In an LGBT context, the term bear carries instant connotations. The label was popularized in the 1980s to describe gay or bi men whose body type — bigger, bulkier, and hairier — sharply contrasted with the more popular style of hairless and fit physiques (known in the ‘70s and ‘80s as the clone look). These men didn’t look like chiseled Greek gods or Levi’s models: they looked a little like, well, bears. But it turns out that actual bears — as in, animals of the family Ursidae — can also be pretty queer and bi too.
Bears are particularly difficult creatures to study in the wild. They live mostly solitary lives, range over vast territories, and can be dangerously aggressive toward humans. And since most adult bears spend so little of their lives around other adults, thousands of hours of observation in the field often reveal very little about their sexual behavior. Even so, researchers have gathered some remarkable findings about bear behavior over the generations. In his encyclopedic book of animal bisexuality, Biological Exuberance (1999), Canadian biologist Bruce Bagemihl gathered decades of data documenting same-sex behavior among black, brown, grizzly, and polar bears.
A fascinating phenomenon among bears is the tendency for females to coparent with one another. Beyond the act of mating, male bears play no role in the raising of their young. Given their habit of killing or eating their own cubs, that’s probably for the best. But, as the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child, and bear moms often form intimate bonds with other maternal females and raise families together. As Bagemihl explained:
Sometimes two female animals who already have offspring join forces, bonding together and raising their young as a same-sex family unit (among mammals, female coparents may even suckle each other’s young): this occurs in Grizzly [and other] Bears.
Among grizzly bears, these unions sometimes involve three females, known as a triumvirate. What’s so interesting here is that, because bears do not form long-term opposite-sex relationships, this same-sex pair-bonding isn’t a case of female bears simulating male-female partnerships in situations where no males are available — these same-sex families represent the only form of long-term bonding between mature bears. As Bagemihl wrote, they “cannot be modeled after male-female (heterosexual) ‘roles’ because there simply are no such models.” About 20% of female bears form these same-sex bonds and coparent with other females at some point in their lives, and about 9% of grizzly cubs are raised in bear families with two (or three) moms! I’d hate to be the predator who messes with those cubs.
Bears also engage in same-sex mounting and sexual play, especially in adolescence, and have even been known to get quite kinky in certain situations. A 2014 study published in the journal in Zoo Biology documented two male brown bears living in captivity who “engaged in recurrent fellatio multiple times per day.” In fact, over the 116 hours researchers spent watching the bears, they observed 28 acts of fellatio (one every four hours!), each of which resulted in, shall we say, completion. The study authors hypothesize that this behavior, specifically the ritualized way in which it was performed at regular intervals, could have some connection to a lack of maternal suckling early in life. Talk about an oral fixation!
To be sure, bear bisexuality doesn’t manifest in quite the ways we see in humans or other primates, because unlike us, bears are not very social animals — in some cases, they can be downright antisocial. But even with these solitary and often surly behemoths, we can still see examples of same-sex partnership and tenderness. The remarkable thing about nature is that queerness is virtually everywhere. Find me a species that hasn’t shown signs of bisexual behavior, and I’ll show you a species that simply hasn’t been studied or published on enough.