Every year, the Katmai National Park in Alaska puts on a March Madness-style bracket of all the fattest bears in their park. It's a celebration of fatness, because a fat bear ahead of hibernation means a healthy bear come spring. This competition is popular — there were over a million votes tallied last year — and it speaks to a larger cultural obsession with bears. In honor of Fat Bear Week, Host Brittany Luse journeys through time to unpack what bears mean to us — and why they're family, friend and foe all at once. And later, an exploration of how the queer community emulates bearness — and what the symbol of the animal can mean to them.

Interview Highlights

On why Fat Bear Week celebrates survival

Katmai National Park media ranger Naomi Boak: For some bears, [it's] more difficult to get fat. So we're rooting for them. And we're also rooting for the cubs – because the cubs are so cute – but the survival rate for cubs is not great. It can be a 35% survival rate for cubs in their first year. And so Fat Bear Week – it's rooting for the bears, and celebrating the success of this ecosystem.

On why bears have so many personalities in our culture

Brittany Luse: I was sent home from the hospital when I was a baby with a teddy bear. I slept with it every night for the first eight, nine years of my life. You think about Winnie the Pooh, Paddington Bear. You've also got park ranger bears that have some kind of authority, like Yogi Bear, Smokey Bear. And then you also got your man killing bears in movies like Cocaine Bear and The Revenant. I feel like other animals only have one personality or one archetype for their entire species. But you could see a bear as a killer and you could see a bear as a friend. How is that?

Bear biologist Sarah Elmeligi: I do think that some of it might stem from the fact that their cubs are ridiculously cute, like, oh, my gosh, they are insane. They're so cute and fluffy and fuzzy and they're just these little bumbling fluff balls wandering through the forest. But then the flipside of that, of course, is that there are occasions where bears attack people and tragically kill people. And so there is this other side of their personality that is quite violent towards people if the right circumstances are at play. And the reality is that bears are individual and some bears are more aggressive than others. And some bears are, you know, more chill. I mean, Cocaine Bear is – it's very hard to watch those movies when you're a bear biologist. You're just like, oh, I can't.

On what the bear symbolizes in gay culture

Newcastle University senior lecturer Gareth Longstaff: That symbol somehow kind of grounds or connects bears together, and the bear paw is used quite a lot in gay male culture. I talk about ecologist Timothy Treadwell.

Brittany Luse: This is the guy from the Grizzly Man film?

Gareth Longstaff: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So this is the guy that basically lives with grizzly bears. [Academic] Colin Carman talks about him, he calls it Grizzly Love. This is kind of a move away from our obsession with each other as humans and trying to understand, through re-engaging with things like animals and nature, who we are. I think Carman calls it becoming animal. To actually give your humanity up to a kind of animalistic form of becoming is an incredibly liberating, but also very difficult project to undertake, because it involves giving up everything that is normal [to] then go towards this very queer space of human becoming animal. And I think that there's something here with bear culture that kind of connects to that, this figure of the bear, which we can then assimilate as gay masculinity, is kind of an extreme or abstracted way of moving beyond our own humanness towards something which is kind of animal-like. So without the bear, I don't think that culture would be the same culture that it is now.

This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Liam McBain and Alexis Williams. It was edited by Jessica Placzek and Bilal Qureshi. It was engineered by Hannah Gluvna. Our executive producer is Veralyn Williams, our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni, and our senior VP of Programming is Anya Grundmann.

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