The unexpected corner of culture that explains a lot about this election.

I am delighted to inform you that all monsters are gay.

Zombies are gay. Werewolves are gay. Godzilla is gay. Vampires are obviously gay. Mothman is gay, as are all other cryptids. Frankenstein is gay in, like, 20 different ways. The Babadook, you may have heard, is gay. Swamp Thing is trans, and also gay.

The queerness here is not so much about whom the monsters sleep with—I don’t want to picture the Babadook getting busy, and neither do you—as it is about the queer community’s enthusiastic adoption of monsters, cryptids, and other weird little guys as beloved avatars. The cultural role of the monster, according to monster studies scholarship (a real thing), is to embody and enforce the distinction between what is acceptable and what is aberrant: The monster lurks around in the no-man’s-land outside what the dominant culture deems normal, in order to remind you what happens when you stray. Queer horror and queer monstrousness turn this warning on its head. If the monster inhabits the same borderlands as you, if you see yourself reflected in the monster, then maybe the monster is your friend—and possibly your kin.

It’s not just queer folks who have embraced monsters and monstrousness, pulling power from what was once considered strange or different. My book Women and Other Monsters is about how women and feminized people can look to the monsters of classical mythology, intended as cautionary tales about overstepping our boundaries, as guides for reclaiming the unbecoming traits we’re supposed to suppress. Looking at Medusa, the hideous woman with snakes for hair, might turn the viewer to stone, but there’s power in offending the eye—or at least rejecting the pressure to be decorative. Charybdis, a mythical female sea monster, is often depicted as a bottomless sucking whirlpool, but there’s power in accepting your hunger, whether it’s for food or love or armies crossing the sea in boats.

Also in the field of women’s monstrosity, there’s Madeline Miller’s Circe and other contemporary feminist retellings, fiction that rehabilitates female villains of legend and literature, from Lady Macbeth to Baba Yaga to Japanese yokai. Memoirs like Riva Lehrer’s Golem Girl, about spina bifida, and Jami Lin Nakamura’s The Night Parade, about mental illness, use monsters and monstrosity to discuss disability.

In short, cultures create monster stories to establish what’s normative within that culture. But there has undeniably been a recent movement among marginalized people to identify as monstrous—or at least to identify with the monstrous—as a way to celebrate stepping outside the borders of acceptability. The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, now is a time for looking at monsters and saying: “Me as hell.”

An even more interesting thing happens when you focus on these marginal characters—these outsiders, who are supposed to have been banished to the borders. Putting the monster at the center means relegating the center—the normative—to the margins. And once we recenter the figures on the edge, the putative center becomes distant and defamiliarized, stripped of its protective sheen of conformity in a way that makes its true freakishness visible. This is why, in addition to revisiting old stories to recontextualize the villainy of the monstrous characters, we’ve also increasingly seen new stories that show white supremacy, patriarchy, and other elements of the dominant culture as the monstrous figures they’ve really been all along. Book examples include Ring Shout, by P. Djèlí Clark, in which the KKK is made up of literal monsters; The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin, a cosmic horror novel in which the infiltrating Elder God figure is a metaphor for gentrification; and Manhunt, by Gretchen Felker-Martin, a gender apocalypse in which cis men become beasts and TERFs become monstrous murderers. In TV and movies, there are the racist horrors of Lovecraft Country and the moral monstrosity of the body-snatching colonizers in Get Out.

This recentering affects the stories we tell—but it also affects our broader social story, the way we make sense of the world around us. (This is why people who want to control the way you think start by controlling what you’re allowed to read, view, and share. A culture and its products are reflections of each other.) We tell stories like this because we have entered an era in which the erstwhile cultural default—whiteness, maleness, cishetness, Christianity—is starting to erode. Those factors still dominate in the halls of power, but in the stories we tell, they’re no longer the presumptive starting point. Many popular and influential stories center the marginal figures who were previously banished to the monstrous borderlands—and some of them look back on the former center and go, “What the hell was happening there?”

Which brings me to “Republicans are weird.”

You probably don’t need me to recap this for you; it was one of the biggest news cycles of the year, after all. But in brief: Kamala Harris’ vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, kicked off a trend—and perhaps secured his spot on the Harris team—by describing J.D. Vance and other Republicans as “weird” for their obsession with invading privacy, constraining rights, making up people to get mad at, and, of course, pushing antiquated and illiberal visions of a Christian nationalist idyll, with a white male overclass enforcing its dominance by any means necessary.

As New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen has pointed out, calling these kinds of policy proposals “weird” verges on malignant understatement. It’s a suspiciously gentle word for, say, mandating genital inspections for school-age children, or outright lying to stoke racial animus—to choose just a couple of examples from a depressingly vast slate of options. If you’ve read even a summary of the fully dystopian Project 2025 playbook, which Vance once praised as an “essential weapon” for the “fights that lay ahead,” the term weird feels almost like an apologia. We’re calling this weird? The thing Al Yankovic is? Surely stronger language is necessary!

But calling MAGA Republicans weird also seems to really bug them. It gets under their skin—more than fascist or Nazi, which some of them are going so far as to embrace wholesale (at least on porn forums). “They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not,” Trump protested this summer. “And he’s not either, I will tell you. J.D. is not at all.”

Clearly, to dismiss these ideological tyrants as “weird” seizes back their most treasured possession: the ability to dictate who is normal and who is deviant. This is key to their vision, which puts people like them—the more like them the better—at the center of society and drives others to the margins. The margins being, of course, where the monsters live.

Republicans in leadership, and many of their fans, have historically been able to shrug off accusations of moral grotesquery because they are safely installed in their cocoon of conformity; the monsters must be the other guys, the ones outside the boundaries. They’ve desperately insulated themselves against divergence, seizing the center and installing themselves as the arbiters of what’s natural and correct, in order to avoid ever having to face the reality of their own warped principles. To call them weird, to banish them to the monstrous hinterlands, is to claw back the ability to define whether behavior is prosocial or antisocial, to determine what principles we should be conforming to. Who gets to decide what “normal” is? Probably most Americans would say: Not people who want to monitor your menstruation.

So what does this mean for monstrosity in 2024 and beyond? It had become a badge of honor, a symbolic identity so many of us have learned to wear with pride. But as the normal and the deviant continue to swap places, our cultural monsters—the ones we create, and the ones we hold a mirror up to—continue to raise questions of where we situate decency, what we canonize, and what we try to exorcise. It’s fun for monsters to be gay, but at the same time … gay is actually an extremely normal thing to be! Way more normal than getting frothy and tyrannical about other people’s sexual and emotional lives. There’s power in embracing the monstrousness laid upon you as a person on the margins. But there’s also power in reflecting it right back where it belongs.