Caged Bear Part One: A Phenomenology of Bearspace Sexual Identity Fraud

Social Construction of Sexuality
Professor Vardalos
Thursday, April 20 2006
This work Copyright (C) 2006 Richard Birch

Note for reading: Prologue: This essay is dual-textual. The reader will see two seperate texts evolving side-by-side simultaneously. The main text which is posted here in normal black and normal font size is a sociological phenomenology of the research data utilized for this project. The secondary text which was originaly an ongoing footnote evolving along the bottom of each page in the essay is posted here in italic font. This secondary text, which can be read seperately has been posted here, starting and ending at exactly the same points along the main text as it was in the original paper. Thus, the italic sections was printed at the bottom of each page and the main text above each italic section was the pre-occuring main text on the same page when this essay was first submitted for academic review. The main text (normal font / black) is a phenomenological account of my research data. The italic text ongoing notation, is textually deconstructing my initial phenomenology. The reader is free to interpret which of the two textual entities constitute the real essay. This style of deconstruction is based on the Derridian format developed by French post-structuralist thinker Jacques Derrida. I have adapted, or in some way, cluster-fucked this format with Ann Game's method of undoing the social. One thing to note for the reader: there are some very strong emotions being expressed in this section which are at times fictive and very critical. However, the expressions of emotions termed as such are to show the feelings one has at times when there is relentless longing, loss of kinship, and incohesiveness in community. I am critical of the gay community and of bearspace, very defnitely, and already there are those who are yet to understand the nature of my criticism. It is not out of hate, or fear, or resentment that I criticize. I criticize I also care about these communities. One can be critical in regards to identity politics, but still have the capacity for hope and for the opinion that change can occur. In essence, in my criticisms, in my personal feelings about these communities I struggle with, I am yet to see the positiveness in it. I am desperately hoping that someone can prove me wrong.

During the first couple of years as an out gay man, my impression of the Gay Bear construct was extremely narrow and linear. However in a short amount of time what became apparent was that the Bear identity construct, what I from time to time I will call the Bear Cage and Bearspace, is as diverse as gay male culture in its entirety. Gay male culture is structured in very systemic patterns of social order. It is also arranged and constructed in a vertical hierarchy based on labels that resonate on mainstream systems of social oppression. Twinks and musclemen are very much situated at the top of such a pyramid of power, and it can be labelled as powerful because these are the typical identity constructs that adhere to technocapitalist commercial ideologies. Early on in my quest to learn a sexual identity as a gay male, it was apparent that certain characteristics which I possess, physical attributes in combination with other aesthetic properties led to a specific type of description I was ascribed to. Overweight, roundish, barrel-chested, goatee, piercings and hair type were systemically and collectively physical codes for my presenting the Bear identity. These specific qualities, though not unknown to me, were certainly independent of my social influence. These also were the basis for any sexual

There really is no denying the fact that the gay male culture makes me completely ill. I really have no problem disclosing that there are many parts of the gay male culture that I sometimes feel like I fucking hate. This feeling is, generated from a real fear of identity malfunction; a malfunction of my sexual identity that resonates sharply to the abuse I was subjected to as a child, as a teenager, and as a socially developmental adolescent trying to make some sense of insane homosexual and homophobic feelings in my own personal subjective white upper class restrictive upbringing. It’s amusing that I actually think that there is some real order to a sexual subculture as the Bear construct, if that can even be said with a straight face. It is questionable there is any real sense to it, anything real that can be measured, or discussed with academic vigour. Yes, it is comprised of gay men, hyper-sexualized men, hairy men who are into other hairy men, fat chubby men who are into other fat chubby men, skinny guys into fat chubby men, chasers, pigs, and all of the types that in many ways shout “Yes, I am another fag stereotype to be the subject of satire in Fab Magazine”. What also is amusing is the status awarded to me in this subculture. Here in the Bear cage I have been told I am sought after, whether it be at fetish events, leather parties, gay bars and sexual establishments which cater to the caged-crowd in both fetishistic and bearish ways. In other words, at Fly, I am the heavy-set queer with his twinkie friends by the bar nobody talks with. At O’Grady’s I’m the musclebear who hot scary looking biker guys buy drinks for in the hopes of being a contestant in my “Would You Like To Enter My Ass Contest!”

identificatory labels of which I soon earned in the culture. The label of Bear was and is still problematic for me. The word provides an emotional landscape that is daunting on two levels.
The first level is simplistic, laden with derogatory subjective meaning, an enabler of feelings reminiscent of schoolyard names such as fat, pig, ugly, fat-ass, fat-head, fag, faggot, queer, and all other descriptive terms associated with the eradication of the social connectivity. These are terms, extremely hurtful terms, little pieces of language that creates the most powerful feeling of remorse and fear. Remorse for my younger self who never had the opportunity to become the gay man who should have been decades ago. Fear for the younger self who was subject to gay bashing, violence, verbal abuse, and the loss of love. For a gay man, sex is not everything as indicated in the popular filmic texts as seen on HBO and Showcase. Polygamous sexual activity for me is merely the underbelly of the recognition of the fact that finding love and connectivity is and will most likely always be one of the most impossible endeavours I will be able to complete as a gay man in techno-capitalist culture.

The sexual messages and meanings in the gay bear social, not unlike other gay male constructs is certainly not a latent phenomena. It is powerful to be made to feel sexual among men who exhibit powerful sexual prowess in extreme measures. It is an exhilarating feeling, and a feeling I have had myself when experiencing the gaze of men in such a subgroup as the Bear cage. It is also a deeply moving feeling for me to all of a sudden realize that there seems to be a community of gay men, like myself, over 30, of varying body types not associated with mainstream glamour and “hotness”, and that I have been socially adopted into such a forum. I also feel uneasy throughout my experiences in the Bear cage, for as like all caged existences imply a meaning of imprisonment and the inability to express ones humanity, I am expressionless in the Bear mise-en-scene, for there really is no such Bear-defined means of expression I am both used to and comfortable with. I recognize the bars like O’Grady’s, Alibi, and Black Eagle, sexualized drinking establishments what cater to this subculture as predominantly cages of the imprisoned and the oppressed. These types of environments are not free standing in the abstract sense. They are also not giving of freedom to the men who harness themselves to them. They are merely concentrations of meanings, of language, and of personal indications of sexual oppression. From the loneliness that resonates among the men I meet, I drink with, and yes have encounters with, there is also a shared sadness amidst the polygamous sexual activity. It is a sharing of the feeling that even among the sexual conversations, the masculine flirtations, the direct propositions for sexual encounters, there is no real connectivity. The Bear Cage is a stage, only ever performative, and the scripts to which we adhere to are ultimately constructed.

The second level is far more latent in personal expression and experiential definition, yet far more complex in self-constructive terminology. The label Bear connotes something more expressive than I would have traditionally wanted to have as an indicator of my own personal identity. The label Bear is a word that I never felt would be a subjective account of who I am as a gay male, or more importantly, as who I wish to be or become in gay male culture. The label Bear is a name that initially provided feelings allied with self-destruction, physical decay, social rejection, and the loss of youth and beauty. The label Bear was a lonely word that held no ground or basis for finding connectivity whether emotionally or sexually with prospective partners or dates akin to my rational sense of desirability. The label Bear for me was not to be the grown up version of the young boy from heteronormative Barrie, Ontario who was subjected to the terms fat, pig, ugly, fat-ass, fat-head, fag, faggot, and queer. The label Bear was also the hardcore leatherbear who was overweight, hairy, unkept, ungroomed, strapped in black leather harnesses, black cap and black boots; highly sexualized in objective symbolic codification. All of these ideas and objects provided feelings of uneasiness and a loss of impropriety. To be labelled a Bear also resonates with the idea of a caged bear.

To be labelled a Bear is one thing. However, to actually self-recognize, and in some ways, self-diagnose is another. In truth, I haven’t decided if the term fits with me. I haven’t decided if I feel ready to call myself a Bear. The word doesn’t seem to be able to break through the cliché meanings and emotions I have in association with other bearish men I have met and have known. Yes, the Bear Cage as a construct as diverse as I have stated in the above text. However this statement and description should not necessarily be read as appropriative or positive. I feel critical of the subculture, as critical of it as I am of gay male culture in general. In some ways, I do feel I have hid behind the terms fat, pig, ugly, fat-ass, fat-head, fag, faggot, and queer, because maybe it’s safe there. Could it be possible to find refuge in such derogatory meanings? Is that why I am so resistant to identity (self-diagnose as if it were pathological) as a happy prisoner of the Bear Cage? And why would I be happy about it? Do I feel happy about it? There are some aspects of Bearspace that provides happy-like emotions. The sexual attention, the play, the ability to find a myriad of men into kink, the ability to locate submissives in an alternative sexual environment who can appeal to my somewhat cruel and dominant darker side. Bearspace is hardcore, it is violent in some regards and in the emotional sense. It is subjectively violent as oppression is violent. Heterosexism is violent in the social. I have the clearest senses and knowledge of that reality in comparison to many who are gay, who do self-diagnose/identify with being a member of a sexual subculture, and with men like me who have sometimes no fucking clue who they are. The only sure thing I know I feel in Bearspace, is that of an object.

The identity forcibly placed into my existence is both liberating in some regard, but also makes me feel very disturbed, confused, and scared of my own power. It is here where I have seen a side to myself that is indicative of the type of gay male I think in some way I am running away from away from in other gay subcultural groups. It’s disturbing because I am starting to see the same social-narcissistic character traits I criticize in other gay men in myself in the Bear Cage. It is not surprising to me that I am critical of the Bear subculture, as I am by virtue extremely critical of gay male culture in general. I do not feel it is self-appropriative, positive, enlightening, or in any abstract sense – crucial. As a gay man, I could definitely dream of doing without the gay male culture altogether. The Bear Cage environment, or Bearspace as it can be called from this point on, is easily diminishable. I, in reality do not feel adequately drawn to it as a community member. I am still gay, as a gay male, as a gay male searching for everything real and epistemologically truthful in this phenomenology, void of any real connectivity to the men who comprise it’s confines and definitions. In many ways I feel I am a fraud in Bearspace. I feel like an intruder, not with any true bearish identity, or real intention of being part of the subculture long-term. For the most part, when I socialize in these Bearspace clubs, it is not the bearish men I am attracted to. It is younger looking, smoother, cub-like chasers who resonate beauty for me.

I am objectified in Bearspace. I in these types of environments attract the gaze of men included in the bear construct such as the bears, chasers, and cubs. At fetish events bears constantly hit on me on. Yet I never knew for the longest time that the reason why I was targeted was because it was assumed I was one of the “cub-club” purely by my body type. Though at these events I never dress like a Bear or a leatherman. My taste in fetish fashion is much along the lines of Techno-Goth. Long black pleather coats, leather pants, high boots, black sunglasses, black eyeliner, grey eye shadow, and a very long stemmed cocktail glass in my hand embracing a very dry vodka martini with two olives penetrated by a very phallic plastic toothpick. I’ve been told that at these fetish events, for a somewhat non-twinkie man (which makes me feel good to learn that I am not a twinkie) that I am a very phallic-acting man, dark, tall, broodish, and energetic on the dance floor. Those are not my words, but another’s. This description, though detailed, is not akin to specific Bearspace language and meaning. Techno-Goth is not a Bearspace identity. It is very much however and identity that I personally encapsulate and at times endeavour to do so with style. Yet, I

In my mind, I have already made choices. I have constructed assumptions about gay men that generalize what gay men are to me as objects. I construct these generalizations because ultimately I fear gay men as much as I fear myself. I fear gay men because of the sometimes impossibility of finding love and recognition in any sort of community. I fear the seemingly impenetrable gay iconographic template of hyper-beauty and archetypical gay power in the gay social. I fear that which I seem to not be and that which I possibly deep down inside wish to exemplify, still in my critically charged knowing of my sexual oppression and status as a sexual minority in a Marcusean one-dimensional society. I fear myself because I am always so close to becoming someone I do not want to be, someone who is easily rejected in and outside of the subculture. This is why I have in recent months since writing my ethnography on the BDSM construct I have started to engage as an actual player in this D/s world. It seemed to me to be the next logical step in my research. (The reason why I feel the need to temporarily conflate masochistic sexuality and Bearspace sexuality will become apparent.) In the alt world where the D/s construct is played out, this fear is gone.

now find myself, at 35, at 220 pounds, at an age where more and more lines appear on my face, around my eyes, my forehead, my brow, that I for some reason personify a member of Bearspace. It is not always a comfortable feeling to have to deal with this. In bars like O’Grady’s, Alibi, and Black Eagle, I have an identity to which its realization is fraudulent. Is it any real question why for example I have adopted the dominant side of the BDSM construct? Why it is almost always me who is holding the crop? Pushing someone down over a bench when he wants it, in a private or public space? Just recently a man, around my age approximately, who I met at a specialized fetish party has propositioned me with a very intriguing offer. He is a submissive. A hardcore one. He is not what one would call a conventional sub (like the capacity for those two terms can be placed together in the same sentence like this is debatable). He also would be one I could easily label as a musclebear. Extremely handsome, very sure of what he wants, and very mature. These are qualities that I tend to recognize in Bearspace men. He also is very dominant looking and acting. Hyper-sexualized in both his vanilla-gay world as well as in his alternative sexual realm. Which is why I was extremely surprised to learn that he identifies as a Bottom both sexually and in the D/s construct. (The reason why I feel the need to temporarily conflate masochistic sexuality and Bearspace sexuality will become apparent, even though this individual does not personally identify with Bearspace. He does not link himself to any bear-like qualities or social constructs. ) He has approached me with the request of me being a trampling and stomping facilitator. In other words, he gets off on someone kicking him, particularly in the face. He receives a sexual charge from this seemingly violent form of physical abuse and humiliation. He craves to be humiliated in the extreme sense.

There is no fear in leatherspace for I sense what the community is about. It is about an attempt to subvert oppression. It is about an attempt to create dark beauty from inside a darkened society. There is beauty in humiliation. There is art in punitive expression. There is respect and rapture in mercilessness. Sex is truly only as revealing to the actors about their true places in the social, as that sex which can undo what stops them from revealing themselves to each other. It is through the D/s role-play that binds people to the collective connectivity that frees us all from the burden of individuality.
Bearspace is ultimately very one-dimensional. It lacks beauty. It lacks humility. It lacks expression other than what it borrows from other subcultures like leatherspace. In Bearspace respect is culturally created for we think we need it and rapture does not exist where true respect is null. There is no mercy in Bearspace as mercy is a currency not traded there. Sex only reveals what men in Bearspace want to see and believe to be true. Bearspace connectivity is all about being an individual and free in the identity which is “natural” or “normal” to the actors, however only that which is labelled normal is dependent on the “other”, the “abnormal” which neither exists or prevails otherwise.

His orgasm both physically and mentally derives from an ever permeating, overpowering, and dangerously gorgeous need to be someone’s doormat. He is beautiful when he is humiliated. He is artistic when he is being punished. He feels his humanity when one shows him no mercy. It is here he becomes someone at peace with his vanilla existence as a pawn of social injustice as a gay man. It is when he is engaged in being a doormat on which his Dom wipes his muddy boots on and stomps on his face, he is able to free his dominant nature and himself from the terror of sexual / social malaise. Maybe if Bearspace weren’t so caged like it would be more appealing to me. If Bearspace weren’t so caught up on believing that it is something original and new, then maybe it would be far more interesting for me and would inspire me to identify as a Bear. But I am not inspired by it. Thus, I feel no real need to believe the words I utter, or the words I type when signing up for an online profile when I create the words: bear, admirer, and musclebear. The fetishistic identity that makes me joyful, which relieves me though temporarily from my cultural oppression in techno-capitalism, is Techno-Goth. If one were to create a Bearspace label and identity that is immersed in the aesthetic and performativity, because in essence it is only in performance where we are our real selves, then maybe I would be comfortable and happy to socialize more freely in the Bearspace institution. Like leatherspace is a bdsm matrix, and to recognize one’s place in a social matrix structure, one has to perform a role. For example, I could be the first, the one and only, new and improved, brand new model, from a new line called: Glamourbear. Yes, I fucking love it! I could be a trend starter. The first face-trampling, doormat stomping, submissive kicking musclebear, complete with

It is paradoxical to me. Here I am suppose to be free to let my gut hang, my facial hair grow, my age to show, my wrinkles to curve and deepen, my looks to become rough and hard. Yet, it does not seem like a place where freedom is contingent on being “natural”, for what if I feel the need to be different than the rest of the men in Bearspace? No one has asked me what type of bear I would like to be identified. It is always arbitrary. It is always predefined like a club membership, or an election, or a high school popularity contest. It is the same Church and Wellesley Street gay male culture pyramidal structure of oppression. Even as a Bear I have to try to look pretty. Because even in Bearspace, the so-called universe of the free let-it-all-hang-out so we can be ourselves utopia, it’s just the same shit, different martini. As both a subjective and researcher it is very confusing to me. I know nothing of what being a Bear is supposed to do. I initially signed onto a Bear website, basically from the suggestion of a friend of mine who met the man of his dreams on it. Since coming out most of the men I have dated, slept with, or fell for were of a specific, pretty run-of-the mill crowd. Very young, sometimes too young for me, between the ages of 24 and 30 is too young for me as they make me feel way too old…and sometimes too young. I was getting nowhere in my love life as a gay male trying to negotiate through the Church Street (Toronto) / Collier Street (Barrie) culture.
So I signed on. Then boom! Then everything built itself up, and then crumbled.

Maybelline New York black eyeliner, mascara, Australian Gold indoor tan lotion with hemp bronzers, cellutox anti-wrinkle cream, my long black pleather coat I designed for fetish events, black leather bondage high top boots, with a maintenance package for bi-annual Botox injection service appointments. (Is it just me, or is the ghost of Hebert Marcuse channelling me during this automobile personification moment?) Yes, as Glamourbear, I could successfully subvert hegemonic heteronormativity! I could feel like the Bear I truly wish to be! I could be happy in my designer Mecca jeans from International Clothiers, the Italian one-stop fashion boutique where no Bear has shopped before! Yes, just because I am a Bear, doesn’t mean I can’t look pretty! It’s a culture, no better, no worse, no more or less energetic, no different in structure than

Gay male subcultures are strange phenomenon. They have the capacity for an incredible amount of socialization with an infinite amount of possible outcomes; sex, friendship, networking, commerce, crime, love, art, cruelty, oppression, resignation, role-playing, and violence to name just a few randomly chosen outcomes which occur in the Church and Wellesley district any day of the week. What I expected in my land of infinite expectations, was to find a playground. The Bear website that my friend enlightened me about, www.bear411.com, was certainly that. There certainly is an abundance of play to be had. At any time when I found myself logging onto this new environment, seemingly random and strange instant message boxes appear on my screen with messages like, “Hey Handsome. Are all of the cubs in Barrie like you?” or “When do I get to fuck you.” The dates were fun. The men were interesting for the most part. They were revealing themselves as the sexual commodities ascribed to them in society. Gay men socially commodity themselves and each other, for in gay culture sexual commodification is how we produce social networks and knowledge. It is that clear to me as a newly constructed insider our purpose as gay commodities is very real, and the pain that I feel from it is also very real. It’s not painful because I am aware of my sexual commodification, or because I sense how oppressive and dangerous it is for me. It is painful because for some reason, even with the social knowledge I possess and the ability to be aware of my destructive environments and relationships I develop, I not only accept it, I aid in its functionality.

any of the cultural phenomenon I have encountered and been effected by in my 35 years. Except for in this one, I fell in love. I really don’t know what I was expecting to find throughout my flirtations in Bearspace. However one thing I did learn was my sharp ability to get what I want out of these men. It seems I am a chronic flirt. A fucking good one too. Not just online, but in live Bearspace clubs. It is a new discovery for me because it is not the norm for me to “put myself out there” so to speak. I rarely in my life have considered myself to be a player, exceptionally attractive, or sought after. However, since deciding some time ago to officially place myself in the gay dating scene, men of both Bear and non-Bear status have told me I have the ability to turn heads. I have been told I have the capacity to break hearts. With some, I also have learned I have the ability to be cruel. The affectionate and passionate queer in me is

By destructive relationships, I do mean ones that are seemingly romantic on the surface, but sordid and dark on the inside. Once in Bearspace, once meeting the men who intrigue me, once engaging in social and sexual activity with them, once dating them and learning about who they are and how I relate thon them, I have realized I have little or no relation at all. Here, I find rejection as well. Here, I find a template of physical codes to which I resemble in very minute ways. In Bearspace, I feel as much the outsider as I do in other gay-male groups I have encountered since coming out. Here I am too thin. Here I am not muscular enough. Here I don’t wear the same types of biker-style leather chaps and garments normalized in Bearspace. Here I have been labelled not a bear, but more so a metrosexual in identity, another stereotype to which permits me little access to community and connectivity. In essence, I perform my oppressive nature in Bearspace. I am the one who commodifies himself in more typical homosexual and metrosexual methods through my self-representation of the man who wears designer jeans or leather pants to O’Gradys, who wears clothing he purchased on Queen Street West instead of Priape or Mark’s World Warehouse, who will from time to time apply eyeliner to accentuate his Techno-Goth sensibilities, and who will not change for any reason. Most importantly through all of this performativity, I therefore reify the oppression of the men surrounding me in Bearspace because I represent the society from where they came, the roles they left behind, and the men they never fit with.

disturbed by that side of me. However the sexually masochistic side to me is very aroused by that aspect of my nature. What makes this more significant for me, is that I also through this sort of phenomenon, have the ability to be damaged and destroyed, to be subject to cruelty, and even more importantly, the cruelty of complacency. I met a man. A beautiful man. A man who I initially expected in him to find a recreational sex partner. I didn’t expect to find the man of my dreams. What clinched it for me, was the rejection I soon felt from him after a few weeks. Not that I haven’t been rejected before, I certainly have, and I have felt deep pain because of it. However, this specific situation made me feel something profoundly real about my existence in Bearspace, something that makes it significantly fallible like other gay subcultural groups. I was made to feel like the commodity I am. That in all of this experimentation in a new and

I feel insecure about my masculinity in Bearspace. I have become feminized as a result of falling in love with a Bear. I have emasculated through connectivity and social interaction in Bearspace. I learned what it is to be a fatalistic femme in a world where all I thought existed are the male counterparts in the film-noir text. I have been feminized by my experiences, and made to feel that my feminine side is negative. That is also what makes me angry and critical about Bearspace. That femininity is socially derogatory here, and that to be one of the “other”, the one who is not so hairy, not so muscular, not so chubby, not so identifiable with a standard of bearness is as such, disposable. How dare they deem femininity to be subordinate? At bars like C’est La Vie, Woody’s, and Fly, I feel lonely, sordid and sad for the men around me. At O’Gradys, I feel played with, toyed with, like I have been someone’s amusing submissive exercise.
If I were to state that I hold out for hope for the Bear cage, it would be false hope. My critical opinions of what I have learned in this interactional experiment have produced more doubt in my mind of there ever being any real solidarity between gay men in postmodernity. Bearspace resembles all other forms of socially oppressive pyramidal structures of power and oppression. It fails to subvert all identifications to narrower patterns of any expressions of humanity and love. It is possible that

exciting sexual gay-centric subculture, I am still nothing more than an object expected to be fucked and to fuck for symbolic connectivity. I am an object who swam into an ocean of cowardly men who are afraid who they are, of why their gay identities, afraid of their Bear identities because it gives them a fall sense of power and self-love and appreciation not awarded or supplied in most Church Street environments. This man was incredible for he was the first and only individual ever to bring me closer to the masochistic sides I not only have denied, but was too afraid to experience. As a post-gay-bashed individual, Bearspace is both a safe and dangerous place for me to exist in. I find other men, beaten, shamed, devalued in the various sexual arenas around them, thus they perform precise engendered formulations of masculine desirabilities. I can recognize this for I am one who lives with the knowledge of what engendered performativity means, and more importantly what the cost is for performing a false engendered sexual orientation and social identity. Yet in Bearspace the sense of balance and solidarity is finite, relentlessly surreal, and emotionally derogatory. To have fallen in love with someone who resides in Bearspace was a crucial moment of realization for me, for it resulted in extreme naiveté, anger, sadness, and a realization that I am as gay, as a queer, as a fag, as a outsider in my own adopted subcultural groups am completely

there may be a key that can open the lock to this cage. It is possible this key may be found through more extensive qualitative research as to the nature of why Bearspace exists in the falsehood state it does, and why it merely maintains the same pyramidal structures of heteronormative, patriarchal, gender oppression other sexually charged institutions maintain. Or, could it be that, my own personal Dasein is now too damaged, too thwarted to realize any real hope or potential for this subculture? Could it be that my most recent realization of my own potentiality for social-narcissism overpowers any real understanding of what Bearspace is and what it could really be about? Maybe as a gay man, still newly finding his place in what I guess I could fairly now call Gayspace, am yet to have the skill to do. I find it difficult to get past my own aspirations and dreams of finding love, real love, real connectivity, the same powerful aspirations that make my social-narcissism and my being attracted to the same type of men, very destructive and real. For now, the cage is not for me. Nor is most of Church Street. I feel the most important thing I have learned in this research project at a personal level of subjectivity, is that I should possibly find it best to take a break from “vanilla” relationships, for a while.

alone. This is what I have to embrace and it makes me very uneasy. What also makes me feel uneasy is that, I brought this all on myself. I initially pursued him. I saw him online, and the very image of him I found arousing. After a few weeks of instant messaging and phone romps, our live in person meetings were to me extraordinary in ways, he will never know. He twisted my identity around until I was fucking purple. He in a matter of moments found both the emotional and physical buttons which brought the most acidic tears to my eyes. The ways he spoke to me and kissed me instantly made realize that in all the research I have done in queer and queered subculture, with all the assumed understanding I think I possess about the men I am part of, that I know absolutely fuck-all about these men. Because as soon as he entered my life and played me like the game I am, he ended it. As a gay male, a hypersexual one as well, I am not without my own experiences as a seducer, as a player, and a manipulator. Remember, I am also a social-narcissist. So in essence, I understand his behaviour as a social being. I understand that my feelings were real love, though as impossible as it seemed to be that real in a short amount of time, it is certainly a love I won’t soon forget, a love I tend to think and pretend not to be able to have the capacity for at the best of times. He told me in classic social-narcissist ways that it wasn’t me, it’s him, that he’s not ready to be in a relationship because a previous boyfriend fucked him over, and the same cliché bullshit we get from people who are scared to feel. I accepted and moved on. What else can a Bear do? Then I recently found out another aspect to his nature, and more importantly, the reason for my rejection. I am not his type physically. Apparently, I am too thin. Too thin. Too thin? Wow. I never knew the severity of my problem and the pathology I have to deal with everyday. I have a serious problem. I am a malnourished Bear. I am a Bear -waif. I HAVE BEAREXIA!!!!! Quick, someone pass me a burrito before it’s to late and I never get laid again! That was a whole new level of gay social-narcissism I had never encountered before. Lucky fucking me!