At Provincetown’s Bear Week, inclusivity, acceptance, and, yes, debauchery
"It’s fun to be a big guy around other big guys."
PROVINCETOWN — It’s midday at the Brass Key Guesthouse and the party is in full swing. Speakers thump out dance music. On raised platforms, men decked out in nothing more than briefs are dancing. The cocktails are flowing. Below, a few other dozen men, some of them large and hairy, many in Speedo-type swimwear, are in the pool, which is so packed there’s really no space to splash about. Bear soup, the revelers call it.
The sun is out and so is the skin. Guts of various shapes and sizes are getting tan. Back and chest hair are proudly on display, as are nipple rings and tattoos of different styles. Here at Bear Week, body positivity is the point.
The mood is buoyant and upbeat, and it’s about to become raucous. In the hotel courtyard, an emcee will shortly lead the crowd in chanting a part of the male genitalia, before performing a rap song about said genitalia, while stripping down in front of a large rainbow-shaped and colored balloon and an American flag. The crowd cheers and laughs.
“The reason behind most bear events is to offer people who are not traditionally accepted by the beauty standard a place to be celebrated,” the emcee, Big Dipper, a podcaster and entertainer from Los Angeles, said before his performance. “It’s also a week of debauchery and fun. It can be both things.”
Bear Week, an annual festival that welcomes and celebrates large, gay men — “bears” — to the tip of Cape Cod, ended Saturday. In the home of a well-established LGBTQ+ enclave, the week has various themes, according to those here: acceptance, community, sex positivity, a celebration of a spectrum of queer identities, and a rejection of traditional and mainstream beauty standards.
“It’s about feeling connected with people who understand you,” said Richard G. Jones, the 52-year-old chief executive of Bear World Magazine, after finishing an Arnold Palmer on the front porch of a cafe on Commercial Street. “It’s as simple as that.”
The bears come in droves: from New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Ontario, Great Britain, Colombia, and Mexico. They work in real estate and tech, in costume design and health care, in pharmaceuticals and art.
They have various coming-of-age tales of realizing their sexual identities and seeking community and validation. Of fleeing a small town, of feeling oppressed by the stringent edicts of Catholic schools. Childhood and adolescent bullying. Not coming out until your 20s, then finding out that their body type did not meet some preconceived stereotype of what a gay man should look like.
“You get off the ferry, it’s just acceptance,” said Lars Kontz, a 59-year-old from D.C. who works in the software industry. “And everybody’s just endorsing the nuances of each other. It’s not just one swim lane.”
Most everywhere else, the bears are a minority, even in some LGBTQ+ spaces. Here, they are secure that at least for the length of their stay they are surrounded by those who can relate.
JJ Reardon, a 39-year-old from Somerville, compared Bear Week to a utopia, where men like him did not have to make little changes to their day-to-day existence in order to assimilate. Here, he said, “you can let your hair down, take a deep breath.”
“It’s fun to be a big guy around other big guys,” Reardon said.
Francis Grant, a 35-year-old who lives in Chatham and teaches ballroom and line dancing, said the festival represents the best week of the summer. He sees overlap in dance and the themes underpinning Bear Week. Both, he said, encourage people “to be comfortable in their own bodies.”
Seated at a Commercial Street cafe — with his 5-year-old Chiweenie, Lucho — Robert Valin, the 60-year-old founder of The Urban Bear, which organizes bear happenings, underscored why events such as Bear Week exist.
“So much of the gay community is about body fascism, it’s the opposite here,” Valin said. “You’re celebrated no matter what shape, size, or color you are.”
Several couples describe simply being in Provincetown as freeing. The pleasure of strolling down Commercial Street and feeling like you are among your own.
“We can walk down the street and hold hands and no one bats an eye,” said Greg Nawrocki, a 39-year-old from Fall River who works in hospitality management. He was at the Brass Key with his husband of four years, Jason Bouchard-Nawrocki. His sentiment was echoed by multiple other couples in town on Friday.
It was the 24th annual Bear Week for the town. The founder of the week, John Burrows, died last year, but his legacy continues. Nearly 138,000 people visited throughout the week, according to the Provincetown Office of Tourism. During the festival, there are parties of different scales and themes, including tea dances, where attendees are encouraged to wear pink or camouflage; leather-and-harness-themed events; and a cigar and pipe social.
Bear Week is about many things. Undeniably, one of them is sex. And at the Brass Key on Friday afternoon, the scene tilts into full-on debauchery. Big Dipper, the phallic-rapping podcaster, hosts a wet thong contest. It’s similar to a wet T-shirt contest, except where it’s not. Six men, dressed in, you guessed it, white thongs, dance around the stage, sometimes with a large inflatable hot dog.
The repartee between Big Dipper and the contestants is blue, and the detailed substance of the contest is too scandalous for this newspaper. Suffice it to say that between the various gyrations on stage, the contestants leave very little to the imagination. Dancers are eliminated according to the volume of cheers from the crowd, with the winner receiving $500 and a free flight to Cape Cod.
Nick Manring, a 38-year-old user experience designer who lives in Dorchester and grew up in Worcester County, is among the contestants. He explained his willingness to put himself out there, so to speak.
“I spent years training myself to be OK with my body and myself,” he said. “I do things like this to push myself, to express myself.”
Alas, he did not win. That accolade would fall to Rob Carcone, of Providence.
“I went in knowing I would have the love of the crowd because I am a good dancer,” Carcone said afterward.
Not everywhere in town is so over-the-top. At the Rose and Crown Guest House, Robert Carito, a 49-year-old Staten Island resident, relaxes. They don’t drink or do drugs, and odds are Carito likes Barbie more than anyone you know. Much of what they own — shirts, tank tops, shoes, a Jeep — is Barbie-themed or at least pink. They typically travel with between five and 10 Barbie dolls and this trip is no different. Here, there are some Ken dolls on their dresser.
The Barbie fascination, they said, allowed them to become more comfortable in their skin, to the point where they no longer use he/him pronouns in their professional or personal life.
Recently, Carito, who has the letters “BEAR” tattooed across their knuckles, has wrestled with some existential questions about their identity. They lost about 70 pounds and started shaving their body. They are not as big nor as hairy as they once were, leading them to ask a once unthinkable question: Are they still a bear?
“If I’m not, it’s fine,” they said. “Maybe I’m a mink now.”
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