He said he felt like he’d finally found a home. “It’s not perfect body, gym-toned, and no facial hair,” said Mr. Charlesworth, who recently completed a Master’s of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design. Society deems as being a normal, stereotypical gay male. Charlesworth, 30, definitely doesn’t look like that ubiquitous image of the stereotypical gay man, but he’s not large or hairy, either. For him, identifying as a bear is more about taking pride in hisĪttraction to men with bodies that look as though they were formed by years of chopping trees, and not by years of running on treadmills and drinking protein smoothies.īut Mr. He said, for all their disdain for superficial gay culture, Bears can be obsessively body-focused, Charlesworth said his lack of heft made it hard to immediately identify with a group predominantly made up of large men. So he used photography as a way in.įour years ago, as part of an undergraduate project at Rochester Institute of Technology, he began photographing bears in the area around his school. “I use photography as a social crutch, engaging with each scene or individual before and after the shutter is clicked,” Mr. Charlesworth wrote in his graduate school thesis.Īlan Charlesworth Dick, Morning Coffee. Once in, he was able to explore the diversity in a culture Charlesworth get his foot in the door of bear communities from Provincetown, Mass., to San Francisco.Ģ010.ĭocumenting bears with his 4×5 camera eventually helped Mr. That from the outside can appear to be homogeneous. Charlesworth also found that there was room for cubs (younger bears), otters (skinny, but still hairy), polar bears (older men) and, “whatever other Yes, bears tend to idealize larger, hairier men, he found. The more he photographed, the more he came to see that being a bear had little to do with adhering to one body type.