outside of everything. Even being gay I felt outside of "mainstream" gay "culture" because I hate dance and disco music, can't give a shit about clothes, and, in general, wasn't into all of the things I was repeatedly told (or shown) I "should" be into. But I quickly discovered that within even the burgeoning "bear culture" I was outside the accepted norm because of my weight and size and because my interpretation of what constitited a bear was, in general, bigger and heavier than what was accepted and promoted by the likes of Bear magazine. I vascillated between identifying myself with either the bear crowd or the chubby/chaser crowd but felt no particular resonance in full with either, because both had elements I did not and could not identify with, and both had elements that rather rudely excluded me (I was too fat for the bear crowd and I liked other fat/chubby guys, so I didn't fit in with the chub/chaser crowd in that respect).

I eventually learned that a porn magazine and the subsequent "culture" that arises up out of it is not the end-all, be-all of existence. Look at it this way: all those magazines are gone, and yet the culture they helped to create is still kicking. Yes, it was nice that somone had started producing something that I could, even remotely, identify with, but one must make one's own place in the world. I did, and still do, identify with the bear thing in some ways, but not in others.

I think a lot of disillusioned people are hopping onto the "post-bear" bandwagon as some kind of protest, and some are being rather pretentious about it. It's always seemed to me that the people who make the loudest noise about something (like declarations of their "post-bearhoodness") aren't really serious, they just want to get noticed. As if they are hoping a crowd of people will gather to try to lure them back to the Eden-like loveliness of bearishness.

I mean, if you are truly serious, you just do it and get on with it, right? I hate to use such a flamingly gay reference, but if Madonna had a press conference every time she changed her look or direction, we'd have all wanted her dead by 1985.

Did I become disillusioned with the bear scene? Sure. But I, like it, have grown and changed and I learned at some point that you have to make your own "scene" and be your own person, and snorting derision at others for not following your lead into your personal next phase of evolution is a sure-fire, one-way ticket to Miserableville because everyone is their own person, and what works for you may not work, entirely, for the next guy, and vice-versa.

Part Two

[bigbear4xl.livejournal.com]

I learned to take the aspects of all the different scenes or cultures that I in any way connected and merge them into something that belonged just to me. Eventually, I started running into other people who shared some, if not most, of my interests. Instead of trying to become something I really wasn't, and fit in where I didn't really "belong", I found it worked much better to forge my own thing and see who, if anyone, showed up as well. I discovered there wasn't just one singular bear scene, but a multitude of smaller, often interconnected ones, often very local, and sometimes very specific. Bulk Male always fascinated me because it seemed to straddle that space where Bear magazine and the Girth & Mirth crowd overlapped. So that's where I found myself after a while, and eventually I just picked and chose among my myriad interests and went my own way.

I knew that "bear culture" had jumped the shark, so to speak, when the mainstream gay porn mags began featuring "bears" in their pages who were same musclebound, pretty boy Adonis types, though they had stopped shaving their chests and grown a few days' worth of stubble.

Stephen Colbert makes winking nods to it on his show, and, of course, John Waters slathered references into A Dirty Shame. Johnny Knoxville had bit on Jackass about his "secret weapon" in a contest on the show to see who could fill up a sperm donation cup the fastest, and that "secret weapon" was a copy of American Grizzly, which he flashed on camera.

As a scene or sub-culture gets filtered into the mainstream, it becomes diluted, and there is always inevitable backlash. I've never liked pretentious, preachy people, and some of these "I'm so over this" post-bear guys are really annoying in their desperate need for validation. We all want validation, we all need it in some way or another, but you have to validate yourself first, and be willing to own up to your own bullshit.

[Sorry this was so long I had to split it up]

[sftekbear.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this post. It made me reflect on my thoughts of the bear community and the post-bear movement and I posted something in my journal about it.