Partial transcript of Warbear's interview for "Sex City" on Saturday, Sept. 20th, on CIUT-FM in Toronto, Canada.
Download Part 2 audio here.
The section on Bears on Bears begins about 3:30 into Part 2.
I found the answer in a very nice book that was produced by a friend of mine – his name is Ron Suresha – a long time ago, he wrote and published this book called Bears on Bears. And in the last chapter of this book, there is an interview in which he tries to define new scenarios of bears, namely, the transbear identity. He organized it like a [round]table – a cross-interview and a dialogue with a lot of different people that were experiencing the transgender perspective on bears. He interviewed a FTM bartender of the Lone Star Saloon.
The Lone Star Saloon is perceived as the Bear Mecca. Actually it's quite boring to go there since everything is so structured and identified and nothing ever really happens, but it had a very important role during the '90s for the Bear socialization. If you were a Bear and you knew what was going on, and how all the thing developed, you had to go there to touch the Mecca.
The interesting thing that happened in that place is that they took an FTM [female-to-male transgender] to work at the bar as a bartender who identified himself as a bear. The interesting thing was that he did not have a cock. Not having a penis means that being a Bear is a gender mediation, it's a cultural construction that filters your relationship with other Bears.
So what happens when Bears understand that you are not biologically a Bear? That was the main question. And the main question defined Bearness as social mediation through the representation of masculinity that was not tied to the representation of a genital masculinity. So the gender issues start to be quite important in the Bear scenario and created a lot of conflict because most of the Bears identify themselves in a very traditional, genderphobic way, but at the same time there is a new wave of FTMs who are identifying more and more as Bears. Once you bring down identity barriers, everything can happen — it can even happen that you can identify as a gay man. I know a lot of FTMs who identify themselves as Bears, as gay men, and as bottoms.
So going back to our focus, the concept of Bear is expressed through this Bearness. You don’t have to show a big penis, and a big belly, and a big tempest of hair, and a big beard, to be a Bear. But it depends how you symbolically mediate your masculinity in terms of social relationships. Coming back, the point is the transbear phenomenon … has had a lot of development, even if they are invisible.
