Bear World

RICHARD JONES CELEBRATES 10 YEARS OF BEAR WORLD

The LGBTQIA+ community is diverse, with a number of sub cultures within the acronym. One of those, if not the biggest, is the bear community. A growing queer demographic within the gay community, however, their aspirations, issues, and identity often escape the attention of the mainstream LGBTQ community. The concentration, it seems, from main stream and social media is the transgender community, which is grabbing all the headlines, and yet it is possibly the smallest group.

This year, the international Bear World Magazine celebrates 10 years and carried an interview with the magazine’s founder Richard Jones. Bear World magazine is the world’s leading online lifestyle resource for bears, cubs, and their admirers.

British by birth and now a New Yorker, Jones heads up a growing multinational media company with publications devoted to LGBTQ niche markets, he had dabbled in publishing gay magazines while living in the UK before pitching an idea to transform a dating website for bears into a digital magazine. Enter Bear World Magazine circa 2012. Ten years later it is thriving and delightful. Here are extracts from the fascinating interview:

Richard Jones: I started it in Northern Ireland, but it was very much focused on the American market because the American bear community, obviously, is bigger.

I’ve been very lucky that the bear community took me as a complete rookie and I’ve learned along the way.

There’s a lot of pressure on gay men to to look a certain way, to be affluent, to be style mavens, to be Sex and the City gays…

Richard Jones: Well, I think that the reason the bear community is bigger is because it’s all the regular people who live across the whole of the country. They’re not just in the big cities living the kind of the iconic gay life of partying, clubbing and all of that. It is people who work at a bank. It is truckers, people doing regular blue collar jobs. That’s kind of where the bear aesthetic comes from: real men with gay dad bods.

To celebrate a decade of Bear World Mag, will there be national and local events, anything readers can put in their calendars?

Richard Jones: Yes. We are launching three things ourselves: a podcast hosted by Larry Flick, which will look at the history of the bear community, how we got to this point; Larry lived and breathed the kind of the early bear community in the late ’70s, early ’80s. So he has that memory that goes back to the beginning. We’re launching a mini-series of shorts, which will be about bear change-makers in New York. We’re going to talk to people about what they do in the bear community, how they have made changes, how they’ve done something for the community or entertained the community, kept the community alive.

So, is bear a serious orientation or is it a lifestyle choice — and what is the difference?

Richard Jones: It’s a good question, and I think the real answer is both because it is something people find attractive and it draws them to it. In the early days of Bear World Magazine, people saw it as a fetish. And we don’t display any more nudity than Men’s Health do. We show a bare bum every now and then but in terms of our core photography we don’t show anyone naked. We’ve always been lifestyle oriented. Lumberjacky. Friendly. We’re not a fetish group. We’re just a bunch of regular people who happen to be a niche within the queer community. The bear identity was coined back in the 1970s in an article in The Advocate as men who were bigger, bearded, maybe wearing leather — but being friendly. The beauty of the bear community is that even if you are not a bear but you want to hang out with us — we welcome you in. We’re not exclusionary.

The magazine has grown with my understanding of the of the bear community because back in the day I wasn’t aware that there were trans bears, female bears. It wasn’t in my frame of reference then. But in the 10 years since, we put a mama bear, ‘Queen of the Bears’ Nikki Wireman, on the front cover, we put a trans bear, Verity Smith, on the front cover. And I’m just super proud of that journey. Richard Jones: I think the world has changed dramatically in the last 10, 20 years as to what those demographics are. You know, we’re not just men and women anymore. We are hundreds of different variants. The Internet has helped us find our tribes, and the people that we feel comfortable being with —be that just as friends or partners or just wanting to belong to a group. That’s very human: the desire to want to belong somewhere.

I like that you pitch Bear World Mag also to friends and admirers of bears. The content mix is interesting and appealing: Style, food, travel, art, drag, grooming, cars…it’s a whole lifestyle range.

Richard Jones: I didn’t come from a journalistic background. I think I came with just an idea of what it is to be a bear — or a human being. Even if we’re a member of any kind of club that has a defined reason, you still eat food, you still travel, you still go shopping, you might have DIY on your home or buy a car… All those things we all do, it’s about kind of putting a bear spin on them.

For example, when we test drive cars we promote the trucks and the bigger cars because we’re big guys, typically a bigger framed man. So, there’s that that kind of old fashioned masculinity idea that’s poured into it. But it’s very fluid. Because a bear might like Drag Race. It’s not as defined as it has been in the past. It’s much more broad now.

HERE IN SOUTH AFRICA BEARFEST SA is Back!

BEARFEST SA is back with fun, and fur, in the sun. Join us for an amazing three days to make new friends, light new fires, or rekindle old friendships. Three days to let go and feed the bear within.

The purpose of BEARFEST is simple, to create a lasting memory of an event each summer, that you will remember for many years to come with a party that welcomes bears and bear-lovers from all over the world to participate in fun activities and a great weekend of making new friends.