Portraits of gay bears through a rooftop hatch

I came out as gay when I was young, but for a long time it felt like I still had another secret to explain. I wasn’t just attracted to men. I was attracted to big men, hairy men, older men, bellies, beards, thick arms; the sort of bodies I never saw presented as desirable in the gay culture available to me growing up in North East England – or even anywhere visible on the internet, TV, film – anywhere whatsoever. 

For years, I didn’t even know there was a word for it. I had no idea what a ​“bear” was, never mind that there was an entire culture built around men who looked like the ones I was drawn to. So even after coming out as gay, I still felt slightly alien within gayness itself. I’d done the frightening bit and told people I liked men, only to realise I then had to explain why the men I liked looked nothing like the ones I was apparently supposed to fancy. 

Essentially, I had to come out twice. 

Back then, I did a lot of bleak teenage mental maths. If I was gay already, and then only attracted to this very particular kind of man, surely I had reduced the number of people I might ever meet to about 0.000001% of the population. It genuinely felt that scarce. 

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At 35, the whole thing has flipped. While some of my friends are beginning to panic about getting older, losing their hair or moving further away from whatever version of youth they once associated with desirability, I find myself heading in the opposite direction. People within the bear community often find themselves entering their prime at an older age. ​“The Daddy Era.”

More importantly, I eventually discovered that bears are everywhere. London, Berlin, Madrid, Rome. Bars, clubs, beaches, festivals, on the train, in the corner shop. What once felt like some impossibly niche defect in my sexuality turned out to be a whole international community. 

The men around me now are friends, lovers, exes, dates, people I’ve met through nightlife, people I’ve travelled with, people I argue with, laugh with and care about. They are not an abstract category of body that I happen to fancy. They have populated my life. 

That is what Big Boys On My Roof™is about. 

The photo series started completely by accident. In the summer of 2023, my flatmate and co-dog dad was bringing me a drink through the rooftop hatch of our flat in Soho. I looked down and saw his head and shoulders framed by this enormous square opening and thought it looked sick. I took a picture on my phone. That was it. 

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But I kept coming back to it. There was something funny and intimate about this huge man emerging through a tiny domestic opening, but there was also something about the way the hatch framed him. It also felt like it was starting to speak to a particular point I’ve reached in my life. It turned this completely ordinary part of my home into a little portrait studio. The picture felt affectionate without trying to announce itself as affectionate. 

So I started doing it again. Whenever one of these men happened to be at my flat, I photographed them coming through the same hatch. Same place, same framing device, different man. There was no casting brief and no attempt to decide who was or wasn’t sufficiently ​“bear” to qualify. They are simply men who exist in my life. 

That repetition became important to me. The hatch gives everyone the same stage, but each person occupies it differently. Their faces, bodies, clothes, expressions and personalities do the rest. Some images are funny, some are tender, some are sexy, some slightly awkward. I like that. I never wanted the series to feel like a catalogue of a body type. 

Because bigger queer men are still strangely under-celebrated as they are. Gay culture has become much more expansive in the ways it talks about sexuality, gender and masculinity, but body representation can still feel remarkably narrow. Bigger men are everywhere in queer life, yet much less visible in the images that are used to represent it. When they do appear, their size can become the entire point of the image, rather than simply one part of who they are. 

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I wanted to photograph these men without asking them to symbolise anything. No transformations. No before-and-after narrative. No argument about what a bear should weigh, wear or look like. Just portraits of men I think are beautiful, made in the place where my life with many of them actually happens. 

That has also changed the way I think about getting older as a gay man. Ageing is often talked about as a process of losing something: youth, desirability, attention. My experience has been almost the reverse. Getting older has brought me closer to myself and deeper into a community I spent my teenage years believing barely existed. 

What once made me feel isolated is now one of the things that gives me the strongest sense of belonging. That is the shift I wanted the photographs to hold: from scarcity to abundance, from imagining there was something wrong with what I wanted to understanding that there are many different standards of beauty, attraction and intimacy. 

The men I once calculated made up approximately 0.000001% of the population are everywhere in my life now. 

Sometimes they literally come through my roof.

Anthony Stockdale is a freelance writer.

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