Most bears are bears: big and often balding, with bushy beards and beefy arms the look is distinctly blue-collar and unfussy. Bears have been a fully fleshed-out alternative gay identity for at least a decade, but it seems the growling’s louder than ever.Īnd like any subculture, the bear community comes with its own distinct taxonomy-its minorities within a minority within a minority. It’s a quasi-intellectualized, entirely merchandized subculture of “those who are husky, hairy and homosexual,” as the Bear Handbook ($14.95 at your local Barnes & Noble) puts it. The Dugout is the city’s best-known bar for bears-gay men who look rather like middle-aged straight men who haven’t been metrosexually harassed into banishing carbs from their diets and hair from their shoulders. But everybody’s having a pretty good time, even the skinny guys who wandered in for the $3 Buds at the Sunday-night beer blast and find themselves outnumbered, and largely ignored, by the husky men around them-the bears. The place doesn’t smell much like gay men are supposed to, either: beery, sweaty, like a frat party gone on way too long-in some cases, at least judging by the bushy gray facial hair in the dank room, for decades. Gay men aren’t supposed to look much like the balding, hairy-belly-up-to-the-bar crowd at the Dugout in the far West Village.