There are between four and six stages to coming out as gay, according to people who study these sorts of things. Many assume all gay people will first be confused about their sexuality, figure out they’re gay, accept that they are and finally, take pride in it. But for many gay men, including the photographer Alan Charlesworth, there’s another step of confusion thrown into the mix.

As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia during the 1990s, all that Mr. Charlesworth knew about gay culture came from television shows like “Will and Grace.” Mainstream culture tends to depict gay men as either comically effeminate, or supersculpted and image conscious. Mr. Charlesworth had a hard time relating, or being attracted to, those kinds of images. He said that while he questioned his sexuality in high school, he couldn’t find anything that reflected it, or an outlet to express it. He said he had a hard time figuring out who he was, but he knew he wasn’t like the well-manicured, muscular men with a penchant for designer clothes and musicals on those television shows.

So Mr. Charlesworth remained confused, first about his sexuality, then about his place within gay culture, until he stumbled upon a Web site dedicated to “bears.” It was the first time he’d seen images of big, burly men who were attracted to other men. He said he felt like he’d finally found a home.

“It’s not perfect body, gym-toned, and no facial hair,” said Mr. Charlesworth, who recently completed a Master’s of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design. “That’s what society deems as being a normal, stereotypical gay male. That’s not what I identify with.”

Mr. Charlesworth, 30, definitely doesn’t look like that ubiquitous image of the stereotypical gay man, but he’s not large or hairy, either. For him, identifying as a bear is more about taking pride in his attraction to men with bodies that look as though they were formed by years of chopping trees, and not by years of running on treadmills and drinking protein smoothies.

But Mr. Charlesworth said his lack of heft made it hard to immediately identify with a group predominantly made up of large men. He said, for all their disdain for superficial gay culture, Bears can be obsessively body-focused, too, just on bigger bodies. So he used photography as a way in.

Four years ago, as part of an undergraduate project at Rochester Institute of Technology, he began photographing bears in the area around his school.

“I use photography as a social crutch, engaging with each scene or individual before and after the shutter is clicked,” Mr. Charlesworth wrote in his graduate school thesis.

Alan Charlesworth

Documenting bears with his 4×5 camera eventually helped Mr. Charlesworth get his foot in the door of bear communities from Provincetown, Mass., to San Francisco. Once in, he was able to explore the diversity in a culture that from the outside can appear to be homogeneous.

Yes, bears tend to idealize larger, hairier men, he found. But Mr. Charlesworth also found that there was room for cubs (younger bears), otters (skinny, but still hairy), polar bears (older men) and, “whatever other strange woodland creatures” as well.

The more he photographed, the more he came to see that being a bear had little to do with adhering to one body type. He said he now sees the culture as a way for gay men to be accepted as part of a group, no matter what its members look like.

Mr. Charlesworth plans to diversify the types of men he photographs, but he admits it will be hard to fully convey the multitude of bodies and attitudes in bear culture solely through images.

But, he said, he feels the need to try, because he’s realized the project has more profound implications for his life than he originally thought.

It’s about the same question that he struggled with back in the Philadelphia suburbs, and one that so many other gay men grapple with throughout their lives: if being gay isn’t about conforming to the stereotypes broadcast on television, peddled in magazines and reaffirmed on dating sites and in clubs across the country, then what is it about?

“I started the project really wanting to show this masculine engenderment,” he said. “Now I’m realizing four years later, it’s about my own personal affirmation.”

Alan Charlesworth

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