Report Looks at Internalized Fatphobia in Bear Community
Nick McGlynn is a human geographer at England's at Brighton University. He is also a Bear, one of the many communities the LGBTQ community has made for themselves. "Bears have always had their own dedicated bars and club nights — being surrounded by other men who look like them is an empowering experience. In a world where fatness is so heavily stigmatised, it's vital," writes Pink News in an interview with McGlynn.
McGlynn recalls to Pink News how at a Bear event in 2015, he took his shirt off — something he says he had never done before in public. "I'd always been terrified of doing it. I took my top off in this space, and it was this incredible, liberating experience, and I still remember very powerfully the positive emotions I felt through that."
That emotional response led McGlynn to do his own research on the bear community, and "was surprised, and a little disappointed, when he started looking into the academic research on Bear spaces and discovered that most of it was 'negative and critical'. That didn't align with his own experiences of the Bear scene."
He published his research at the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender at Brighton University. Follow this link to read his report.
He describes his project this way: "I was surprised to encounter scholarship about Bears which described them as rejecting or excluding fat men (e.g. Brown, 2001; Whitesel, 2014). I found that there is very little research on Bears, and as a human geographer I noticed that few researchers had investigated Bears here in the UK, or the physical spaces that Bears create and socialise in (McGlynn, 2021). The Bearspace project was developed to address this gap."
He adds to Pink News: "I was reading a lot of this stuff and I thought, 'That's not how I feel in Bear spaces when I go to them.' I've always found them to be one of the very few places where I feel good about my body."
And what he learned reinforced his positive feelings about being a Bear. "Through his research, Nick found that fatter queer men are, in most cases, going to Bear nights not so they can feel safe, but so they can feel comfortable. In a world where anti-fat stigma is ingrained into the fabric of our society, that's vital."
He continues: "We talk so often, rightly, about the value of LGBTQ spaces as spaces that are 'safe.' I've moved quite far away from safety in my research because I'm not convinced that's what people are really looking for a lot of the time. I think people want to feel comfortable in a space and they want to feel accepted. They want to be able to let their guard down and feel at ease. I think that's what's important for everybody."
He concludes in his report: "Fat GBQ men often felt unattractive and undesirable in both everyday life and in mainstream LGBTQ spaces. However, they did get to experience feeling attractive in Bear spaces, which was felt to be a particularly positive feature of them."
He also discounts the long-held belief that the size-phobic attitudes are not the fault of muscle queens. "I want to be quite careful here," Nick adds. "I don't want to say that muscle guys are the problem. That's not the case and in fact, I have to say myself, I had that in the back of my mind going into the research, I was like, 'I bet it's the f**king muscle Bears.' But it's not."
Instead he sees it as a larger cultural problem that fatter queer men must face. "It's not necessarily the case that muscle guys are doing anything wrong, but just being in the presence of muscle guys and knowing how valorised muscle is and how stigmatised fatness is, that makes people uncomfortable."
He added that fatphobia existed within the Bear community as well. "One of the most fascinating findings from his study is that many fatter queer men reported feeling relieved if they weren't the fattest man at a Bear night. Nick says that, for him, it's one of the most significant findings of his research," adds Pink News.
"I think that suggests that fat stigma is carried with all of us, even myself," Nick adds. "I think it suggests that fatness is still stigmatised in Bear spaces and, in fact, maybe passing that fat stigma onto the fattest guy, that's part of how some guys feel comfortable. That fattest man makes them feel comfortable because he's the one that the stigma's attached to, and it's detaching from you because you're not the fattest."
McGlynn also learned of an intense focus on beards and facial hair, with some feeling shunned due to their inability to grow a full one. "That was something that wasn't on my radar when I was doing this project, but quite a few guys mentioned that it's not enough to have a beard or a bit of facial hair, there's the right kind of beard and that's what makes you a Bear," Nick explains.
"Quite a few guys actually pointed to me and said, 'You've got the right kind of beard because it's a full beard, it's sculpted, it's rounded.' A�few guys said, 'I can only grow these wispy beards,' or 'My beard is at a funny angle and I can never get it cut right,'" said Nick. "So that idea of having a particular kind of beard I found very interesting — it can make people feel more accepted in Bear spaces."