Portrait of the Cartoonist as a Middle-Aged Bear
An Interview with Tim Barela
By Ron Suresha
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Ron: Regarding your readers: do you get much fan mail?
Tim: Actually, no. I receive a piece of fan mail every once in a long while, and it's very gratifying whenever I do. I have struck up friendships and gotten to meet some people that way. Not that I write back and become penpals with everybody who writes me, but there have been some folks who write fan mail, and I realize we have something in common, and I write them back and it turns out to be an interesting correspondence, and we become friends. I've met some very good friends that way.
I have a very dear friend in Pennsylvania who was a reader of my old motorcycle stuff. He's a biker - just like I used to be. He used to read my cartoons in the motorcycle magazines. Later on - just when he was coming to grips with his own sexuality, coming out of the closet, and starting to make gay friends - he saw some of my Leonard & Larry cartoons somewhere. He couldn't believe it. He realized, Hey, this was the same guy who used to draw those cartoons in those straight biker's rags from years back that he used to read! So, he just had to write me. We've become great friends.
I've also struck up this wonderful correspondence with a reader in Oslo, Norway. He's not a biker, I'm afraid, but a photographer, like Leonard, strangely. But one of these days I hope to actually talk to him on the phone and maybe even meet him. I don't know when that might happen but he writes me all these wonderful letters about the fan base I have in Norway! It's really amazing and gratifying to find out I've got readers in other countries.
Ron: Not surprising, however, considering that the strip is now carried on the Internet on Frontiers' Website.
Tim: True. The friend of mine in Oslo, though, found a copy of my first book, Domesticity Isn't Pretty, in a bookstore in Stockholm. He stumbled on to one of my books - in Europe - and came to the Internet afterward. It's shocking to know how my stuff gets around.
Ron: Yet you mentioned to me in a previous conversation that your books aren't carried by your local bookseller.
Tim: You mean, my bookstore here in Temecula? Well, I'm not surprised they don't. They can't carry everything that's printed under the sun. They could carry it if I wanted them to. I certainly do wax green with envy from time to time, when I go into the bookstore and see the "Local Authors" section - this little rack where they have titles like A Guide to the Temecula Wine Country and stuff like that. It'd be wonderful if my books could be sitting on the shelves with that stuff, but this is a very conservative little town, out in the country, and I would have to be out of my mind to allow that to happen. But it's nice to fantasize about.
Ron: Do you yourself identify more with Larry or Leonard, or some other character, or none of the above?
Tim: I used to tell people that I identified more with Larry, but as his character and personality have evolved, he really has gone beyond me, beyond reflecting my own personality. I'm much more identified with Jim, believe it or not! He sort of looks like me. We both have long hair, salt-and-pepper beards. Jim used to be the loneliest guy in town . . . until he met his cowboy! Until he met the Marlboro Man of his dreams. Which still has not happened for me, but, you know, I can't live vicariously through the strip completely. I gotta give somebody like Jim a happy ending sooner or later. He was getting to be kinda pathetic before Merle came along and I decided to put them together.
Ron: Your strip is well known for its abundance of bearded characters.
Tim: I draw what I like. Other people who draw other comic strips can draw what they like, but I draw for myself and I know what kind of audience I have. All the people who've felt that they and their tastes have been neglected in the world of gay comic strips all these years have sort of rallied around my stuff.
Ron: It seems to me that the effort involved in drawing beards and body hair - with the level of detail that you use - must be somewhat a labor of love. Alison Bechdel commented to me, "No one renders facial hair like Tim Barela, I always say. He does the most fabulous beards - he seems to draw each individual strand of hair."
Tim: It's a lot of work. But I can't imagine not drawing men who are worth looking at and worth spending time with, every couple of weeks when the comic comes out. I can't imagine drawing men any other way. It's the type of men I like to draw, and the type I like to see, and that my readers like to see. My readers expect nothing less, and I'm not gonna give them anything less!
Ron: As a friend of mine says, "You find a fetish that works for you, and you stick with it."
Tim: Of course, yes! Bearded men, and leather, and cowboys - it all works for me.
Ron: And these are some of the features that have made your strip so popular with the Bear community around the world. How have you related with this particular group of readers?
Tim: The Bears are a very large percentage of my readership. I'm well known in the Bear community. They're the type of people I relate to significantly and the type that most of my friends are. I don't have anything against other types, but I'm a Bear, myself - what can I say? That's where I'm coming from.
Ron: What was your initial reaction to learning about the Bear phenomenon in the mid-80's? Considering that the whole thing began around the same time as Leonard & Larry - you even did a one-time guest cartoon for Bear issue #4 - did what was happening with the Bears influence what you were doing in your strip?
Tim: After Leonard & Larry became a regular gig, I never did Grizzly & Ted [in Bear magazine] again. Besides, as I mentioned before, I never really wanted to do a "sex strip" and Bear magazine was shaping up to be a very sex-oriented magazine, which is fine - I have nothing against that. I just didn't want to do a sex strip. The type of strip that I wanted to make of Grizzly & Ted was more like what I do in Leonard & Larry. I didn't think that that type of more conservative strip would have fit into the format. But I love that magazine, and American Bear - don't get me wrong. I definitely love the way the whole thing has evolved.
Ron: What's your take on the whole Bear subculture? Like myself, you've watched the whole thing blossom since before -
Tim: - Watched it evolve since before the moniker "bear" was a common expression, way, way back. It's just wonderful to know that there's a reactionary movement to the mainstream gay press, who think we all look like the pretty models on the covers of some of the more mainstream gay magazines . . .
Ron: Like Frontiers?
Tim: [Laughs.] I don't want to criticize my art director! Don't make me do that!
No, but there is this mindset that we all want to see are these pretty, blond, bald-faced, bald-chested individuals. They may be very pretty, but they don't do a thing for me. It's nice to see that there's been a reaction to that, this collective cry of "No! We don't want that, we're not gonna take it, we're gonna have things the way we like it."
Ron: So it follows that the success of Leonard & Larry is yet more evidence of the interest of other Bear-minded and -bodied folks.
Tim: Yes, I agree!
Ron: Personally, Tim, what does it mean to you to age along with your characters? You've mentioned your earlier midlife crisis. We've also seen Larry -
Tim: - Larry's gone through midlife crises of one sort or another, Leonard has grown grayer and grayer over the years, and Jim is growing grayer and balder - fortunately, losing hair is not a problem I have.
I don't think I could do the strip any other way. I really couldn't do one of those comic strips where nobody grows older and the kids never grow up and things don't change. But it's not only about the strip reflecting real life, I think that if I drew one of those strips which stays the same year after year I'd grow bored to death of doing it. I don't know how I could come up with funny things to say. So many of the comic strips in the newspaper - where nothing ever changes and nobody gets any older and the children never grow up - they end up recycling the same stale humor over and over again, year after year after year. I couldn't handle that. I couldn't stand writing stuff like that.
Someone once asked me at a public appearance how I manage to keep my stuff fresh. I don't know! I do it because I just couldn't imagine doing it or writing it any other way. I have to keep it fresh to keep myself from becoming bored with it, and in turn to keep the readers from becoming bored. I guess I've achieved a certain degree of freshness every time the strip comes out. That's what I want.
Ron: Is that the hardest part about creating the strip for you? Keeping it fresh?
Tim: Sometimes it is, because even I fall back on old gags and old situations. I think, Well, I've gotten humor out of this situation before, maybe I can squeeze some more humor out of it again. Like Larry becoming a grandfather for the third time: to use a hackneyed old gag like that but to make it fresh can be really difficult. That's probably part of the reason why I ended up in the midst of last year's writer's block.
Ron: What part of creating Leonard & Larry gives you the most pleasure?
Tim: Drawing bearded men with hairy chests! [Laughs.] The thing that gives me the most pleasure is knowing that my little cartoon brings so much pleasure to the lives of regular readers of the strip. I once got the most wonderful compliment from someone - this was years ago when the AIDS crisis was raging - he told me that one of the nicest things about my strip is that I make people laugh and at the time that it was important for the community to laugh. I appreciate it when I hear things like that, or hear from other people that they had always aspired to having a "normal" life as a gay person, to being monogamous, to being settled. When they say they wanted to be happy with themselves but didn't see that around them, yet were able to see that in the characters in my strip, and that my strip was a positive influence on their lives, on their coming to terms with their own sexuality - that gives me a tremendous amount of pleasure.
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