As a kid, Sacha Coward used to sneak downstairs and watch The Little Mermaid every day before school.

He was too young to understand its appeal. As an adult, he’d learn that the original fairytale was a thinly veiled tale of heartbreak that the story’s bisexual author, Hans Christian Anderson, wrote after his male crush rejected him and married a woman.

Coward, who had always been interested in older legends and folklore, eventually made a career working in museums alongside others who shared his passion. But during the pandemic lockdowns, his obsession turned into a hyper fixation.

“Some of us were making banana bread. Some of us were fixating on the connection between LGBTQ+ people, mythology, and folklore,” he tells LGBTQ Nation.

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He ended up writing and publishing Queer As Folklore: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters, a book that explores the deep queer history behind many instantly recognizable folk creatures, like mermaids, unicorns, werewolves, witches, ghosts, and even aliens, pirates, robots, and superheroes.

“The bedtime stories of mermaids, vampires, and fairies that many of us grew up loving were often created — or contain monsters and characters that were inspired by people who had similar lives and loves to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people living today,” Coward writes in his book’s intro. “To truly understand who queer people are today involves an adventure into the fantastical stories of our past.”

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Mainstream narratives treat queerness as a modern phenomenon that deviates from the norm and takes childhood fairytale symbols — like unicorns, mermaids, and witches — and subverts them into something dangerous, Coward says. But our modern-day understanding of these tales often came from sanitized colonial and Victorian retellings that imposed their morality and erased any dangerous, subversive, sexual, or queer content.

“From Africa to China, to India, to South America, to ancient Egypt and all over Europe, gods and folkloric heroes change sex, fall in love with beings of the same sex, become hermaphrodite, transform into beings of a different sex, or sometimes assume an asexual aspect. From The Epic of Gilgamesh to The Iliad, queer relationships abound,” his book’s introduction states.

Coward’s book ultimately encourages people to reconnect with this queer heritage as a means of power and possibility. But, in his conversation with LGBTQ Nation, he recognizes that these unsanitized tales also have a sharp edge, one that anti-queer conservatives have tried to turn on queer people as they vilify us as predatory vampires, godless witches, and demonic creatures preying on the innocent.

(The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

LGBTQ Nation: Your book demonstrates how the inherent queerness of creatures ‚ like vampires, unicorns, fairies, werewolves, demons, witches, and even robots and aliens, has been hiding in plain sight throughout history. Queer people are quite the same: We’re ubiquitous throughout history and culture but haven’t always been easy to spot unless someone looks in the right place or way.

Sacha Coward: The word queer itself gives you the sense of this duality. [It] comes from the Latin torquere, a word which means to twist or to contort. So it has this sense of being strange, odd, and different, and there’s a darkness to that, but there’s also like a superpower to it as well.

So, if you are inhabiting these secret spaces, and you’re mixing outside your social comfort zones, you know whether it’s going to a Molly house (a secret meeting space for gay men) in the 1600s or whether hosting private parties or being part of an arty and bohemian crowd — because that’s where you find safety and representation — you are also mixing up against loads of different ideas, against all kinds of stories and politics that create for really exciting art. Like, yeah, that’s the hidden nature of what it is to be queer.

I’m not saying every single queer person is an incredible storyteller; we’re every kind of person: We are accountants and librarians and dinner ladies and every kind of person. But it does historically and even today, [queerness] does push us slightly towards these creative spaces, and these, these kind of, the, quote, magical spaces.

So we are often the little boys that never grow up, or the little girls that never grew up, or the little people that never grew up. And in that there is, there’s a sadness there. You know, you can definitely see that the difficulty of being queer historically is really obvious, but we have been so deeply laid into these stories, as creators, as consumers, as the kind of people that carry the torch on. That means that — when you look at the history of storytelling itself, the history of fantasy and folklore of creatures and monsters — you find secret people like us, very overly represented. We have a very loud voice in those spaces.

I understand why it’s important to reclaim historical figures as gay, like Tchaikovsky, because knowing the creator of The Nutcracker was gay helps us understand our larger social history. But what is the importance of pointing out the historical queerness of creatures like mermaids and fairies?

Okay, so there’s lots of reasons…. The first one is, we’re often told as queer people that we’re borrowing something, or that we’ve actually painted it and stolen it: “Why are these creepy gay men into The Little Mermaid? Why are they getting drag queens to dress up like [Ursula the sea witch]? That’s for children — you’re defiling something!”

What I want to say to queer people is, you have a right to these stories. You have a right to these spaces. To be honest, even if your ancestors hadn’t written them, you’d still have a right to them. But it is a really nice thing to be able to push back against some of the culture war nonsense and go, “Hey, Marvel, you wouldn’t have superheroes if it wasn’t for queer people. You wouldn’t have them without Achilles and Patroclus. So, you know, you’re welcome.”

There’s a power, and there’s a strength to be had in that, which I think particularly for young queer people who are discovering their own loves in these areas [of fantasy], who are, you know, writing lesbian werewolf fiction. It’s a little bit of a sense of, “Hey, … you get to do this because you are part of this.” I think that’s important.

When I wrote this book, I actually wrote a passage in the book saying, you know, in the past, queer people would literally be called demons and monsters, and that doesn’t really happen today. I wish I could rewrite that, because it’s literally happening, right? Those, those exact words — trans people in particular, being described as “demonic,” “satanic.”

These words and these ideas are used to make us feel terrible, to make us feel less than human. And so there’s a spark of power and maybe activism or rebellion in saying, “No, we actually created those words for you. We actually are written into those stories.” And also, this has happened before. It’s happened multiple times, we’ve been cast as these characters, and we’ve survived it.

Your book uses a very wide-ranging definition for folklore, which can include contemporary pop and mainstream culture, rather than just stories, legends, or other myths from an oral tradition. Why?

Having spoken to a few like, call them “real academics,” — people that literally live in universities — actually, my treatment of folklore isn’t that controversial in terms of contemporary analysis.

But I also think, if you say folklore has to be really old and it has to be written down in a certain way on dusty manuscripts, and it has to be studied by certain people in certain manners in certain countries, then suddenly you start to limit and limit and limit.

And you find that actually all the voices that are interesting — the voices of women, the voices of queer people, of people of color — suddenly, they all get like, erased out of the meaning of folklore, and folklore becomes basically 16 collective books written by white British men in the 1800s and maybe a few Americans, just for spice. And so you limit what is human storytelling, and you also limit the kind of the kind of art forms that express folklore.

So folklore, it’s oral, right? It’s storytelling…. Traditionally, it’s something that you know you would tell to an audience gathered around you in our ancient history, that’s how we would recount our tales. It would be by spoken word. And that spoken word, it doesn’t always get fossilized into written paperwork. And there’s a certain privilege that has to happen for that to happen. You know, the 19th-century bloke who’s interested in fairies, he gets to pick the stories that he collects from Ireland and then writes them down in his own words, and so you don’t have the reality of what was actually going on.

But if you start to draw from more sources and say, “Well, what does the word actually mean?” — folk means people, and lore means stories — then we tell stories in many ways. We tell them in books: We tell them orally, we tell them in fashion, we tell them every Christmas through Christmas cards, we tell them in a million different ways, and it becomes much more rich.

So for me, you start talking more interestingly about human storytelling if you don’t go to this really, really narrow definition, I don’t see why you would. What would be the point of going for that definition, other than just to limit things, right?

There has been a modern trend of queer horror fans reclaiming fright flick villains for ourselves. For example, years ago, gay fans shipped Pennywise the demonic clown and The Babadook (a personification of mental illness) as a gay couple. Does this mean that queer people are becoming less afraid of showing our messy, monstrous sides, or is something deeper going on?

It’s a separate but connected thing. I also love horror as well. I know a lot of queer people love that sort of darkness.

When you are born in a body, in a mind, that is just, quote, “wrong,” everything in society is telling you it’s wrong — even if you have the most loving parents and the kindest upbringing, whether you’re gay, trans, nonbinary — that, “No, that’s not how you should be,” you’ve already broken the rules just by existing. You’re already, in some ways, the bad guy. You’re more like the bad guy in a classic fairy tale than you are like the good guy.

Queer people, specifically, when we watch Frankenstein or read the book, we think, “What about the monster? How does he feel like?” There’s much more pathos because the demonized, the creatures that are supposed to be hated or detested, we know a little bit what that feels like, just to be detested for who we are. So you start to go, “Well, what about them? And what about their story? What do they get up to? And what’s their motive? Maybe Ursula is actually just a really competent businesswoman, and maybe Ariel [the little mermaid] needs to stop signing contracts without reading the small print.”

So you start to see these other side things, which I think means we dabble in the dark. And when you’re told that you’re monstrous a lot, there is a power to go, “Great, I’ll be monstrous.” Look at the Divine, who inspired Ursula, in terms of how she was drawn. As a drag queen, [Divine] would do disgusting things: would eat dog turds [and] … say the most provocative awful things comedically, because it’s like, “Yeah, okay. Your system doesn’t work. I’m going to completely rebel, rebel against it.” And most of that, I think, is wonderful and empowering.

I work a lot with teenagers, and queer teenagers can be very sardonic. They’ve got this shell that they’ve put on already, which is like, “Yeah, I’m gonna do the opposite of what society wants. I’m gonna side with the bad guy. I like the darkness.”

And this part of me goes, “That’s great. And punk, I love it. But what if you want to be fragile? What if you want to be soft? What if you want to be the princess in the tower for a little bit? What if you want to be the gallant hero with not a thought in his head?” I’d like us to be painting with the full spectrum.

So, there’s a wonderful power in queer love of horror, scary things, and monsters. But I worry that we start pushing ourselves too far that way, young people who are queer start to think that’s the only thing they get to be, and I would like us to be all of it.

A chapter in your book says that werewolves and animal shape-shifters can represent the transformative nature of transgender identity and queer life and desire in general.

Conservatives in the U.S. have started spreading their own “folklore” about student “furries” who dress and behave like cats and dogs, wearing ears and collars and leashes and demanding to use litter boxes instead of toilets. There’s absolutely no real evidence whatsoever that any of this is actually going on.

And in the U.S. and abroad, queer people are accused of witchcraft, of being possessed by demons. What do you make of that?

We are in these big bubbles of social media that often don’t intersect…. The extreme right, the homophobic, transphobic right, are getting served a really weird slop that is like distilled from weird elements of reality, like that. There is cosplay… I know nerdy queer kids who like wearing cat ears because they like anime… I also know, like, within queer spaces, particularly with younger, gender-conforming kids, they will be really playful. They will be like, “My gender is spoon, screw you!” They’re not being literal. They’re just like having fun and being punk.

And then that all gets taken out of context, put through the weird gristle mill that is the content mill, and out comes these bizarre stories where you’re like, I can always see the touchstones. I can always imagine the websites or the conversations that this, you know, this creator, this person who’s made this up, has got their information and then tied it all together into something really weird. And you’re right, yeah, these things never happen.

We, as queer people, find it very funny when we’re not being hurt by it. Like, “Oh, that’s really what you think? That’s wild!” I guess the dark thing is, going back to, you know, what we’ve been saying before, is how believable, apparently, that is, that you can say that about us…. It’s like the standards for us are already so low that these things are believed. I think that is a frightening thing.

The thing is that it’s a dangerous kind of space to play in folklore, because, on one hand, it’s a weapon, it’s a blade that can be used against us. You know, we can be turned into monsters and creatures and dehumanized.

But also, I’ve had some wonderful conversations with so-called conservatives around mermaids, and like, “Hey, did you know Howard Ashman was one of the creators [of The Little Mermaid], and he actually contracted HIV shortly after working on [it], and he voiced the songs originally. Can I play you the songs?”

And if you like the film, and you like mermaids, and like storytelling — and who doesn’t, unless you really are jaded and cored out the whole of your soul — this is actually a really nice meeting place. So sometimes we can actually meet each other, even when our beliefs are very different. When we talk about stories, things that we loved in our childhood, that we share and go, “Yeah, I love that too, and you love that. We love them for different reasons. But isn’t that incredible?”

It can be healing, and it can be damaging. I think just like exploring it, though, is a good thing. Tease it apart and kind of open up Pandora’s box. It at least allows us to go, “Why are these things being said? Why are these ideas embedding so easily? Why is it so easy for someone to imagine a transgender woman being a killer when there have been no serial killers who were trans women? They don’t exist outside of films and horror movies. And yet, it’s an image that is conjured so quickly and easily. So why is that?”

And if you understand why those ideas have been put into your head, you can maybe push back against them a little bit, possibly.

From your point of view, is the extreme religious conservatism of this moment giving more queer people an appetite for non-Christian, neopagan folklore-type characters and heroes, or has our community’s appetite for these creatures always been pretty consistent?

I’m thinking back to, you know, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like [after it came out] every other girl at school was a Wiccan for a while. That’s no disrespect to Wicca. I’ve got friends who are Wiccan witches.

Young people really… they are very playful. If you look at what they’re doing on TikTok, they have this mad irony; I call it “new Dada.” Like it’s the reinvention of surrealism, their humor is so off the wall that I think they have a very sort of belligerence. There is a kind of sense of shifting fluidity, even among those who aren’t queer, that I see around belief and understanding.

So you can have young people who will say two things that seem completely contradictory: “I’m a religious atheist.” Like, okay, cool. What does that mean? [They’re] playing with those ideas and those boundaries.

What I see is a kind of desire for more playfulness, fewer kinds of burdensome labels and categories towards a much younger, more youthful approach, which is much more fluid and surreal.

Part of what you’re saying in your book is that queers can benefit from seeing themselves as part of a magical heritage rather than just mere mortals in our capitalist, humdrum world. What magic, positive or negative, do queer people have to offer real-life cisgender-heterosexual heads of the world?

All the time. My God, look at the things that we’ve contributed to: A voice or a perspective that is from the outside is so, so helpful. And, you know, we have found ourselves massively overrepresented in the arts, fashion, theater, dance, all of that stuff. And, yeah, we can joke that that’s because we’re effeminate and we prance and we have floppy wrists and all that jazz, but it’s that outside storytelling capacity that I think makes us incredibly genuine.

Nowadays we’re all looking for authenticity…. We live in such a hyper-manufactured world with AI and fake news, and so someone being really authentically themselves is really compelling to anyone. And the stories written, reinterpreted, and created, the artwork made by queer people, is enjoyed by everybody, because it’s just authentic, and it’s fighting against something. It’s pushing back against something. And I don’t think cis-het helps anybody, even if you’re the straightest cis dude in the world … it doesn’t allow you be more you. It just keeps that cage tighter. And if you want to live your life without ever changing a thing about yourself, it still doesn’t help you… I’m not trying to convert straight people into being queer. I’m just saying…

You can go to any epoch or time, and you will find queer people creating stuff that everybody loves. And I think it’s because authentically lived people create really interesting art. People who have had to go through something to find who they are often have a voice that I think is very compelling. No one wants to read the story of Cinderella, where Cinderella starts as a wealthy princess, and she’s already kind of proposed to the prince, and they get married, and nothing ever goes wrong. They want to read the story of the underdog that rises. Even in the simplest stories, that’s classic, and that is what I think queer people can offer.

They can also offer a bit of insight. They can see the walls of the kind of cell that we are all walking around in. And they can go, “Hey, just no, that doesn’t need to be there. You don’t need to do that. If you want to do that, that’s fine, but you don’t have to.” Which I think is why we find ourselves so overrepresented in the arts.

You could never remove queer people from society, because, sorry, cis-het people, you keep making more of us.

Coward is currently working on his second book with Manchester University Press, Space Invaders, a queer history of video games.

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