THE NEW YORK TIMES: An annual celebration of bears — gay men on the bigger and hairier side — feels different in the age of GLP-1s.
Some partygoers were in sequins. Others in polo shirts. Steve August and TJ Howe were in full costume as park rangers, wandering through the crowd of hundreds of men gathered on the deck of the Boatslip in Provincetown, Mass., asking if anyone had encountered problem bears. They were prepared, they said, to stop bears from eating your dinner.
This year though, the real problem was different. This year, the bears were harder to find.
Howe and August brought their costumed shtick to the final night of Provincetown’s Bear Week, an annual bacchanal at this gay vacation destination on the farthest reaches of Cape Cod.
The midsummer festivities are a celebration of bears — a favored term of self-identification for many gay men who are bigger and hairier. It’s a time when the ordinary archetypes of gay male perfection, with their waxed chests and trim waistlines, take a back seat to those with beards and bellies.
But even at Bear Week, a body-positive carnival of self-love and hard-core flirting that celebrated its 25th anniversary this summer, it’s impossible to escape weight-loss drugs — what they change for the 11 percent of Americans now taking them, according to Gallup, and for everyone else too. » | Jacob Bernstein | Reporting from Provincetown, Mass. | Saturday, August 1, 2026
