Visit Provincetown in mid-July, and along with the throngs of Cory's shearwaters that patrol the harbor by day and cackle together in noisy gaggles by night, you can witness the return of another beloved migratory species. The bears.
Thousands of them arrive in a procession of packed ferries from Boston to MacMillan Wharf, where they're released to pillage the shops of Commercial Street for cheese fries, lobster rolls, strong cocktails, and objectively skimpy bathing suits. Patio pools overflow with their numbers and seaside lanais strain under their rapturous dancing. Unsuspecting tourists huddle close as they push through tipsy crowds of furry faces, all locked in a ceaseless cycle of kisses hello and goodbye and calls of "WOOF" and "see you at Tea, gurl."
If you didn't know that bears were just one stripe in the rainbow of gaydom, you do now. But you'd be forgiven for never having heard of them.
For a long time, the bear world was a subculture of a subculture. Bear lore has it that it emerged in the early '80s, when increasing numbers of gay men started rejecting the emerging lithe, lean body standards by celebrating and essentially cultivating an ethos of hirsute amplitude. (Of course, some also believe it was also a tacit response to the body savaging effects of AIDS; bodies offering a signal of health in a time of deep uncertainty among gay men.)
From this metaphorical type was derived an entire nomenclature: Grizzly bears are the super furry ones; musclebears are the jacked ones; polar bears are the gray-bearded elders; leatherbears are just what it says on the tin; cubs are bears that are diminished by one degree — be it age, size, or fur; otters are the slim hairy critters that share the habitat.
They bump bellies at bear bars, congregate through chapters of localized bear clubs (think the Elks, but way more grabby), assemble and party around the world at "bear runs," of which Bear Week in Provincetown has become the grand dame, drawing an estimated 10,000 bears and admirers at its height.
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While this furred herd in caps and cargo shorts overruns Commercial Street, on the residential side-roads, lined with clapboard cottages that were all booked a year ago, you can hear another kind of birdsong among the local larks and nuthatches. From the porches and balconies come two distinct calls: a rising three-note chime, and a descendant counterpart.
They are the unmistakable notifications of Growlr and Scruff, a pair of bear-inclined location-based dating (i.e. hookup) apps for gay men. Though reception can be chronically iffy this far out on the Cape, the abundance of Wi-Fi signals fanning out from the cafes and B&Bs has created a vital virtual space in P-Town's charmingly tight quarters, and apps like Growlr and Scruff are tantamount to a whole new main drag to cruise.
While the apps are distinguished by differences in searchability (Scruff wins) and service (Growlr is more precisely bear-attuned), the fundamental functionality of each app is similar: a main GPS-organized grid of user pics indicates who is on or offline; a profile page discloses their distance and offers space for a short bio and list of interests; and should a user opt to include them, galleries of private pictures (ahem) can be locked or unlocked (and, often, swiftly uploaded to Tumblr for mass consumption).
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That little three-note jingle means that someone has "Woof"d or "Growl"d at you — sort of like a poke on Facebook. It could also mean that someone has sent you a message, or unlocked a trove of photos, or announced a bear-friendly dance party nearby, or asked you to marry him from Taiwan. That happens a lot.
When GPS dating apps first arrived on the scene with the debut of Grindr in 2010, the scene responded with some serious side-eye. Dozens of early adopters could be spotted at that year's Bear Week, despite the Grindr's more general gay audience. The sight of men on a crowded sundeck shielding their heads in towels to see their iPhones gave many bears pause about the prospects for the future of gay social life: Why show up if you're just going to sign on?
But the trend had legs, albeit waxed ones. Grindr now has over 10 million downloads and 5 million active monthly users. And its cub-corralling derivatives have effectively found their niche. Scruff founding partner and CPO Jason Marchant reports a half million members logging in every day, a tenfold increase since the app's launch four years ago. And Growlr founder and CEO Coley Cummiskey reports five million users worldwide, with about 10,000 users online at any given time.
That's a pretty close match to Provincetown at peak bear. As such, it's not hard to spot both apps in use in the wild: bears at bars hoisting their phones over their heads to snag some stray wireless, or comparing notes on assorted "Woof"ers around tables at coffeeshops, or snapping fresh profile pics on the wharf, or using Growlr's paid "SHOUT" function to announce parties, report lost bank cards, present extreme bouts of hotel room loneliness, or remind users of themed outfit suggestions for the day's tea dance (e.g. kilts on Tuesday, singlets on Wednesday). And you can bet that each bike stealthily zipping across town in the dead of night, and most every walk of shame down Bradford the following morning is the product of one of these apps doing their job.
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A few years and millions of downloads later, it's hard to imagine either of these apps are killing gay social life. And while Cummiskey grants that social media may play a part in a decline in bar business, he doesn't equate bar business with gay life, nor the rise in app use with a decline in gay culture. "I came out in the '90s," he says on the phone from Columbus, Ohio, "You could go out any day of the week and the bars would be shoulder to shoulder. That's not true anymore. Columbus had like 28 gays bars. Today it's down to five or six."
Cummiskey points to the '90s, when men might sit nervously in the parking lot on their first visit to a gay bar, wondering what and who was inside. Apps like Scruff and Growlr soften the stigma of coming out by providing a reassuring visual of the density and presence of the community at large — as well as its furrier, hungrier offshoots. They also blow the doors off the notion of what a gay bar is for — to that end, both occasionally throw bar events for users to interface in 3-D.
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Both apps appear to be roaring forward.
But as broad, intimate, and pervasive as their reach might be, there still remains some pure, precious space at Bear Week for a vacation free of buzzing smartphones. (Let's see you try finding a pocket on a singlet.)
Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.