Bears in Mourning

When I think about it, it was terrible the way we behaved when Victor died. We behaved as if we were ashamed of him, or angry. It didn't show us at our best – we didn't cope at all well. We all knew Victor was 'ill', obviously, but none of us really took on board how bad things had got.

He was in the middle of our little group, our sect, but somehow he got lost all the same. I suppose each of us paid him some token attention – his conversation tended to go round in circles, particularly with the drink – and then left it to somebody else to do the real work: supporting him and talking him through the dark days. He was our brother Bear, but the fraternity didn't do well by him.

We Bears are a varied crowd. There's an organist, a social worker, a travel agent, an osteopath. That's not the full list, of course, that's off the top of my head. If it wasn't for membership of the Bear nation we would have nothing in common. Somehow we always thought that would be enough.

It's amazing that Victor was able to hold down his job for as long as he did, but then he'd done it for a long time. He was working with friends, people who would make allowances. In any case there was a structure set up, and within limits it ran itself. Every few months Victor, or rather the company that employed him, put out the first issue of a magazine devoted to some sure-fire subject – French cookery, classic cars, sixties pop. When I say the first issue, I mean of course Parts One and Two, Part Two coming free.

It doesn't take long, with a halfway decent picture researcher, to get enough stuff from reference books to fill a few magazine pages. Tasters for future issues take care of the rest. Part Three never arrives, and maybe people wonder why not. Maybe they think, shame nobody bought Parts One and Two – it was such a good idea. Pity it didn't catch on.

I used to wonder what would have happened if one of Victor's magazines had really taken off, had sold and sold off the news-stands. Would there have come a time when Part Three became inevitable? I don't think so. I think Victor's employers would have carried on repackaging their little stack of ideas for ever. With a little redesign, they could put out the same Parts One and Two every two years or so. Which they did.

Victor was prime Bear, Bear absolute. I know I haven't explained just what a Bear is, and it's not an easy thing to define. There have always been tubby men, but I can't think they ever formed a little self-conscious tribe before. Tubby isn't even the right word, but at least it's better than chubby. Chubby is hopeless, and chubby-chaser is a joke category.

To be a Bear you need, let's see, two essential characteristics, a beard and a bit of flesh to spare, preferably some body hair. But it's a more mysterious business than that. Some men will never be Bears however hairy they are, however much surplus weight they carry. They just look like hairy thin guys who've let themselves run to seed, thin men who could stand to lose a few pounds. A true Bear has a wholeness you can't miss – at least if you're looking for it.

It's a great thing to watch a Bear become aware of himself. All his life he's been made to feel like a lump, and then he meets a person, and then a whole group, that thinks he's heaven on legs. On tree-trunk legs. He's been struggling all his life against his body, and suddenly it's perfect. There have been quite a few lapsed health-club memberships in our little circle, I can tell you.

One of them was mine. I remember the first time I was hugged by a Bear, as a Bear. We were Bear to Bear. I remember how his hand squeezed my tummy – tummy's a childish word but the others are worse – and I realized I didn't need to hold it in. He wasn't looking for a washboard stomach, the sort you can see in the magazines. He was happy with a washtub stomach like mine. He liked me just the way I was.

And Aids, Aids. Where does Aids come into this?

All of us were involved in the epidemic in some way, socially, politically, rattling collection buckets at benefit shows if nothing else. And of course we were all terrified of getting sick. But that's not what I'm getting at.

Aids is like the weather. It doesn't cause everything, but the things it doesn't cause it causes the causes of. So, yes, you'd think there'd be a link between a group of men who like their lovers to have a bit of meat on their bones, who like men with curves, and a disease that makes people shrivel away into a straight line up and down.

But I don't really think so. The Bear idea would have happened with or without Aids. The English language had a hand in it, by putting the words bear and beard so close to each other in the dictionary. Perhaps it's a sexual style that works differently in other languages. Has anyone in history ever really enjoyed beards, let alone based a little erotic religion around them? I suppose Victorian wives were the people in history most exposed to facial hair, and they weren't in much of a position to shop around or compare notes.

The beard is a mystery worn on the face. There are beards of silk and beards of wire, each with its charge of static, and it isn't easy to tell them apart without a nuzzle, or at least a touch of the hand.

We in our group are great observers of the way a beard shows up different pigments from the rest of the head hair. Ginger tints are common; less often, we see magical combinations of darkness and blondness. Beards age unpredictably, sometimes greying before the head hair, sometimes retaining a strong shade when all colour has drained from the scalp. The first frost may appear evenly across the beard, or locally in the sideboards, or on the chin, or at the corners of the mouth.

We in our group are tolerant of tufty beards, wispy beards, beards with asymmetrical holes. There are beards that Nature more or less insists on, to cover up her botches. Only a few bearers of the beard, we feel, positively bring it into disrepute, usually by reason of fancy razorwork. The beard to us is more than a sexual trigger, not far short of a sexual organ. Some of us even defend jazzman beards, goatees, beards that look like a few eyebrows stuck together. As a group, we particularly admire a beard that rides high on the cheeks, or one that runs down the neck unshaven.

Bears don't discriminate against age. It's just the other way about. We often say that someone is too young for his beard – he'll have to grow into it.

A man with a pure-white beard can expect as many looks of appreciation, still tinged with lust, as someone twenty, thirty years younger. There are many couples in our group, though few of them even try to be monogamous, and some of them are made up of figures who we might describe as Bear and Cub, Daddy Bear and Baby Bear – but even they don't take their roles very seriously. Neither of them tries too hard to play the grown-up.