ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationships and differences between Bear/y spaces in different cities of the UK. It opens by critiquing accounts of the UK’s LGBTQ spaces focused on London, arguing that research on LGBTQ communities suffers from a ‘metronormative’ focus that mistakenly treats very large cities as the norm. It also highlights the dearth of engagement with intra-national variation amongst Bear communities and spaces. This chapter highlights the importance of London as an origin point for ‘Bear’ in the UK, but also the perception of London’s Bear/y spaces as being dominated by trim muscular men with a ‘negative attitude’. However, it also notes perceived intra-urban variation in London scenes too. This chapter then shows how London was compared with smaller cities, which were believed to be necessarily more mixed and therefore more friendly due to the smaller population pool. Finally Manchester was shown to slip between both the London bracket and the smaller city bracket. This chapter ultimately suggests that population size may be a key factor in experiences in Bear/y spaces, and stresses the importance of addressing geographic variance for understanding Bears.
