He received his PhD from UC Berkeley and is a retired professor of English and German. He has authored and edited several books, notably The Bear Book, which is a seminal text of queer history. His current bear history work is a full-time job. 

Wright grew up in a working-class family in upstate New York. He was a Rotary International exchange student in Mülheim-an-der-Ruhr, West Germany (1970-71).

Studing in Germany, the 70-s was his coming out and beginning of activism decade. He wrote extensively for the emerging gay press, including GPU News (Milwaukee), Schwuchtel (Berlin), and Revolt (Stockholm). He received a fellowship in Netherlandic Studies (UC Berkeley) and was a Fulbright fellow at Cornell.

Answering the siren call from Carl Wittman’s A Gay Manifesto and the San Francisco portrayed in Armistead Maupin’s column Tales of the City, in 1979 Wright moved to San Francisco’s gay Castro District. He lived through the AIDS epidemic at Ground Zero (Castro District) as a PWA (person with AIDS), and became an AIDS activist, volunteering with several community-based AIDS education and emotional support groups.

He earned a PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley (1992). An oral history of his years as an openly gay graduate student at UC Berkely in the Bancroft Library Archive.

In the mid 1980s Wright became involved in the activities of gay men who were calling themselves bears. Realizing this bear phenomenon was more than a passing fashion, he began taking notes, collecting ephemera, and led “What Is a Bear?” discussion groups at Bear Expo (1992, 1993, and 1994). To date there is still no settled answer to this question. In 1992 he founded the Bear History Project, and the earliest results were editing The Bear Book (1997), editing The Bear Book II (2000), and co-curating (with artist TJ Norris) the “Bear Icons” art exhibition (Boston, Provincetown, Manhattan, and Washington, D.C. (1999-2002)Wright was a volunteer at the Men’s Resource Center (2000-05) in Amherst, MA. When moved back to San Francisco in 2005 he joined the Billy Community. When he moved back to Central New York in 2013, he became involved with Bear Your Soul gatherings at the Easton Mountain Retreat Center. These continue to be his gay spiritual communities.

With the publication of Children of Lazarus: The Forgotten Generation of Long-Term AIDS Survivors (2025) he has returned to AIDS activism. In July 2025 this brought him to London to do book readings, lead discussions with HIVAIDS survivors, activists, and healthcare professionals. He was a panelist on HIV and Aging at New York’s annual Ending Epidemic Summit (2025). He is a speaker as a long-term HIV/AIDS survivor.

He recently served as the historical consultant to Bears: Documentary currently in production. Along with Dr. Nick McGlynn (University of Brighton) he is cataloging the BHP materials archived in Cornell’s Human Sexuality Collection. He was the keynote speaker at the first international Bear Studies Symposium (2025) and is part of the Bear Research Network, which the Symposium sparked. (Email inquiries to: bear-research-network@googlegroups.com) He is researching Bear Book III (seeking contributors from outside the American bubble).

In other works he has been documenting the history of gay San Francisco and long-term AIDS survivors. He is a founding member of the GLBT Historical Society San Francisco, founder of the Bear History Project (1995-2005) , and founder of the Bear History Project International (incorporated 2023). Since moving to Syracuse NY in 2023, he has become involved in numerous local queer organizations and participates in gay men’s spiritual communities – the Billy Community and Bear Your Soul at Easton Mountain Retreat Center.

He currently lives full-time in East Syracuse, NY and part-time in San Franciso with his partner Tomas Hemsad. Hemstad is a freelance journalist, essayist, andfilmcritic for the Swedish-language press.