Les K. Wright is a queer historian, writer, fine arts photographer, gay activist, AIDS activist, literary scholar, and small press book publisher.
Wright grew up in a working-class family in East Syracuse, NY, and then Preble, NY. He was a Rotary International exchange student in Mülheim-an-der-Ruhr, West Germany (1970-71). He earned a BA in Comparative Literature at SUNY Albany. On a Study Abroad program in his senior year he studied at the University of Würzburg (1974-75), where he came out as a gay man and met his first long-term partner. He joined WüHSt (Würzburger Homosexuelle Studenteninitiative) and became a gay activist. He began his graduate studies in German, English, and Russian at the University of Tübingen (1975-79) (MA, 1977). He continued his gay activism as a member of the IHT (Initiativgruppe Homosexualität Tübingen) and came out in the leather subculture in Munich. He wrote extensively for the emerging gay press (GPU News (Milwaukee), Schwuchtel (Berlin), and Revolt (Stockholm).
Answering the siren call from Carl Wittman’s A Gay Manifesto and the San Francisco portrayed in Armistead Maupin’s column Tales of the City, in 1979 Wright moved to San Francisco’s gay Castro District. In 1981 he found sobriety, returned to graduate school, and was infected with HIV. His recovery began at Eighteenth Street Services, where he served as a peer counselor for dual-diagnosed and AIDS-infected gay men (1986-1989). He earned a PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley (1992). He witnessed the AIDS epidemic at Ground Zero (Castro District) as a PWA (person with AIDS), and became an AIDS activist, volunteering with several community-based AIDS education and emotional support groups. HIs most challenging commitment was answering phones on the AIDS Nightline (San Francisco Suicide Prevention).
In 1985 Wright was a founding member and founding board member of the GLBT Historical Society San Francisco. He was a member of the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian History Project (1984-1991), founded by Allan Bérubé and Jeffrey Escoffier.
In the mid 1980s Wright became involved in the actives of gay men who were calling themselves bears. Realizing this bear phenomenon was more than a passing fashion, he began taking notes, collecting ephemera, and led “What Is a Bear?”discussion groups at Bear Expo (1992 and 1993). To date there is still no settled answer to this question. In 1992 he founded the Bear History Project, and the earliest results were editing The Bear Book (1997), editing The Bear Book II (2000), and co-curting the “Bear Icons” art exhibition (Boston, Provincetown, Manhattan, and Washington, D.C. (2000-02).
Wright was a volunteer at the Men’s Resource Center (2000-05) in Amherst, MA. When moved back to San Francisco in 2005 he joined the Billy Community. When he moved back to Central New York in 2013, he became involved with Bear Your Soul gatherings at the Easton Mountain Retreat Center. These continue to be his gay spiritual communities.
During the Covid lockdown years Wright began coming out of retirement, a step at a time. He returned to his early passion for photography, going on day drives and taking photographs, an activity h could enjoy by himself. He has become a fine arts photographer, his work has been included in two group exhibitions, and a book of his work has been published, Salt City and Its Environs (2023).
Since coming out of retirement Wright has returned to his bear history work. He put out a call to reactivate the BHP. This resulted in the nonprofit Bear History Project International (incorporated 2024). BHPI materials are archived at the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago. He is researching Bear Book III, penned the “Bear Tracks” column for Bear World Magazine, honored the the first Pioneer Award by Bear Your Soul (2023), was named Bear Icon by BWM in 2024, and is serving as consultant for a documentary film about bears (currently In production), and with Nick McGlynn is cataloging the BHP materials archived at Cornell.
With the publication of Children of Lazarus: The Forgotten Generation of Long-Term AIDS Survivors (2025) he has returned to AIDS activism. As book publisher of the small press Bearskin Lodge Press, Wright is focusing on bear-related works, AIDS-related memoirs, and San Francisco gay history..
He remains involved in the queer community in Syracuse, NY. This includes Bear-a-Cuse (bear group), S.A.L.T. (leather/kink group), and serves on the board of SAGE Upstate. HIs memoir Resilience: A Polemical Memoir of AIDS, Bears, and F•cking (2023) documents his life up to shortly before his move to Syracuse in 2023.
Influences: Allan Bérubé, Michel Foucault, Robert A. Heinlein, John Rechy, Susan Sontag.
Les K. Wright 