A bit late coming off the pen, but here it is…
To the Advocate:
Dear Editors,
The trendy metrosexual mag Details pictorial feature, “Gay or _______?” has been an excellently done send-up of the confusion often faced 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?
Sadly, “Bear or straight?”, the Advocate’s 8/17/04 send-up of the Details series, was a cheap shot, stupidly conceived and executed, and offensive to self-identified bears.
In this unusual attempt at satire – presumably the Advocate is a news magazine – a “typical” bear is dressed up like a clown, a tasteless pre-queer-eye straight guy, then dissed up and down. The piece is so clueless and falls so short from the mark that it points to, I believe, in the minds of the writer and the magazine editors, some deeper prejudice against bodies or cultural types of gay and bi men other than the ones they have encountered and appreciate.
“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.” Maybe the bears they imagine or who haplessly wander into WeHo bars might wear such goggles, but the bears I know – and that would be many hundreds all over the nation – don't look or act much like this supposedly satirical image of a bear.
Nor are Bears particularly inclined to “drink cheap beer” – they drink everything from dirty martinis to whiskey and chardonnay. And plenty are sober nondrinkers. Better still, the writer had the brilliant idea to derogate MGD, a product of Miller Beer, one of the Advocate's major advertisers. Perhaps the cleverest part of the piece: they printed an apology about the “cheap beer,” but none for the cheap shot at bears. Seems the Advocate staff can remove their head from their ass only long enough to pull their foot from their mouth.
Bears proudly challenge the stereotype of gay men as being thin young fashion-obsessed prissy queens. The Advocate and other gay men's media should celebrate their presence in the GLBTQ community, as they are, and for the diversity-within-diversity they represent. The editorial space would have better served all with a profile of bear clubs which proliferate the globe, some of which in the USA are now more than a decade old, for example. Otherwise, they should skip the lame stereotyping attempts at humor singling out other queer subsubcultures which they neither understand nor appreciate. They are likely to end up losing advertisers – and readers.
Many thanks,
Ron Jackson Suresha
Author, Bears on Bears
