When it came to sex, I used to be a closed book. This was due in part to my innate shyness, though growing up in Minnesota probably didn’t help. “Are you having a good time?” was a question I’d heard a dozen times in bed by various men, usually following a bout of what I thought were obvious noises of my approval. I went through life speaking, and groaning, at volume level 9, while the world heard me at 2.

A few twisted fantasies percolated in my head but I lacked the guts to ever talk about them until the ripe old age of 35, when I went straight from a sex life of pure vanilla to dating an International Mr. Leather.

Low volume was never a problem for Joe Gallagher. Even with his mouth shut he was communicating, like the first time I saw him, wearing a t-shirt that read: “I Make Boys Cry.” The T-shirt scared the crap out of me. My fantasies did not involve tears. But still I found him compelling. Some of us are just cursed with a need for bad boys.

We liked each other for more than just the physical. Still, we both harbored doubts about our sexual compatibility. I didn’t know what to make of leather, which seemed to me a world governed by a million mysterious rules, where stuffing a red hanky in the wrong pocket could lead to trouble. Membership in this world seemed to depend upon the right boots, the right chaps, and knowledge of rigid protocols.

As a kid I’d dropped out of private school because I hated the uniforms, and I found these rules stifling. I liked Joe for his irreverent streak – he’d carved out his own place in leather. He wore what he liked, when he liked, and made no apologies.

He showed me some essays written by Robert Davolt, a leatherman who’d died of melanoma in 2005. Davolt loved the leather community, but like all good writers he was a bit cantankerous. Leather, he argued, was a relatively young world, which began as a group of “outcasts, leftovers, the dark secret of the gay community.” He advised its members to question its “traditions,” and to distrust anyone who claimed to be a leather “authority.” He wrote often of leather as a group of people on individual journeys, with no two paths the same.

Like most of us, I looked for role models in all areas of my life, and here in leather I’d found two. Joe and Robert gave me the permission I’d always thought I’d needed, permission it turned out I had only to give myself.

I began my little journey by learning what I didn’t want. A Leathermen’s discussion group taught me that I didn’t want, for example, to walk one pace behind and to the left of Joe at all times, nor did I want to be in charge of his frickin’ Outlook Express. Fortunately, on these matters, Joe and I agreed.

At Joe’s side, I went to a lot of leather events and met a lot of kinky folk, most of whom I liked. Sometimes, though, I’d meet a boy who’d talk my ear off about protocols, questioning whether or not half the people at the event were “real” leather folk, or a titleholder who seemed to have gotten lost in the intricate local leather politics. I had no stomach for politics, and was wary of protocols, but I’d learned that leather was big enough to fit us all.

Prodded by Joe, I began to speak up in bed, to set in motion my fantasies, and to claim the kind of sex I’d always wanted. And though I’d long feared it, the first time he made me cry (during sex, that is) it came as a catharsis. In leather scenes, I watched others challenge their fears and their limits and come out exhausted, exalted, and content.

I felt this sense of liberation spreading into other areas of my life. I was less fearful, less shy, less concerned with what others thought. Still, I considered myself a fringe member at best until I heard an acquaintance dismissing leather as “just another form of drag.” My reaction surprised me with its strength: anger, yeah, but also a sort of protectiveness, for the people I’d met and the experiences I’d had. And pity, too, since the acquaintance was cutting himself off from trying something new. My reaction told me that maybe, in my own way, I did belong.

Fortunately this was not real-life Fireplug talking, but merely the Fireplug in last week’s nightmare. I used to be, in the beginning of our courtship, nearly four years ago, a jealous wreck of a man. But I thought those days were long gone. I felt secure in our whatever-you-want-to-label-it-ness. I no longer wasted time worrying if he would leave me, in part because he pretty much dotes on me all the time now.

Oh believe me, he tried in the beginning to resist my charms. But really, what chance did he have, once I’d made up my mind?

But apparently my subconscious is still an anxious amusement park filled with scary clowns and seductive porn stars. Because yes, in my nightmare I caught a glimpse of the Fireplug, hand-in-hand with some humpy little thing much closer in height to himself, traipsing through Dore Alley: a bullet shot straight through my heart.

Maybe you’ve never had nightmares that your boyfriend will leave you during a street fair devoted to half-naked kinky men from all over the planet. I suppose this might be a San Francisco-centric  nightmare. But any of us in any half-way sizable city can easily drive ourselves nuts fearing that the humpy number just around the next corner will woo our loved ones away.  Curse those next corners, they’re always holding back some temptation.

In real life I forestalled such tragedy by signing us both up for the beer booth at Dore Alley, where will we be slinging suds half the afternoon, side-by-side, getting the kinky fucks drunker and raking in the cash for my Gay World Series-bound softball team. Just like we did last month at Pride, pictured here (with our handsome, totally-single friend Lon: call him!), in a moment of tender capitalist camaraderie. What you don’t see is the leash around the Fireplug’s waist.

If you’d like us to get you closer to intoxication this Sunday, or if you want like a Diet Coke or something, come to our booth outside the Powerhouse between 3-6 pm, right about the time the crowd turns a tad messy. My team could use the cash.

“Oh come on,” I said, “I’m not THAT big.”

“I guess I still think of you as that skinny fifteen-year-old,” she said.

“So do I,” I said. “Which is why I now look like this.”

I’d been a scrawny kid, the kind of scrawniness that perfect strangers felt compelled to comment on when meeting me for the first time. My first year of college I was an inch shy of six feet tall and weighed 128 pounds.

I now weigh 190, due in no small part to the gym. I realized the other day that I’ve now been working out over half my life. But it wasn’t until the last couple of months, when I changed what I ate, that I started seeing the results I’ve always wanted. Turns out all those guys telling me to up my protein actually knew what they were talking about. Go figure.

I’ve been kicking around in my head this subject of change for a little while, after something profound happened to me.

That day I was walking from my apartment to the museum lot at the end of my street where I’d parked my car, about 100 yards. Blue skies, the air cool, Finley trotting just ahead of me, sniffing the ground, his little tail wagging. And for a moment I felt a particularly tender love for him, for his enthusiasm and his charming little strut, and that feeling inside me spread out to the day, and to my life.

I realized that I was happy.

This may be the kind of feeling, or awareness of feeling, that other people have all the time. But for me it was a revelation.

Most of the time I worry. I live in tomorrow (a strange position for a memoirist, but I never claimed to be consistent.) I struggle with impatience, full of ambition and thwarted by doubt. I think that I should have met all of my goals by the age of 25. And now I am 39.

But for those 100 yards I felt content.

Of course my next thought was, “Why?”

The most obvious factor was this thing I have going with the Manly Fireplug.  We’ve only been back together a few short weeks, and I’m reluctant to say this out loud, but a couple of days ago we linked our Facebook profiles again so I think I can risk it: today we are happy together. I now recommend breaking up as a terrific method for reflection and re-prioritization. Things are better than they ever were before, and they were pretty damn good before. That goes for sex too. Just sayin’.

The second factor was with writing. At some point in the last few months, after a string of career rejections, my approach to writing shifted. I’m giving up trying to impress readers. I just want to reach them. Sure, I still hope to impress  – c’mon, I’m a writer – vanity and insecurity come with the job. But the contortions I twisted myself into, trying to impress, didn’t serve me so well.

Third, I look good.

I guess what I felt, coming together in one short walk down the street, was a comfort inside my skin, a strange sensation for me. And upon further reflection I could trace it all back to D league softball.

I like to poke fun at D league softball, because really, the stakes couldn’t get any lower. But that is why I am continually amazed at what it has done for me. I told you already how bad I was in the beginning, how bad it felt being so bad in front of so many people, and how being so bad in front of so many people made me want to cut my losses and run.

I’d joined in the weeks after the Fireplug and I had broken up, when I’d already felt like a failure; I’d failed at love and I’d failed at writing and now I’d failed at sports.

I needed to flex some muscle. So I stuck it out, hit the practices, hit the batting cages in my spare time, and over the course of the season transformed from the guy who could reliably strike out every time at bat, to the guy who could reliably get on base every time at bat. I’m no D league rock star, just a solid member of the team, which for this season is okay.

That subtle transformation fed my confidence, and that confidence spread into other areas of my life. I had a stronger sense of myself as a man, of what I wanted out of love, out of sex, out of writing. All because of D league softball.

And if D league softball could tap unknown potential inside me, then what else did I contain?

Of course I still harbor doubts, mostly about my abilities. Cynics say, “People don’t change.” But they can, and they do, though only with tremendous effort. For the past three months I’ve watched the Fireplug transform into a more open, loving man, his changes – both big and small – unfolding on a near-daily basis, and that transformation astounds me, humbles me, makes me want to hold on to my front row tickets.

And I keep circling this subject of change, trying to figure it out. I suppose it gives me hope. Maybe, as I close in on forty, I need reassurance that change is still possible, that as long as I draw a breath I can keep throwing aside, year by year, a couple of the doubts that I lug around – buying myself a few more yards of this hard-won feeling.

So this weird thing happened when I gave that reading the other night. I got choked up. This surprised and embarrassed me – I’d been working on the book for several years and I figured by now that I had enough emotional distance from the material, the distance that making a good book pretty much requires. By getting choked up I felt as though I were letting everyone know that I hadn’t yet achieved that distance. And that the book would be closer to an undigested therapy session than to something like literature.

I guess by most standards I did not have a happy childhood. And the excerpt I read the other night comes from a time of enormous upheaval in the story, just after my parents split up and begin dating people of the same sex, when I was ten and my brother five, about a year after this photo was taken. For several years I’ve steered my way through this book, afraid above all else of falling into self-pity. And I think I steered it too sharply in the other direction, away from the hard feelings.

So with this latest draft I tried to delve a little deeper into each scene, and to just say what was going on in my little head and little heart at the time, and I can already tell it’s a stronger story as a result. Whether I can do so and still keep it from teetering into self-pity, well, time will tell. But those feelings were closer to my surface, I guess, the night of the reading, because of this recent draft. The choked-back tears came early, and I fought them down pretty much the whole time I was reading. At one point I looked up and made eye contact with the Manly Fireplug, but then had to look away. He may look like a tough cookie on the outside, but really he’s a big softie (it’s this combination of bad boy looks and good boy heart that makes me love him), and there’s a scene on a tractor that always makes him cry. The tears in his eyes triggered my own, and I had to look elsewhere the rest of the reading.

Thanks to everyone who showed up, and to those who gave me feedback. It was a good night – it energized me to keep working, and to finally finish (again) this damn thing.

(This story, or at least a version of this story, will appear in the next issue of Pink Mince. I’ll post links when it’s available. I’ve used a few paragraphs here from previous posts, so that I could create a stand-alone story about my experiences backstage at the Walter Van B show. But most of it is new.)

hey man - came across your profile and im helping a friend restage the walter van beirondonck show may 9th in SF at the berkeley art museum. you’d be perfect to be in the show - its all muscle bears modeling. should be a lot of fun – the team is coming from antwerp. cheers!

Walter Van who? I followed a couple of links and watched a bunch of bears dressed in funny pastels lumber up and down a runway in Paris.

I have a complicated relationship with the whole bear thing. I like to think I’m above labels (I mean, we all went to high school, we all grew up on John Hughes movies). Even my profile on Big Muscle Bears points out that I prefer to be called a “dingo.”

And yet underneath this thin veneer is another very thin veneer. Someone called me a muscle bear – me, the guy who came to college an inch shy of six feet and weighing 128 pounds soaking wet. That was 65 pounds ago, but some things, like high school, stick with you.

About Walter’s clothes: let’s be honest. They’re ridiculous. Cartoonish. I couldn’t see the point of dressing up bears in clothes they would never wear and marching them around the lobby of the Berkeley Art Museum. But then high fashion is a foreign culture to me. I live in laid-back San Francisco, where my only stab at fashion is switching out my Levi’s with Diesel. But like any gay dude familiar with reality television, I know that models don’t get to choose the clothes. Zip your lip, put it on, and make it look pretty.

Aside from a lingering prepubescent need for attention (oh, like you don’t have one, too) I had other reasons for accepting the (unpaid) musclebear model invitation. I’m less adventurer than homebody, so I tend to lack for raw writing material. I figured, looking back, I’d feel more regret if I turned down the invitation than if I accepted it. Plus I’d been racking up a few months of job-related rejections, and my ego needed soothing.

So I went along for the ride.

As news of the model scouting spread through my circle of friends, a kind of guarded anxiety took hold. The prospect of being picked was impossible to take seriously. Everyone made jokes. But underneath, oh, underneath… well, that’s what this story is about.

My first clue of trouble came with the fitting. That’s what they called it, in the beginning, when the Walter crew was still a few bears short. But as the days ticked down the “fitting” day was changed to “casting” day. We’d have to audition; a sure thing turned into one big maybe.

So I showed up for the casting, at a clothing shop in Hayes Valley, with two voice fighting in my head: “Just a goofy fashion show” battled with “Please deem me worthy.” Head versus heart, ego versus id. Big Mike versus Little Mike. I am not proud of the anxiety, the vanity, the keening insecurity, but to tell you otherwise would be to lie.

So both Mikes met Walter, a burly Belgian bear of a man, who shook my hand warmly. A casting girl asked if I could take off my shirt for a picture. Walter and his assistant looked me over, murmuring to each other in a language I was glad at the time not to know. They had me walk up and down the length of the shop, then huddled together with a binder full of photos from his Spring 2010 line, glancing between me and the photos.

“Would you be willing to come back in underwear?” Walter asked.

“Um,” I said, picturing myself walking down Hayes Street in nothing but briefs. “What do you mean, ‘come back?’”

He apologized for his English. “For the finale. Twenty of the models will come back to the runway in underwear. Some do not want.”

No doubt the wise ones. “Sure,” I said. Another assistant led me away to change into a lime green poncho, t-shirt, and cargo pants, with brightly colored sneakers 18 sizes too big for me. I was led back to Walter, who nodded his approval. The casting girl took my photo and then handed me a sheet of paper with directions to the museum.

“So I’m in?” I asked. She nodded.

Relieved, I drove home and wasted no time letting the online world know about it, in suitably self-deprecating terms. “Who can resist a supermodel musclebear in a lime green poncho?” I asked. “Absolutely no one, that’s who!”

On Sunday I made my way to the museum across the bay. Walter’s crew had set up an impromptu back stage on a loading dock. I like to think I’m at least somewhat unique in appearance, a misconception that became clear the moment I opened the door and found thirty-seven bearded men looking back at me. In the week before the show I’d compromised my usual look, by growing my beard longer than usual, to better my chances at casting. To better fit in. And now, well, I fit.

I joined the guys, a few of whom I knew. Below us, lining the dock’s bay, stood rolling racks of Walter’s pastels. Beside us on a bulletin board hung all of our pictures in the order we’d walk. I noted with amusement my number: 13. Underneath some photos were handwritten notes: “Underwear OK,” or “Haircut.” At the end of the loading dock worked a hair stylist. Next to him a make-up girl began to brush the shine from 38 foreheads. I noted with relief that my page was not marked with “haircut.” The Manly Fireplug would have put the stylist down like an old dog.

We spent the next hour or so waiting in a stairwell between runway run-throughs around the museum’s lobby, its space dominated by an enormous orange sculpture, whose edges we skirted in time to a loud thumping beat. “Faster, please,” an assistant murmured to me. At one point Walter appeared in the stairwell. “That was good. But please this time try not to look like you are being punished.” In between runs we told each other to smile with our eyes.

Afterwards the underwear models had a separate rehearsal. Walter appeared again in the stairwell. “We have bags of cotton balls,” he said. “When it comes time to change you may stuff them down the front of your briefs.”

The models cheered.

“But please, tasteful amounts. The Paris models – they got carried away.”

Back in the loading dock the first few bears changed into the pastels, aided by a small pack of dressers, slender black-clad juniors from the local fashion school, who attended to the naked burly men with admirable professionalism. I wondered if, when signing up, they had expected to come so close to so much back hair.

Three women with pink bakery boxes pushed through the crowd. Some bear yelled “DONUTS!” and, fearing for my life, I ducked out of the stampede’s path. Frankly I was starving, having come straight from a softball game. But I’d been working hard at losing my gut and feared – irrationally, yes – that a single donut would swell my waist during the underwear march. As a gay dude I thought I knew poor self-image, but high fashion modeling was like an advanced placement course in anorexia.

Next to me a friend peered at the bulletin board. “There’s a name here,” he said. “Crossed out.” Under the black marker I could just make out the name of one of his friends, a guy who, my friend whispered to me, had just expressed his anger at the Walter crew in a Facebook post. He’d been cast, then replaced at the last moment.

All day similar whispers had floated around backstage of other friends. Facebook and blog posts, tweets complaining about the way they’d been treated by Walter and the casting folks. Disorganization may have been inevitable – curators and PR folks had taken over the job of model scouting. The casting requirements had been vague and poorly relayed. One announcement – which I’d never received – called only for guys over six feet and 200 pounds. Guys scouted by the casting people online, guys told they’d be perfect for the show, took time off from work to come to Hayes Valley, where they were quickly dismissed as too short. Too thin. Too smooth. Guys pushed onto roller coasters – cast, then fired, then cast again.

All of this par for the course in the world of fashion. Certain jobs – modeling, acting, writing – come with rejection. It’s the contract you sign when you pursue that work. But the men scouted for the Walter show were not models; they were “real men” from the “real world:” software developers, bartenders, ad men. The problem with casting guys from the real world is that they come with real world feelings. Guys who – unlike me – called themselves bears and cubs without a trace of irony, who’d found a home in the beer busts and backyard barbecues of the furry crowd. Guys now told they weren’t quite bear enough.

Here in San Francisco fashion culture had collided with bear culture, and these guys were the roadkill. “Get over it,” you could say. “It’s just a stupid fashion show.” Oh but underneath. Who among is immune to the pain of rejection– whose soul wasn’t forged in the howling gymnasiums, bitter playgrounds, and drunken keggers of our pasts?

These guys – some of them my friends – clouded my thoughts, as if someone had thrown Walter’s pastels into the wash with a bunch of darks. In the two days between casting and runway, I’d had time to measure my growing discomfort, and to mull my complicity. Was I condoning all of this, by taking part?

The relentless focus on appearances was wearing me down. I wanted to get back to my little life, back to words, which I could rearrange on my own, putting forth an image – a self – I could control.

I dressed while an assistant stuffed paper into the toes of my clown shoes. I pushed cotton balls down the front of my briefs and closed my eyes while the make-up girl blotted my face. I pulled up my cargo pants and Walter adjusted the cuffs. I tugged at the lime green poncho.

We lined up, and the music began. The lobby was packed with fashion folks, fashion students, and friends of the models. Some of whom no doubt had been deemed “not quite right” for the runway. I had expected the quiet reserve of the runway audiences I’d seen on television, but as we marched down the ramp the crowd roared. They cheered for our goofy spectacle, for the cartoon clothes, for their friends.

The show flew by. Backstage the dressers ripped off our clothes in time for the underwear finale. We pulled up our socks and patted our guts. We checked our postures. And we marched out, half-naked, into the void.

I felt liberated. Once you’ve walked around a crowded museum in cartoon briefs, nothing can stop you.

We circled the lobby, raw, uncovered, acting braver than we really felt. Cheered on by bears and cubs and wolves and otters. Guys who’d showed up for their friends, wanting to be bigger-hearted than they really felt. Dingos and twinks and art fags. Guys with bald spots and bad tattoos. Guys in flannel, guys in black. Guys with day jobs and no jobs and unspoken dreams. Guys who thought they’d left all that behind. Guys cut down the middle between scared boy and grown man. All of us, I mean to say. All of us crashing the show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7X2lYTf6do

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN79pmxrkIY

I’m still working on a little story to tell you about the show.

A reporter at the SF Chronicle interviewed me before and after the runway. Then last night she called me with a follow-up question. “Um,” she said, “What exactly is a BEAR?”

The $64,000 question, one that I had been pondering even more than usual over the past week. I was just about to step into the theater to see a play, and I had about a minute to answer. I hit the usual talking points:

• facial scruff
• body hair
• a more liberal body fat percentage than one sees in most media images of gay men
• a fairly relaxed, mostly welcoming attitude, at least here in San Francisco (yeah yeah there are bear bitches, fiercely patrolling the fringes of the type and informing various transgressors of the bear qualities they lack, but I’m speaking in generalities)
• then I sort of launched into my little speech about being a writer and irritated by labels, and questioning my own membership in this community and and and…
• I think if she could do it all over again, she’d pick a non-writer to interview

I am one tired dawg. More to come.