Gay elf

Earlier this month, a work buddy asked me if I’d watched Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer when it was broadcast a couple of nights before. Sign up for HuffPost's Morning Email.

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It’s a lesson that all queer kids back in the day learned early on, one way or another: there are good reasons to “get used to” the closet.

But of course Rudolph won’t — not really, anyway — just as we never did. Can girls have penises too? My relationship to my past was substantially ruptured when I came out as trans in my late 40s, and since then I’ve struggled to parse the person I was wired to be from birth with the persona I tried for too many years to project in order to appease a world I feared would reject and even kill me if I showed my true colors.

The Abominable, that monstrous threat to difference posed by the cold, unforgiving outside world, is to him just a “Bumble.” This verbal reduction doesn’t eliminate the very real danger the monster represents, of course, but it does demystify it. My work buddy’s son and his peers have ready access to depictions of difference in all its many forms.

Hermey’s “nonconformity” (dentistry) isn’t as visibly in-your-face as Rudolph’s, but even before he confesses that he simply can’t get himself to like making toys, his exuberant swoop of blonde hair and a voice one writer characterizes as “indeterminate..., at once childish and fey,” tell us that there’s something different about this elf, something that makes him more like the blonde female elves than the other male elves.

Though the art is old now, I thought it might be nice to make it available digitally as a pdf so I can continue to share my love of all things elf and fantasy (and gay elves specifically of course~)! 

The whole file is 19 pages, 14 of which are interior artworks! Even the “reformed” Bumble gets a job. They were surrogates for the companions I didn’t have, and bearers of a promise that better times would, if after much time and struggle, come.

Rudolph’s not so latent queerness has been frequently acknowledged and commented on in recent years.

If that’s the case, then perhaps there’s not only a work around for that menace, but also an alternative way to look at the whole penis/man up thing. He’ll never be a toymaker — he’ll never be other than what he is. And when Santa himself registers his none too approving surprise on first seeing Rudolph’s difference soon after, the little reindeer’s path into the closet is cleared.

Hermey gets the message and also resolves to run away.

Unlike his future companion, Rudolph receives some consolation before departing: a glimpse of a brighter future in Clarice’s song, “There’s Always Tomorrow.” As sentimental as it is to my jaded fifty-something ears, I remember that this song resonated strongly for me when I was young.

Both of these equivalences have been widely observed.