BEAR MAGAZINE

Many fondly remember BEAR®, a magazine published in San Francisco, circa 1987-2002. It was the original erotic periodical specifically geared toward gay men who are or who admire real, hot, blue-collar, working-class, masculine men, proudly sporting body and facial hair. The magazine and its readers were the beginnings of today’s gay bear community. We are
not too vain to admit that we have enough salt-n-pepper whiskers to prove that we were there from
the beginning.

Richard Bulger and Chris Nelson founded the
magazine in 1984 as a photo-copied flyer, published
from their apartment. This modest flyer morphed into an internationally distributed, high-gloss magazine featuring erotic photographs of masculine men, erotic stories, features of interest to the emerging bear community and a classified personals section, which prior to the Internet was one of the only means of finding long-distance, and even regional, hookups.

Bulger and Nelson organized Creative Options
Associates as the first corporate publisher of BEAR.
In 1991, COA became Brush Creek Media Inc. (The lore is that the company was named for the town where their vacation cabin was located, Brush Creek, California. In 1996, Bear-Dog Hoffman bought Brush Creek Media Inc. Hoffman further expanded BEAR into video and Brush Creek Media Inc. into several special-interest gay magazines and video series.

BEAR ceased publication abruptly in 2002, leaving a
trail of disappointed customers and creditors. We were
both, as subscribers and an advertiser of our fledgling porn business, Butch Bear®. It was a shame that the primary, ground-breaking voice for our resistance from the tyranny of the gay mainstream became silent. However, the Bear Movement had achieved critical

mass and would not be stopped merely by the collapse of BEAR. As it turned out, neither would we. After a merry chase, we tagged Brush Creek in court and made them pay. (Other creditors could have done the same thing, but we guess they lost interest given the arcane and expensive nature of winning justice.)

What we inherited was a bittersweet legacy:
1) a shabby and broken BEAR trademark and
2) the historical, but still relevant, classic copyrighted BEAR print and on video content. So what if fate delivered a few moldy lemons? We resolved to make lemonade by awakening BEAR from its six-plus year hibernation. In so doing, we also aimed to establish an online BEAR research archive to preserve BEAR‘s unique importance to the Bear Movement and to benefit the charitable causes that bears want to support: The bear-fund.org. It’s a big commitment, but we feel up to the challenge.

Sure, we know a few bitter holdouts from the Ancien
Régime, with personal or petty commercial axes to grind, who never want to see BEAR rise again. However, we have the audacity to hope that more than a few will support us in advancing the interests of a better-connected global Bear Community through an ultimately iconic publication and website. Proudly and unapologetically, we pick up the torch to present a fresh erotic look at men we love, fiction and information of interest to an evolved and mature bear community. We believe this will re-validate our self-image and give a needed voice to represent the erotic desires, strengths and freedom of our community. To those few who say they are “sad” to see “the legacy of something that meant so much to so many rewritten and repackaged as something new.” We say, if they don’t like the taste of our BEAR asses, let them eat, well….beef.