Queer be Dragons

The long history of queer people as monsters - and the dangerous return of that story

Editor’s Note: Every so often, I get to pretend I’m running a serious publication and publish someone whose work I’ve actually admired for a while - and this is very much one of those moments. Sacha Coward is one of the leading voices exploring the intersection of queer history, folklore and storytelling, and his book Queer As Folklore is as fascinating as it is timely.

As ever, Bearly Politics is very much an open door, so if you’ve got something you think is worth saying, drop me a line at iratusursusmajor@gmail.com.

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I am a historian and folklorist. In particular as a gay man I have become fascinated with the way in which the lives of LGBTQ+ people and storytelling itself, have shaped each other. I wrote a book, Queer as Folklore, a couple of years ago exploring the connections between the likes of vampires, mermaids and fairies with queer people. The way in which we have used folkloric beings as symbols, and icons arguably for thousands of years.

It’s something that I find fascinating, and is still alive and well today.

If you go to a gay pride parade anywhere in the world, think of the symbols you will see:

Not just rainbows, but amongst the LGBTQ+ iconography there will be tridents, butterfly wings, sparkly unicorn tank tops and cat ears. The monstrous and otherworldly are, even in 2026, playgrounds for LGBTQ+ people. We write stories about these creatures and the worlds they exist in. We reclaim myths where we’ve felt unrepresented and even adorn our bodies with hybrid and monstrous forms.

For the large part, writing my book felt like a celebration of this very connection. Whilst talking at bookshops and libraries I largely felt great joy at hearing readers sharing their own stories; How werewolves, Frankenstein or Peter Pan helped them understand their own lives, loves and even their bodies.

But every magic mirror which can help reflect ourselves, can also be twisted and warped. Historically there are many reasons why gender nonconforming people and those who loved outside the narrow brackets of heterosexuality, have seen themselves reflected in monsters. For those societies that have seen us as deviant, wrong or even sinful, we may find ourselves cast alongside Dracula and Nosferatu for far more sinister reasons. Just as Little Red Riding Hood is ostensibly a lesson to teach young women to be careful around predatory men, the folklore of the past was sometimes a way to teach ‘normal’ people. In particular to warn them about the supposed dangers of people like us.

Witches recruit from other women by enticing them into their covens, away from roles as subservient wives. Vampires literally transform their prey into something like them through a sexualised embrace. A changeling is a fae replacement of the original human child, that may look the same but is wrong, altered and no longer of this world. All these accounts align dark creatures of myth and legend with the lives of very real queer people.

Looking at tabloid newspaper articles from the 70s and 80s we see headlines such as ‘They Come Out At Night’ or ‘Homo Terror’ to describe fears around those who weren’t cisgender or heterosexual. By calling upon the understood language of fairytales and campfire horror stories, real people become monstrous. They lose their complexity, shifting to something darker, less human, impossible to predict and ultimately dangerous to be allowed to coexist with ‘normal’ ‘decent’ and ‘moral’ folk. Indeed, a monster MUST be hunted, it is the correct thing to do. ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’.

When I wrote Queer As Folklore I believed this dark mirror had faded somewhat. Perhaps naively I thought that direct comparisons between gay, bisexual, trans and intersex people to monstrous creatures seemed archaic. Sure, I could see it in the illuminated manuscripts of Medieval England, where demons are shown encouraging sinful same sex liaisons. I could read it in the lesbian overtones of the vampiric antagonist in Sheridan Le Fanu’s 19th century gothic novella ‘Carmilla’. But surely not today? The 80’s maybe, but not today? And if such allusions to monsters were to be made, they wouldn’t be as direct, not as clear cut.

I was of course wrong.

We have recently seen a resurgence in bigotry towards LGBTQ+ people and with it a swing back to the language of folklore. Whilst in many ways I find myself living in a far more permissive society than the one I was born into, in some ways the rhetoric around LGBTQ+ people has not shifted, and in others it has even backtracked.

While I was researching and writing the book a new wave of paranoia has been sweeping around the world, aimed largely against transgender people. The language used on both sides of the pond has included literal terms such as ‘creature’ ‘monster’ and ‘demonic’. This is not a fringe occurrence. A comic appearing in the Telegraph in 2023 literally depicts transgender women as the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood wearing women’s clothes. The writing next to it reads ‘‘So, you ate grandma and now you want to be sent to a women’s prison?’’.

The quiet part is being said out loud.

LGBTQ+ people and their supporters, particularly in arguments around gender and trans identities, are not just bad, or wrong, they are fairytale monsters. They will eat your grandma, chase your daughter, replace your children with copies and slowly transform your reality into a nightmare of pronouns and toilet-based horror. Dehumanisation at this scale has happened at many times in history, each of them now described as some of the darkest parts of the entire human story.

Despite studying inhuman monsters, and magical tales from hundreds, even thousands, of years ago, I find all of this research increasingly relevant to today. The same symbols that can be sources of power and joy for my community can also be flipped to alienate and harm us. The more we talk about real people and real lives as folklore, the less able we are to discuss them with depth and nuance. As a historian this frightens me. As a queer person this terrifies me.

I used to believe the way in which my community reclaims and uses folklore was only ever a good thing. I loved working with queer young people who were fascinated in the occult, or Greek Mythology, or Norse runes. I saw myself in them, and understood the queer desire to connect with the ‘other’. Now sadly, I have seen the sharp side of this connection come painfully into focus. I still find folklore fascinating, but I am seeing the cruelty it can be used to engender. The fact that mermaids and monsters, creatures and ghouls are compelling, that they are characters we have encountered since our childhood, can make them both wonderful ambassadors for difference, as well as dangerous tools for misinformation and hatred.

To those reading this, queer or not, I would ask you to keep your awareness sharpened. Look at the words being used, the way in which queer people are being described.

Ask yourself whether the terminology is leaning towards storytelling tropes and if so, ask yourself why?

What is the shortcut the writer wants your mind to take, why are they using the big bad wolf as a stand-in for a human being?

For queer people, I would say that the resurgence in interest in folklore and mythology is a wonderful thing to see. I do not wish to stifle even an ounce of queer joy or playfulness… at the same time, I would add a subtle note of caution.

As we reclaim the monster, sadly we must also be aware of who is watching and how our words and actions might be manipulated and turned against us. Frankenstein can teach us much about what it is to be alone, or different, or strange. We can connect with it, reinterpret it and rejoice in it.

But, sadly, it also teaches us much about how people have so often treated those they deem monsters.

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Further Reading:

If this piece has sparked something (or awakened your inner goblin, witch, or mildly chaotic forest spirit), Sacha Coward’s Queer As Folklore dives much deeper into the long, tangled relationship between queer identity, myth, and storytelling. It’s sharp, fascinating, and quietly affirming in all the right ways - and you can find at the link below, ready to take its rightful place on what I will presume is your ever-expanding bookshelf.