BEAR Magazine Is Coming Back to Print in September — Personal Ads and All

BEAR is going back to print. The title returns in September as a quarterly, sold online, at major bear events and in a limited number of retail stores — its first printed issue in fifteen years, by the publisher's count.

The magazine's own announcement page says the first issue can be reserved from late August, when subscriptions also open at what it calls the lowest prices they will ever be offered.

Where it started. BEAR began in San Francisco in 1987 as a photocopied zine — 45 copies of the first issue, printed on letter paper, folded in half and stapled through the middle. Richard Bulger, who was running a model and talent agency at the time, made it with his lover, the budding photographer Chris Nelson.

Les K. Wright came across issue one on a rack at A Different Light on Castro Street and later pitched Bulger a column — a film review that ran once and was then dropped, Wright says, for taking up ad space. Writing for Bear World Magazine, he describes what made the thing land: these were men, he writes, “you actually saw in the world but never in glossy gay magazines.” (Worth flagging: Bear World was founded by the man who now owns BEAR, so read it as a house history rather than a neutral one.)

Circulation grew quickly, and the format moved up to standard magazine trim with a black-and-white cover, then color. Wright dates the arrival of the look he thinks most people still associate with bears to issue 9 in 1989, when Jack Radcliffe took the cover; the collaboration between Bulger, Nelson and Radcliffe, he writes, established “the now iconic imagery of gay bear culture.” Bulger also, by Wright's account, tried to copyright the word “bear” so that the bear clubs then springing up would have to pay him to use it. The courts turned him down, Wright writes, on the grounds that “bear” was “a generic, and therefore uncopyrightable, word.”

Then it stopped — and the two accounts don't match. Wright's history has BEAR published under Brush Creek Media, bought by Beardog Hoffman in 1994, until the IRS seized Brush Creek's inventory in 2002 and took the magazine down with it. A creditor, Butch Media Ltd., picked up the copyrights, and in 2010 Steven Wolfe and Teddy Marke restarted it out of Las Vegas with a wider brief covering gay masculinity generally. Dallas Voice, which reported the relaunch, describes a differently shaped middle: an end in 2002, a revival launched in 2008 that lasted two years on paper, a move entirely online in the 2010s, and a site that eventually went defunct. The two sources agree on the 2002 collapse and on the eventual disappearance; the years in between are approximate.

Dallas Voice reports that ownership passed in 2024 to Richard Jones, an LGBTQ+ media publisher who founded Bear World Magazine — though Bear World itself was already calling BEAR recently relaunched under new ownership back in 2023.

Quoted by Dallas Voice from the announcement release, Jones pitched the decision as a bet against the feed rather than a wallow in the past. “We're at a point where everything is digital, and I think people are craving something physical again — a magazine you can actually hold, keep, put on your coffee table,” he said. He added: “That's part of why print felt right for this relaunch, not just nostalgia.”

What's actually in it. The magazine has published issue one's table of contents. Mack Sturgis shot the cover subject, Jason. There are further photo stories from Jeremiah Damian, shooting David in Palm Springs; from John Orbit RMRL, on Brett in Georgia; and a Cigar Bears portfolio by Tristan Sutphin, credited to various bear and leather events. On the writing side there's an essay from Zachary Zane, a piece from Wright himself titled “Everything Old is New Again,” an interview with the leather creator Syluss, and an advice column from Cody Daigle-Orians. And the personals are back, which the magazine promises with an up-to-date twist. To our eye that list reads like the old book with the edges filed off.

Our read on why print, and why now. The argument for paper is one Jones is making as a seller, and we think he's right about it: a magazine sits in a room where other people can see it, which is not something a feed does. But our read is also that bear culture was never waiting on a magazine to survive. It has kept going in rooms — the ones we cover, like 2Bears Tavern Uptown in Chicago, The Iron Bear in Austin and Woofs Sports Bar in Atlanta — and across a calendar of weekend events.

Which, going by Dallas Voice's account of the release, is where BEAR intends to sell it: reps are set to work all major U.S. bear events, Texas Bear Round Up among them, across 2026 and 2027. From where we sit that's the right instinct — a magazine about a community that finds each other in person ought to be sold where that happens.