Bears on Bears — Contributors
Part One
Eric Rofes is an impassioned longtime activist and author of several landmark books, including Socrates, Plato, and Guys Like Me: Confessions of a Gay Schoolteacher and Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men’s Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic. His most recent book is Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures, which The Nation
called “perhaps the most important book about gay communities and
cultures of the past decade.” He also contributed a seminal essay,
“Thoughts on Middle-Class Eroticization of Workingmen’s Bodies,” to The Bear Book. Although Eric has called San Francisco his home for the past decade, he
travels widely. In August 1999, Eric began teaching as a professor of
education at Humboldt State University in the Redwoods, three hundred
miles north of San Francisco. Photo: Steven Underhil
Wayne Hoffman is a writer living in Greenwich Village. He is co-editor of the award-winning anthology Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism. In 1997, he was chosen as one of the country’s “Best and Brightest under 30” by the Advocate. As an essayist, his work has appeared in several collections, including Men Seeking Men, Boy Meets Boy, Generation Q, Mama’s Boy, and Bar Stories. As a journalist, his cultural reporting has appeared in the Advocate, Torso, and dozens of regional newspapers, as well as the Washington Post, The Nation, and the Boston Phoenix. He was the managing editor of the New York Blade and is now Deputy Editor at Billboard. Photo: Mark Sullivan
Christopher Wittke writes about hairy-chested, bearded and/or burly celebrities of stage and screen, television, music, sports, and literature for Bear Magazine. He was the first paid Features Writer, and later the Features Editor of Gay Community News, at the time the nation’s oldest gay and lesbian newsweekly. His feature writing has also appeared in Art Issues, Drummer, In Touch, and other publications, as well as in the anthologies Hometowns, A Member of the Family, Flesh and the Word 2, My Life as a Pornographer, and Quickies 2. Currently he works as HIV Prevention Manager for an AIDS service organization. Photo: Duke Studios
Rex Wockner has
reported news for the gay press since 1985. His work has appeared in more than 250 gay publications. He has a B.A. in journalism from Drake University, started his career as a radio reporter, and has written
extensively for the mainstream press as well. Highlights of his gay news career include going to Denmark the day it first allowed gay marriage, reporting from the first gay-pride events in Moscow and then-Leningrad, and making early connections with emerging gay
movements in the former Eastern Bloc and developing nations. He has also written on Bear-bars. Currently he writes the online column “The Wockner Wire” for PlanetOut.com and reports news for a string of eighty-five gay newspapers, magazines, and Websites in eighteen countries. Wockner lives in San Diego with his partner, Jess. Photo: Bob Gordon
David Bergman is author or editor of a dozen books, including Cracking the Code, which won the George Elliston Poetry Prize, Heroic Measures, and Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representations in American Literature. His work has also appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review, The Kenyon Review, Men’s Style, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. He edited the biennial series Men on Men: Best New Gay Fiction until its year 2000 edition (which won a Lambda Literary award), and with Joan Larkin he edits the book series Out Lives: Lesbian and Gay Autobiographies. He teaches at Towson University in Baltimore. Photo: Jenifer Bishop
Michael Bronski is author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom and Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility, and editor of Taking Liberties: Gay Men’s Essays on Sex, Politics, and Culture and Flashpoint: Gay Male Sexual Writing. His writing has appeared in many publications, including The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Z Magazine, Out, and Gay Community News, as well as in the anthologies Gay Spirit, Friends and Lovers, Home Towns: Gay Men Write about Where They Belong, Acting on AIDS, and volumes 2, 3, and 4 of the Flesh and the Word series. He has been involved in the Gay Liberation Movement for thirty years. Photo: Joshua Oppenheimer
Al Cotton is an Alabama native who moved to Atlanta in 1983. He holds a BA in English and history from Huntington College in Montgomery, Alabama, and a Masters in English from Vanderbilt University. He has helped to start four gay community publications in Atlanta: he was founding editor of Visionary: The Newsletter of Gay Spirit Visions and founding co-editor of the Amethyst literary journal. He has written a general interest column and a book review column for Southern Voice. His work has also appeared in White Crane Journal and the Gay & Lesbian Review. He was a member of the Gay Spirit Visions planning committee for eight years, and is currently Atlanta’s Body Electric coordinator. He has been a practitioner of Shambhala Training meditation since 1995. Photo: Cindy Sproul
When Alex Damman became an ovolactovegetarian at age eleven, he just knew that his life was destined to be a series of conflicts with the dominant culture. This has involved living in Kansas, Missouri, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Illinois; helping to found the intentional community Acorn in Cuckoo, Va.; getting degrees in math, computer science, and landscape design; being fascinated by plants and
permaculture; making a living by working for telecommunications and utility companies; buying a farm as a place for a custom home and long-range plant projects; and riding his BMW motorcycle. For the last ten years he has attended Faerie gatherings with the circles at Short Mountain Sanctuary, Tennessee, the New York circle, Faerie Camp Destiny, Vermont, and Circle Star, California, not to mention Rainbow Family Tribe national gatherings and others. He currently works as a computer consultant in Peoria, Illinois, and is extremely available. Photo: Billy Toth
Rev. Jim Mitulski has been pastor of Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) of San Francisco since 1986. In January, 1998, the congregation voted to make him Senior Pastor. Before MCC/SF, he was associate pastor of the MCC in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Rev. Mitulski has been an activist for gay and lesbian civil rights and for the right to marry. He attracted national attention in August, 1996, while distributing medical
marijuana at MCC/SF to people with AIDS and other illnesses. Jim has also been interviewed extensively about his remarkable success with the new protease inhibitor treatments for AIDS. He has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, a master of divinity degree from Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, and was a Merrill Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is currently a doctoral student at San Francisco Theological Seminary. Photo: courtesy of J. Mitulski
