What’s A Gay Otter?
If you’ve never heard the term “Otter” before with respect to gay culture, don’t worry about it. I didn’t even know what it was until recently. I asked Tony what it was; he didn’t know. And at a small dinner party recently I asked a table of eight filled with LGBT people and none of them knew. Everyone knew the term “Bear,” but not Otter.
And that’s because Otter is actually a term that’s part of Bear sub-culture. Urban Dictionary describes Otter this way:
A fuzzy adorable sexually aggressive and playful sex object that is highly sought after.
For those who don’t know what a gay Bear is, the link below has a good explanation. And it also mentions Otter as a sub-culture.
It’s titled A Handy Guide to All Gay Men
The gay world is often represented as some sort of monolithic whole that has the same culture. That is a lie. It is actually broken down into a handful of substrata to which each gay belongs. Here they are.
Here’s what they say about Bears:
Bears
Body Type: Large, hairy, often with facial hair
Description: The bigger, generally older subset of the population is new but increasingly popular both in the community and pop culture. They have their own social calendar that is well populated with events to support the flannel-clad butch lifestyle of beards and beer guts.
The article goes on to mention other categories of gay men, but I’m not actually certain where I would fit. If I had to go by the process of elimination and be totally honest I’d probably be what they consider an “Art Fag.”
You can read more here. It’s also interesting because in all the categories and sub-categories they mention brief descriptions, and one description is top or bottom. All state bottom. So for those who think top or bottom isn’t a big thing in gay culture…or it shouldn’t be a big thing in gay fiction…you might want to double check to see if the information you have about gay culture is accurate.
As a side note, when I was in college, before I met Tony, I met a nice-looking thin guy
at The Roxy. We went back to his apartment and to my surprise he removed all his clothes the minute we walked inside. The first thing I noticed was that he had fuzz all over his body. Fuzz on his chest, legs, arms, back, and neck. He even had fuzz at the tops of his shoulders and his knuckles. Just fuzz. So when he asked me if I wanted anything, I smiled and replied, “I think I left the lights on in my car.” And I got out of there as fast as I could, as politely as I could. I guess he would have been considered an Otter.
GRL 2013
An author friend I’ve known since the early days of e-publishing when I first started writing for the now defunct e-publisher loveyoudivine.com, attended
Gay Rom Lit 2013 (GRL), in Atlanta this past weekend and he’s doing a two part blog post series on the events and all things book related pertaining to GRL. His name is Jon Michaelsen and I’ve read and reviewed his gay mystery/suspense books a few times
here on the blog.
Attendees also got the opportunity to ask questions of the panel, which proved to be very focused on specific series penned by the authors and questions about future releases. I found it personally interesting when JP Bowie described while writing the books in his Portrait series of mystery and mayhem with protagonists Peter Brandon and Jeff Stevens, how secondary characters introduced later in the series grew larger than life and demanded their own series, thus Nick Fallon Investigations was created and now spans four wonderful novels.
You can read the first post in full, here. Since I don’t know much about GRL I found it to be a good, fast read that talks about books and publishing, which is what I’ve always been told these events revolve around. I haven’t seen many other articles about GRL yet, at least not with respect to books publishing. If anyone has any links, feel free to e-mail them to me.
Gay Marriage NJ
Last night, at midnight, Gay Marriage became legal in New Jersey. I saw on my local Philadelphia news channel that only one mile away from me, in Lambertville, NJ, gay couples were gathering at midnight to celebrate at the city hall where there was a big reception. Lambertville, like New Hope, PA, has a large LGBT community. I’m thrilled for them. But imagine the way it would feel to live in Pennsylvania, only one mile away from a state where gay marriage is legal, and not be considered equal.
Several couples planned to marry minutes after the state began recognizing the unions. Yet other said they had not been able to get a license. New Jersey law requires that couples wait three days between obtaining a license and getting married.
“There’s a lot of mass confusion and it boils down to the fact that the state should have issued guidance a week ago,” said Troy Stevenson, executive director of Garden State Equality.
We should all be so lucky to experience that brand of confusion.
Photo Here
