Author Archives: Cecilia Sweet-Coll

Don’t Talk About Crashing – Cyclist Superstition

My informant is a 21-year-old animation student who was a nationally and internationally recognized competitive cyclist in her high school years. She has since given up cycling professionally but teaches spinning classes at the Lyon Center. She heard this word of advice from an older cycling teammate when she started cycling. This interview was conducted during a break in our animation class.

“You never talk about crashing, that’s the number one, because if you talk about crashing, you’re gonna crash. Anytime I’ve ever crashed, I talked about crashing immediately before.”
“That happens to you?”

“That happened to me so… (chuckles) I’m like ah fuckin hell, they’re probably right. Just don’t talk about crashing. If you like, talk about it, it’s just like, bound to happen, which I guess, my old coach, the reasoning she said was that, like, uh, you know that psychology thing where if you say like ‘I’m not gonna do this’ then you do it because you’ve like, brought the idea of doing it to yourself. If you think about crashing… and she’d be like no, no, you can’t phrase it that way, you just have to like, think about staying upright and being alert! And I was like, this is stupid, this doesn’t actually, this isn’t a thing. But uh, yeah.”

With a sport like cycling where everything is so up to chance, crashes are one of the scarier possibilities during a race. It makes sense that there would be superstition about it, especially among higher-consequence competitive cyclists.

What is a Gay Bear?

My informant is a 20 year old gay film student who self-identifies as a bear. Gay bears are loosely defined as masculine, bigger, hairier guys who are into other masculine, bigger, hairier guys. Here he tries to define what a gay bear is:

“So the bear community if you don’t already know is a community of gay men who tend to be on the heavier side of life. And uh, weight, like, there’s no specified weight that makes you a bear, there’s a lot of schools of thought on it and the jury’s kinda out on it, but um, people tend to think that it’s just bigger guys. Muscular, heavy, just big. But really the biggest, uh, the biggest component is hair. Hairy men, hairy gay men, are bears. ….That’s not a good quote. But the bear flag is a nice little piece of folklore, it consists of uh, orange, black, brown, and uhm… orange black brown colors, more, and those are supposed to be the colors of, all the different colors of body hair, all the different possible colors of body hair on men.”

The informant knows about the bear identity and the bear flag through friends who are bears, but initially (especially in high school) gained most of his information about bears through the internet, because “nobody really talks about gay culture in high school, let alone bears.” As he said, the jury is out on what really defines a bear, and the definitions of the identity is in itself so diverse and numerous that anyone you ask will have a slightly different concept of it. However, here my informant references a semi-official (though born out of folklore) bear “flag” to identify gay bears more with hairiness.

Bear Week and Dick Dock

My informant is a 20 year old gay film student who self-identifies as a bear. Gay bears are loosely defined as masculine, bigger, hairier guys who are into other masculine, bigger, hairier guys. In this interview he describes a holiday particular to bears called Bear Week, which takes place in Provincetown. He says it has always been a dream of his since he heard of it in 7th grade to go to Bear Week, and he might make his dream a reality this summer. It means a lot to him because this community is one he is very involved in, and very into personally as well. This interview took place in a university dining hall.

“Uh, ok so, the biggest bear event is at Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is already a pretty gay hotspot year-round, but uh, second week of July the bears come to town and wreak havoc on the pools and, (laughs) and hotels, and main streets of Provincetown. And there’s a place called Dick Dock, which is (chuckles) a certain section of the boardwalk in Provincetown, and you go underneath the boardwalk, just as the old song says, (laughter) you can find men engaging in… all sorts of pleasures.”
“Where’d you hear this?”

“That I know about… I know about this from friends of mine who have gone to Provincetown for Bear Week.”

When I asked him about the more common ways that this kind of knowledge is proliferated, he had this to say:

“Well in gay cultures, the folklore tends to spread more in private, um, because bears is not something that’s discussed widely in high schools across America so I didn’t know about it, my friends weren’t telling me about it so I had to look this kinda stuff up on the internet, and I would just read articles, and like, the Wikipedia article, like a lot, and you know, different theories on like, what bears were about, and there’s this one great guy named Andrew Sullivan, who’s actually a super famous writer, and he wrote this great article about what it means to be a bear…”

Bear Week and Dick Dock were two of the only pieces of information he could give me about bears that he hadn’t just learned from the internet or from bear movies and webseries (of which there are many!) because of this phenomenon he describes of the rarity of discussion of bear culture among youth. However this community means a lot to him, and since now he’s in college he can participate in it less virtually and more in reality, which gives him access to bear folklore of a different sort. That said, this community has evolved and proliferated (like many other queer subcultures) through the internet so much that it’s difficult if not impossible to disentangle the “real” folklore from the internet folklore, especially when you’re young and tech-savvy. I think the internet has opened up so many avenues and subcultures for youth, especially queer youth, to explore, as it’s easier to access in private, even before coming out.

Dancing at Chalma

My informant is my 74 year old grandmother, who is a language professor born and raised in Mexico City, and currently living and working there. She first used this proverb or saying with me when talking about something that can’t be fixed at all, “ni yendo bailar a Chalma” or “not even going to dance at Chalma”. Here’s her explanation when I asked her what Chalma is:
“Es un pueblito donde hay un santuario donde la gente va a rezar por milagros. Y allí hay un lugar donde unos señores tocan violincillo y donde la gente baila con flores en la cabeza para que les conceda el milagro. Y el señor de Chalma es un Cristo negro que esta allí bailando.”
“Y donde conociste eso de Chalma?”
“Todo el mundo se lo sabe!”
Translation: “It’s a little village where there’s a sanctuary where people go to pray for miracles. And there there’s a place where some men are playing little violins and where people dance with flowers on their heads so their miracle can come true. And the man of Chalma is a black Jesus that’s there dancing.”
“And where’d you learn this about Chalma?”
“Everyone knows it!”

The significance for my grandmother is relatively little, as she’s only been to Chalma as a tourist, but she knows of many people that have made pilgrimages to cure an ailing relative or themselves. The interesting thing about Chalma is that while it is a place people go to pray for miracles, traditionally, there’s also this often-used saying that dismisses it as an option. You can go pray and dance at Chalma if you want, but some things cannot be fixed not even going to dance at Chalma.

Cincinnati Chili

The informant is a 20 year old college student from Cincinnati. He has a special attachment to the place like many young students, where he simultaneously hates the place and doesn’t want to go back, but also holds a strong love for it if anyone else dared speak ill of it. He told me about one of his jobs back home as a dishwasher for a restaurant that served Cincinnati chili, and told me what it was. This interview was conducted on a break between classes.

“Ok so um, so yeah, so Cincinnati has their own style of chili and uh, there’s two different leading chili fast food chains, there’s Skyline and there’s Gold Star. And there’s like big rivalries and like people have their loyalties to the different restaurants and like, it’s pretty serious stuff. Not for me, I’m like, I don’t really like Cincinnati chili, I guess that makes me kind of sacrilegious but um, basically what it is is just like, low quality… this is gonna sound like I’m bashing my own city but this is just the reality, it’s just like low quality, watered down like, chili, and what they do is they put cinnamon in it, and that’s just like, the standard ingredient, and depending like, if you go to Gold Star they just have cinnamon but if you go to Skyline they have chocolate. So it’s chocolate, cinnamon and chili, like at the same time. And like some people really like that, but I’m not a fan. I worked for Gold Star, and most people liked Skyline, I’d say like 80% of people at least side with Skyline, so like people would actually hold that against me that I worked there, that was a real thing that people would do. I guess the only other thing I could say is that people who come out of state and try it usually don’t like it, it’s usually something that people who are born in Cincinnati and grow up with it actually enjoy and people who try it for the first time as an adult usually don’t like it. It’s just one of those things.”

It meant less to him at the time as it does now when he looks back on it, he says; the nostalgia clouds the significance a bit. But it’s definitely a rite of passage for a Cincinnati kid to work at one of these restaurants, so it solidifies his identity as a Cincinnati boy and gives him an extra connection to the place.