You're 30 and you like your thick black bushy beard and moustache and the curly hair on your chest. You know you're good-looking, but at the disco all the slim, hairless young twinks treat you as if you were wearing a tarantula on your chest.
You're 50, fat (let's not mince words), your hair has migrated from your head to your chin and most of the rest of your body. But your sex drive is as strong as ever. In your local gay bars the regulars behave as if you'd just landed from Mars, and you overhear disparaging comments behind your back including the words "grandad", "ancient", and "Methuselah".
So where do you go to find men who will appreciate your excellent qualities?
Well, you could join a bears' club. There are at least three in the UK: BearHug, Bears2000, and Bears' Club UK. They publish newsletters and magazines (with contact ads), and organize bearish events around the country, including special bear sessions at various saunas. They also have excellent links with bear groups around the world.
To the general public (and, it must be said, to the majority of young gay men) the idea of these ancient, greying, overweight, hairy men (I generalise from my own appearance!) calling themselves "bears" probably seems as silly as the rituals practised by masonic lodges and similar organizations.
But if you yourself are such a picture of a man, there is a sense of relief and exhilaration when you first attend a bears' meeting and find that not only are you not alone in your appearance and age, but also that these men will talk to you, they will chat you up, they will hug you, and treat you as a worthy and fanciable part of the human race. They may even drag you into bed.
That's not all. If you're a bear, and it should happen that your own tastes in men tend towards fancying 25-year-old, slim, hairless, young men, you will be amazed to find that the bears' group contains such people; what's more, they fancy you (or men like you), age, hair, fat, and all.
One of my young friends says on his web page, "Some of the men I fancy are: James Robertson Justice, Jason Robards in 'Once Upon A Time in The West', 'Big' Ron Tarr, Albert Hague (Mr Shorofsky from 'Fame'), John Peel (the DJ), Bill Hunter as seen as 'Bob' in 'Priscilla, Queen of the Desert' and Yosemite Sam. That tells you a lot about me as two of those are fictional, two are dead and Jason Robards is getting close."
Interestingly, he has problems in gay bars too -- the men he fancies are nearly thirty years older than him, big and hairy, and they find it difficult to believe that he could be seriously interested in them.
So, let the hairless young muscle-men vie with each other to be beautiful and unapproachable (but let me have a few, too!); let the disco queens display their sweat-drenched hairless chests (but let me have a few, too!); and let the rest of us who don't seem to fit the mould enjoy ourselves in the company of bears and bear-fanciers.
Please email me at: JLD1@cam.ac.uk if you have any comments.