Greetings from Palm Springs: and What Happened to Bear Pride?

Starting this new blog, because Tumblr's dead, and all the alternatives were tremendously disappointing. I don't expect heavy traffic or even much notice at all. I've never gotten it before. This is mostly just for me and if others feel like reading, all the better.

So, to start the show.....

Palm Springs Pride! I marched in the best leather gear I've ever worn in my life, and got a lot of notice.

Now it's pretty well told already that I and the leather world have never been able to collide. I am not in San Francisco any longer where I definitely faced the very worst ubiquitous rejection of that entire community, but I never remember any success in either Tucson or Atlanta either. So now that I'm living in Palm Springs, I don't know if it's my refusal to quit or just plain stubbornness, but I'm hoping the attitude here is at least a little better.

There is a little encouragement. When I showed up in the laser-cut black and red top, I was just going to wear jean shorts underneath. Figured that was enough until one of the local daddies lent me that gladiator kilt. He was right. The two are made to be worn together.

Pretty sure I did something similar in San Francisco already but I'll have to look through my archives.

This isn't my first time at such a rodeo. Palm Springs is the fifth city where I've marched in Pride, always with the leather folks, who always make nice at the parade but then never, ever seem to invite me into the scene. Guess I'm hoping that'll be different here.

That's enough of that talk though, right?

I'm reminded of being in the very first Pride parade in Louisville, Kentucky, where at the time I'd made the huge mistake of starting the bear group, Kentuckiana Kodiaks. I and my ridiculously jealous partner at that time, made our own bear float. We'd gotten the guys together to make packets of gummy bears with our logo, and tiny little stuffed bears, because in Atlanta's Pride I'd always seen people toss things off of floats. A string of beads here, a stuffed animal thingie there.

These guys would come up to a crowd and toss tons of stuff to two or three people. I mean I was working with real class morons there. I do not miss that city. (Funny I now live here with a man who's from there but he's not one of the weirdos that helped tank that group).

Some of that gang, however, were wonderful. In the photos above, Mutt and Tim were great pals who helped me escape that jealousy trap I was in, and Jaime saw I was gonna wear leather (not GOOD leather but what I had) so he gave me that pair of shorts you see.

Now Louisville had a leather contingency, but none of them wanted to be seen on TV and outed in public. I mean seriously. Kodiaks were the bear group, not the leather group. But some of the men saw me dressed as I was and they wanted to march with us after all.

In that march a reporter walked beside me to ask a lot of questions. I found my answers written in a big article on the first Pride in Louisville. And what gets me is how just that act can get you noticed so powerfully yet the leather world....... okay I said I wasn't going to keep up with that talk, but come on. How can I be so damned unnoticed by the entire leather community in several cities? I don't get it.

It seems to me that we started the bear thing because we wanted to enhance that the community is more than just skinny hairless twinks and muscle guys, the only gays anybody in the media ever seem to showcase. And now the bear world is overrun by "musclebear," a term I've truly come to loathe. It is entirely against the essence of the point, to let elite bears with big muscles make all the real bears, for whom the whole thing began, feel like they don't belong. We've gone from saying all bodies are beautiful to returning to shaming anybody who isn't that body.

How quickly we forget.

But the spirit remains. At the Toolshed they always have go-go dancers that are, of course, ideal body types. One went on break and a big, chubby boy dressed as a Green Man stood up on his pedestal to do some dancing. He made BANK. Even I, for the first time, put money in a G-string for his sexy beast of a butt.

Do we honestly need to do this again? Maybe make a new community that's based on something they won't steal? Muscle guys are always scared something won't be entirely about them, so they barge in and make it about them. I'm reminded of all the arguments about who is and isn't a bear, and how Bear411 was so mean about being exclusionary (and I'm not saying they weren't), but I think maybe we should have at least stopped people from stealing bear and making it so stretched out a term that it became meaningless, because now it's stolen. By the "musclebear." And nobody else can get any oxygen.

Maybe next we can be gay cows or some shit? I don't know.

Happy Pride.

PS: Searched archives. Back when my beard was still red, I wore it with a heavy leather kilt instead. Okay, yeah, I liked the gladiator one better.