Harry & the Bendersons:
Turning Bigfoot & Other Cryptids Queer

1,971 words

August 27 sees the annual anniversary of the birth of the modern-day version of the Bigfoot legend back in 1958, when Californian logger Jerry Crew spotted some prints in the ground which looked as if they had originated from a pair of feet which were very…well, big. The whole thing was probably a hoax, but it helped launch the fringe scientific discipline of cryptozoology, or the search for unknown animals, into the public mind. In the years since, the popular emphasis of the field has repeatedly shifted along with shifts in taste amongst aficionados.

At first, cryptozoology was largely treated as a type of zoology, in which the scientifically unknown animals (or ‘cryptids’) were conceived of as being real, but little-seen, flesh-and-blood animals. Then, as the paranormal and ufology industries began to take off, things like El Chupacabras and the Loch Ness Monster were reconceived by some as being demonic, fairy-like, or phantom-type creatures, or even lost alien beings, stranded here on Earth, following saucer-crashes. But now the monsters who walk amongst us have been reconceptualized anew yet again…as homosexuals.

Queer Be Dragons

Self-obsessed essays with titles like “Nessie Is My Girlfriend” explain how gays, lesbians and transgenderists supposedly feel innately connected towards cryptids because rarely-seen beasts like Bigfoot tend to try and stay hidden away from general public view in dark forests and lonely caves, much like queers have historically had to hide away their true selves from general public view too.

In the above-cited essay, the lesbian author fantasizes about reclaiming the concealed cryptids from the general heteronormative gaze, which views them as being potentially dangerous, and reframing them through a “queer lens” instead as being “maternal figures, friends, or even potential partners.” As some of the more unlikely cryptids, like mermaids, chimeras and goat-men, are split-species in nature, they can be reconceived of as being “non-binary”, says the author. If so, then being abducted by them into another world may actually be a positive experience, as “maybe they’ll see queer people as kindred spirits and take them in.”

Rather than monsters, some homos prefer to call cryptids “momsters” and fantasize about being adopted by them into becoming “a big hairy family” together, as they will be more accepting of their queer ways than their real-life biological human parents might be. As “queer people have their experiences and existence denied all the time”, just like Nessie does, it makes sense the Scottish lake-monster might want to be the author’s girlfriend one day – or so the author thinks, anyway.

Gay supernatural sites like Queer Paranormal (“Do you fear that a queer haunts here?”) catalogue accounts of Bigfoot being gay, noting that “Whether it’s male bears giving each other fellatio, or two male penguins raising a baby, nature shows animals aren’t always as heterosexual as we like to believe,” and that may include Bigfoot too. Reliable sources like old supermarket tabloid The Weekly World News were dredged up as proof:

The site further cites cryptozoologist Loren Coleman’s guess that 10 percent of Bigfeet may be homosexuals, and that, due to an ancient Mesopotamian legend about a hairy man-beast called Enkidu having anal sex with the mythical hero Gilgamesh, “Iraq could be chock full of artifacts proving the evidence of Bigfoot’s gay past.” Coleman is a genuine scholar who was sort of joking, but his speculation still gained him hate-mail from persons outraged he had been “calling Bigfoot queer”.

However, now things are changing, and gays and trannies are no longer afraid to be out and proud, which means cryptids can also be reimagined anew as shedding their previous shyness and flouncing out into the direct glare of the public camera-lens, as in the following Trans Bigfoot posters and greeting cards:

J.D. Vance and Michelle Obama sure have let themselves go. The message being imparted by such images appears to be a kind of a threat. In the words of one queer cryptid essay-writer: “Oh, so you think queer people are monsters? We’ll show you monsters. And this time, no one’s locking us back in a cage.” If only someone would. And then throw away the key.

Robin Badfellow

The true new queer monsters of today are not the yetis and yerens, but the (approximate) humans who now write about them in a ridiculously pink fashion. Below, for example, is pictured some authentic photographic proof of the existence of fairies, in the shape of children’s author Robin Gow.

I’m not just calling Robin a fairy as a homophobic insult; as he uses the chosen pronoun ‘fae’, he seems to think he is one of the fairy-folk himself. Here’s the fey gay’s author biography:

Robin Gow (it/fae/he & él y elle) is a trans poet, witch, and community educator. It grew up in Kutztown, Pennsylvania and lives with his partner Rain and their menagerie of animals on unceded Lenape land also called Allentown Pennsylvania. Awarded the Jerry Cain and Scott James Creative Writing Fellow, Gow earned faer MFA in Creative Writing from Adelphi University where fae also taught as a professor of English … In addition to writing poetry, Gow also writes Young Adult and Middle-Grade books. It is the author of YA novels in verse, A Million Quiet Revolutions, and Ode to My First Car with FSG Books for Young Readers, and Dear Mothman with Abrams Books. Fae has earned starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, School Library Journal, and more. Gow works as a community educator around LGBTQIA2+ and disability justice.

Just the kind of uncanny being you want to be writing your kids’ books for them. As you’ll have noticed, one of the children’s titles this wonderful self-described “autistic bisexual genderqueer person passionate about queer and disability justice” has published is called Dear Mothman. Mothman is one of America’s most famous modern-day cryptids, a giant winged humanoid moth-type monster with glowing red eyes, who is supposed to have haunted the West Virginia town of Point Pleasant during a 1960s UFO-wave, culminating in the deadly collapse of the local Silver Bridge in 1967, a tragedy Mothman was subsequently interpreted as being a sinister living omen of. Robin Gow, however, knows better. Rather than a menacing harbinger of doom, Mothman was in fact a cheering predictor of queer liberation!

For some reason, capitalism has decreed it should now be possible to purchase personal notebooks with covers like these:

Perhaps it was the existence of such unnecessary items which inspired Robin Gow to pen his own epistolary Mothman-related novel in the shape of 2023’s Dear Mothman, which the publisher’s blurb describes as being “A moving middle-grade novel in verse, about a young trans boy dealing with the loss of his friend by writing to his favorite cryptid, Mothman.” Just as a fairy-like “trans poet, witch, and community educator” like Robin is absolutely nothing for you and your children to be afraid of, neither, it transpires, is Mothman him/her/theyself: the true monsters are the normative members of white, straight, cisheteropatriarchal society, don’t you know?

The book’s plot is as follows:

Halfway through sixth grade, Noah’s best friend and the only other trans boy in his school, Lewis, passed away in a car accident. Lewis was adventurous and curious, always bringing a new paranormal story to share with Noah. Together they daydreamed about cryptids and shared discovering their genders and names. After his death, lonely and yearning for someone who could understand him like Lewis once did, Noah starts writing letters to Mothman, wondering if he would understand how Noah feels and also looking for evidence of Mothman’s existence in the vast woods surrounding his small Poconos town.

Written in something approximating to blank verse, Noah’s letters to Mothman largely center upon weird identitarian stuff, like whether or not Mothman is also some kind of niche homosexual:

Do you wear
a chest binder or do you bind with
great broad leaves from the forest?
Lewis was sure you were queer like us.

What next? “Dear Sasquatch, have you got a strap-on?” Or, on the other hand, maybe Mothman is autistic, like Robin Gow is (and, indeed, like many of the poor teens duped into getting their chests bound in real life are):

I’m sorry if this is too much
all at once. When I start learning about something
sometimes I just get so excited and my brain keeps
running and running and running – exploding with questions.
It’s something I love about being autistic.
Can Mothmen be autistic?

No, but once he finds and reads Noah’s letters, Mothman probably wishes he was severely dyslexic, if not outright illiterate.

Hey Mothman,
Can you keep a secret?
Here’s the secret:
Lewis and I kissed once.
Just to try it out.

What makes you think Mothman gives a shit?

The whole point of the story, once again, is to draw a parallel between queers and cryptids as both being fundamentally misunderstood:

When you met those people on the side of the road
and they ran away screaming, I bet you were
just trying to say hello.
I bet they didn’t let you talk.
No one listens to kids [or queers] or monsters.

And why should they, when they have absolutely nothing of any possible interest to say to anybody?

Wankenstein’s Monster

Getting back to Bigfoot, if America’s most famous cryptid really does turn out to be a genuine, flesh-and-blood biological animal, then it makes sense some zoologists have made legitimate anatomical speculation about what his penis looks like: surprisingly small, apparently, as seen during a 1970s eyewitness sighting in which a Bigfoot called Kong “exhibited a tumid penis and interacted sexually with a cow.”

We generally think of Bigfoot as being male, due to his hairy, muscular status. But, of course, many leftists are keen to tell us this is a mere far-right gender stereotype, as hairy muscular people like the members of ZZ Topp can legitimately self-ID as women these days if they like too. Queer journalist Samantha Allen, previously best known for her 2019 book Real Queer America: LGBT Stories From Red States and for being Transgender Advocate of the Year 2014, has used Bigfoot as a tool to deconstruct gender and sexual stereotypes in her debut 2022 novel Patricia Wants to Cuddle, Patricia being a huge lesbian Bigfoot.

If the species is real, then there must be female Bigfeet, and Allen imagines Patricia encountering a group of young wannabe female celebrities holed up in some woods as contestants in a reality TV show resembling The Bachelor. Patricia decides she wants to make the sole black contestant go gay with her, so sets about ripping the other girls’ limbs off; yet what is really being dismembered here is heteronormativity:

A lady Sasquatch doesn’t just make a great horror monster, she’s also a symbol of everything a conventionally attractive reality TV show contestant might be afraid of becoming: a big, hairy Other. She performs a dual role of being both a very real physical threat but also as a figurative threat to a certain brand of heteronormative hyperfemininity.

The author wished to “explore not just the violence of surviving a night of being attacked by a monster, but the violence of existing in the world as a social and cultural other”, she explained:

To me, my cryptid, my Patricia, she’s a representation of the kind of femininity that lurks in the shadow of shows like The Bachelor or Love Island. Patricia is everything […] the women on the shows are terrified of being: She is big, she is hairy, she is visibly muscular.

She’s also, being ape-like, metaphorically black, but Allen is careful not to explicitly state that particular implication, lest she too be torn apart by a screaming quasi-sapphic mob, like in Euripides’ The Bacchae. There are some spurious reimaginings of cryptozoology which go a little too far even for obsessive rewriters of reality like her.

With Queer Studies, these people really have created a monster.