I’m a bear.

I’m a 6′2″, broad-shouldered fella over a certain weight (and if you think I’m going to tell you exactly how much I weigh, you are out of your ever-loving mind), bearded and firmly devoted to jeans and t-shirts over anything I could buy at Abercrombie and Fitch.

Not that I could fit into anything at Abercrombie and Fitch, mind you, except the main entryway.

So. I’m a bear.

Woof.

When I first came out 15 years ago, I didn’t know what the hell a bear was in gay terms. I actually stumbled upon the community quite by accident — trolling the internet of course, cruising my way through gay chat sites filled with guys that I wasn’t remotely attracted to, eventually landing on a site filled with guys that looked like me, guys I thought were hot, and I said to myself, “Oh! We exist! And apparently we’re called bears!” And I was really excited, because until that point I didn’t really feel as though I fit into the gay community, because even among this group of Others, I was another Other — a hairy, chubby Other.

Now there was this moniker that I could apply to myself, this “Hello, My Name is…” badge that I could stick on my sweater, that would connect me to other guys like me, that would give me a community.

And belonging to a community mattered. An 18-year old gay kid in a small southern town already feels adequately out of place. He really doesn’t need to feel like the stranger among strangers.

My ex-boyfriend recently moved to Dallas, and he’s getting his feet wet in the bear community there. And from our conversations — and what little he tells me about his new life there — I gather he’s taking the community identity very seriously (he went to something called a “bear dance,” which is all well and good, but I have an cynical imagination, and I can just picture a high school gym decorated in streamers and a disco ball filled with big hulking hairy men slow dancing to “On the Wings of Love”).

In a recent email update, he told me he was having some trouble with his car, and he was glad because he’d found someone to help out.

“I met this bear mechanic who said he’d fix it for a good price.”

Not just a regular mechanic. A bear mechanic.

Apparently in Dallas, being hirsute affords you a set of mechanical skills that launches you above and beyond mere hairless mechanics.

Sarcasm, of course. I’m sure the guy’s a good mechanic. But I thought it was odd that my ex felt the need to tack that “bear” on the front of his occupation, as if that identifying marker were somehow important to the situation at hand, as though his sexual proclivity (or at the very least his sexual self-identification) mattered in communicating his worthiness to fix a car.

I don’t have the same need for that bear “Hello, My Name is…” badge anymore. That’s still the kind of man I’m attracted to, and I’ll use the moniker in conversation as a shorthand to get my point across, but I don’t feel like “a bear,” or any other gay subculture designation.

Hell, there are a lot of times I don’t even feel it necessary to tack the “gay” moniker to myself. It doesn’t feel important sometimes.

And it sometimes feels like a cage.

Being a big gay bear in the world seemed important to me when I was still trying to figure out who the hell I was in relation to everything else. I came out as a gay man not really knowing what that meant, what that entailed (because I didn’t have any points of reference in my south Louisiana town), and I needed that marker, that label, to give me a place to build an identity on.

Now, I don’t. I have a lot of other identities. I’m a writer, a teacher, an artist. I’m so many other things that are ultimately more important to my self-definition, that the bear thing — even the gay thing — takes a backseat.

I’m discovering that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, it has served me well to be an openly gay man who didn’t live through his identification as a gay person. I’ve been able to change a lot of minds on matters like marriage equality, employment nondiscrimination and other gay issues because, in my daily life, I subvert the expectations of what “gay folks” are like. I’m just this guy — not the boogeyman “Gay Guy” that our opponents make us out to be.

But on the other hand, I can forget what it’s like to be judged on my gayness, what it’s like for others to see me through that prism first, and it can make me complacent. It can lull me into thinking everything’s hunky dory for me and gay folks everywhere — and it isn’t.

It’s a struggle. But I think our larger push for equality as a community will move us in the direction of erasing those distinctions, and if not erasing them, making them less important to us, less essential to our sense of self-worth and importance. And we’ll be less inclined to see ourselves through the prism of being gay.

And bear mechanics will just be mechanics.

I’ll “woof” to that.