I just love donging a good deed. Here's an April piece I never posted.
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NY Blade: DeepBear Dating
Bears venture out of their caves
New dating options, an art exhibit — burly guys (and those who love them) are not hibernating anymore
By JAMES WITHERS
NY Blade, Friday, April 22, 2005
The tulips are in full bloom and the days are getting longer and longer. Old Man Winter has been banished (why is he always the last one to leave?), which means all you city bears, otters, cubs, wolverines need to wake up and venture from your caves because hibernation is over.
What better way for bears, and those who love them, to bring in the seasons of spring and summer than a little “Deeper Dating” at the Center? This Saturday, April 23, at the Center on 13th Street, there will be “Deeper Dating” seminar specifically for bears and their groupies. The evening will be run Hernan Poza and Ken Page, the founder of the “Deeper Dating” movement.
“This a dating forum where people can meet in a kind of spirit. That is friendly and very accepting of all different shapes and sizes of people,” said Poza. “I think of it as salon that is very guided. It is set up in a way that makes it as safe as possible.”
Dating, even for “Sex in the City” Carries and Samanthas, is a complicated business in the city we love to hate. Page noticed that if gay men were looking for more than booty (not that there is anything wrong with that), there were not many options outside of Internet chat rooms and clubs.
Page decided it was time to do something about that for guys who want to know more about a guy before getting down to business — like, say, his first name.
So Page reserved a room in the Center in January of 2004 and had his first deeper dating session. The room, prepared for 50 people, overflowed with over 100 and the seminar had to move to the auditorium.
Participants were put in small groups and people had an opportunity to discuss how their spirituality manifested itself in their dating lives.
“Afterwards interested parties could give the potential objects of their affection their phone numbers,” as the Blade described the night in an article at the time. “There was no need to call the number unless there was sincere interest. The only ‘rule’ of the evening was the acceptable response in getting the number would be a simple ‘Thank you.’”
“Everybody has inside themselves a gravitational pull toward love and growth and connection,” Page said at the time. “Spirituality is listening to that pull and letting yourself be guided by it.”
It is this type of atmosphere Page and Poza want to create this Saturday, a place where people can find like-minded individuals.
“People are realizing it is an idea whose time has come,” Page said referring to Deeper Dating. “If they are going to have relationship happiness they have to have someone who shares the same values, and this does the whole screening for you. It is an environment where people will grow and learn in deeper ways”
Hernan Poza runs Deeper Dating and is offering a special event for big, hairy men.
From the looks of it “Deeper Dating” is catching on.
“Atlanta and Boston are starting ‘Deeper Dating’ programs,” Page said. “We are hoping to start a Hispanic one as well, and we want to offer this as program to our queer seniors. It is spreading really rapidly. So many people at these events say ‘I wish had this when I as younger.’”
As far as they both know, this is the first Deeper Dating evening for bears, a term that has transformed and transmuted over the years.
There isn’t a clear definition of what a bear is,” said Poza. “The categories sort of blend into each other.”
Some writers even think that the gay community is about to witness a bear renaissance where bears will be as ubiquitous as the thin new models that seem to come from the Midwest every new fashion season.
“Chunky Jay McCarroll winning the grand prize in the ‘Project Runway’ TV reality series, cult Bear ‘Babydaddy’ from Scissor Sisters topping the charts, and Bears being on top of the Face magazine’s style barometer — all indicate that things may be changing,” wrote Aki Choklat on the Website bearhistory.com/ezine.
Choklat also sites a British style magazine story on a plus-size male model. “In a recent fashion show, I was trying to explain to a 25-year-old straight female fashion journalist what a bear was,” he writes. “To my great surprise and delight, she had heard of bears and even XXL,” a London bear club.
While that may be true, it’s not speaking out of turn to say that Falcon is not about to make a video featuring bears anytime soon (although the porn company really needs to get rid of its music department). Next month, Bear Cafe, an organization that sponsors bear get-togethers between September to June, will have a showing at the Center of the photographs of Paul Roberts.
Roberts admits that it was not the Madison Avenue ideal man, thin and hairless, who attracted him when he was growing up in the Midwest.
“I was drawn to the middle-aged hirsute, masculine, rugged, and occasionally ‘solidly’-built — ‘bear’ — men even as a child,” Roberts writes on his Web site. “As my aesthetics developed, both sexually and artistically, I began to see something provocative an sexy in almost every man I would pass by.”
Page thinks bears have done much for the overall gay community by pointing out that there is a multiplicity of body types.
“The bear community has taught the gay community you do not have to look the stereotypical way to be hot or to get dates,” Page said. “Across the whole range that people look like there is no monopoly on finding lasting happiness.”
It is this wider spectrum of body types, men with junk in their trunk so to speak, who Poza hopes comes out on Saturday. He also wants bears to know that what may have happened in previous dating events will not happen here.
“People told me they were uncomfortable coming to the dating event because of their experiences at other different dating workshops,” said Poza. “They are afraid of being rejected or feeling different.”
Feeling different is not going to happen on Saturday and if that can’t get you out then what about doing a good deed for gay and lesbian kids? Ten percent of the Deeper Dating profits will be donated to Pride for Youth, an arm of the Long Island Crisis Center that advocate for gay youth.
OK, then if meeting people with similar values or dong a good deed will not move you, then maybe some bear dancing will. After the Deeper Dating session there will be Fur Ball 2, a time when bears can shake it like they just don’t care.
“Hopefully, the event [Deeper Dating] will move into Fur Ball where we all can dance,” Poza said. “The last bear dance was the most successful dance they ever had” at the Center, with about 560 people.
“It was packed and was a festive crowd and most of them haven’t been to a bear dance,” Poza said. “Bears have a really good time when they are dancing.”
