The Bear Book is a composite portrait of gay bears--usually big, hairy men who favor full-face beards and prefer to wear jeans and flannel shirts. This emergent social phenomenon and new sexual iconography is burgeoning across America, Western Europe, and other parts of the gay global village. The first-ever book on the gay bear phenomenon, this book offers readers a collection of first-person observations and historical and critical investigations by participant observers within and outside the bear community. This exciting book is organized in an ideologically revealing manner, including sections on history, identity, social spaces, iconography, and the bear phenomenon abroad. Because of the dialectical position of this work, it inevitably both describes and, to a lesser extent, may prescribe various parameters of this subculture-in-the-making.