“Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!” Mame Dennis, Auntie Mame
Eleven years ago Freddy Freeman (Goldenheart) put his vision of community—deep, loving, spiritual community—into practice with the first Bear Your Soul retreat at Easton Mountain. I attended it and was filled with joy, finding myself in deep community, a part of the fellowship of bears with shared values, interests, and goals. I was honored at that gathering as a pioneer of the bear community for my bear history work.
Ten years later, after a very painful and lonely ten year long life detour, I found my way back to Bear Your Soul at Goldenheart’s invitation. I was very grateful and again filled with joy being in a heart-centered bear community. This time I was the guest of honor and, caught completely unawares, was awarded the first Pioneer Award. The plaque states “[my] life and work are the bedrock of the values that led to the creation of Bear Your Soul.” All that time I had been doing what I felt drawn to, co-creating and participating in this new bear community, and documenting what I was experiencing.
The Summer 2024 BYS retreat (my third one) was amazing. Back in deep community, I saw old friends, made new friends, taught and shared bear history, witnessed and participated in the still expanding diversity of bears.
On the second day my heart broke open. I immersed myself in the joy and love and fellow feeling. As John Stasio, the founder of Easton Mountain, wrote in an article published in 2009 in White Cranemagazine,
Easton Mountain is a community, retreat center, and sanctuary created by gay men as a gift to the world. Through workshops, programs, and events we provide opportunities to celebrate, heal, transform, and integrate body, mind, and spirit. We offer our land, rich in beauty and wisdom, as a home to a community that extends beyond the land. We are a worldwide fellowship of people enriched by our connection to Easton Mountain. This fellowship is a force for positive change in the world.”
I came with both social and sexual intentions to address. Of course, I engaged in my participant-observer history work. I became aware of the social networks and, to my surprise, the abundance of erotic play. When my exile in the traumatizing loneliness began twelve years ago, my libido disappeared. That was an additional hardship as sexual connection has long been an integral part of my gay community. (Imagine going to a party or to church and seeing there a dozen men you have had sex with. That is a uniquely gay men’s bond.)
As my sex drive came back, I continued to live with no sexual connection at all. At BYS this summer I realized I am now much older, somewhat heftier, and have the ED issues that come with advanced age. My desire (and need) for intimate connection now completely overshadows my old habits of recreational sex play. The rules of sexual engagement have changed—asking for and negotiating sex play (as practiced in the kink world) has increasingly replaced nonverbal and anonymous hookups. Recognizing that others now see me as a polar bear chub, I am exploring a whole new erotic play space. At BYS I made progress in understanding this, but not in moving back into the erotic realm.
When I arrive at Easton Mountain, I step out of the matrix and into the real world. I enter a safe and supportive space. Attendees are assigned to a “house,” the small group which meets every morning, where the most intimate sharing and bonding occurs. Bears can explore the rural grounds, meditate, do yoga in group, start the day with a twelve-step meeting, hang out in the hot tub at any time, do the sauna after 10 PM, play board games, or play in the Bear Den after 10 PM.
BYS was a long weekend of workshops, shared meals, creative activities, music, a talent show, and an evening bonfire ritual of claiming your bear name (formally entering BYS community). The weekend concluded with Reverend Yolanda’s Old Time Gospel Brunch. Her inspiring words of radical love, the soul-nourishing music, and breaking bread together in community were a fitting farewell to the retreat and preparation for going back to the matrix.
I had substantive conversations with amazing bears. I participated in several workshops, where I was able to explore bear masculinities, learn about the new “ask culture,” safely re-enter nonsexual touch with other men. Tyler Flowers and I led an interactive workshop, called The Bear Necessities, on the history of bear identity. Participants learned about where we came from and they shared how they embraced their own identity as a bear. Tyler and Shane Scott led a workshop instructing us on how the new “Yes, No, Maybe” sexual culture works.
In his workshop Unmasking Masculinity Ace Ricker led us in an exploration of how we learned traditional masculinity, how we embraced our own masculinity, and how we connect through our queer (cis, trans, non-binary, gender-fluid)) male masculinities. I ended up telling one guy that from the moment I first laid eyes on him I had been smitten. Sadly, I never got the opportunity to savor him. (I didn’t dare ask.) Luckily for me, I probably spared myself ending up with a broken heart. He has, to me, the look of a heartbreaker, no doubt with a legion of lusting admirers. (This is what my “picker” instinct hones in on.)
I took Joseph Kramer’s suggestion to dip my toes in the erotic waters at BYS. I was prepared to meet rejection with equanimity. To wit, one workshop included a three-way touch exercise. By then I had been fantasizing about a three-way with my transbear lust object and one of the other two men who happened to be in my three-way his exercise. The other two guys in the three-way were absorbed in, wrapped up in, consumed by their sexual desire for each other. (Ahem.) They both pushed me aside to focus on each other. I thought this violated the implicit ethics of our exercise. In the many three-ways I’ve had in the past I can recall only two where this happened. In those cases I got out of bed, got dressed, and left without saying a word. That was not an option here. I had to sit with and (later) work through my feelings of being judged and rejected. I faced my inner samurai and slew it.
The US is currently in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness. We live in a capitalist society that profits from that loneliness, dividing us, pitting us against each other in competition with each other, and teaching us to believe we are “not good enough” just as we are. Social media has greatly deepened this sense of loneliness. As George Orwell wrote in 1984 (describing how totalitarian states erase individual identity), “the most terrible loneliness is not the kind that comes from being alone, but the kind that comes from being misunderstood, it is the loneliness of standing in a crowded room, surrounded by people who do not see you, who do not hear you, who do not know the true essence of who you are.”
The solution to this seemingly insurmountable loneliness and lack of connection is community. Community is core to answering basic human needs—community growing organically from the ground up, where individuals can be their authentic selves, valued for who they are–where they are seen and heard and embraced. The solution that works for me is to go to this banquet of life. As Lee Ann Womack sang, “Promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance / And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance / I hope you’ll dance.”
Les K. Wright 