He was kind and handsome and Ivy-league educated and our life was comfortable and easy. She bravely leaves her prince behind to live in the woods with her wild, untamed kin, even though she has to abandon all the comforts of wealth and state-sanctioned love.įrankly, it sounds a lot like my own story.
The unicorn in the movie endures every injustice with kindness and courage, and in the end discovers a sea full of others like her. I just knew that my existence was somehow different than the muggles around me. “Me too, me too,” I thought as a child, “I am the only one of my kind,” even though I didn’t feel like a sparkle-eyed waif and I didn’t know what “my kind” were.
The point is that the unicorn is magic and she has been told her whole life that she is the only one. The unicorn in human form is a leggy femme waif pining for a prince. It is not a particularly gay movie, plotwise. I watched it on repeat for an embarrassing number of years and cried every time the unicorn had to choose between her human love and the safety of her unicorn blessing, which is the delightfully apt name of a group of unicorns. My dad brought me a copy of The Last Unicorn, an early bit of animated magic about a unicorn who thinks she is the last of her kind. My own relationship with unicorns started when I was six. Pliny wrote that, “the unicorn is the fiercest animal, and it is said that it is impossible to capture one alive.” Ferocity aside, I still won’t turn down a rainbow unicorn cake with sprinkles. The ancient Roman sage Pliny described unicorns as having a dangerous three foot black horn and a bellowing voice. I tend to prefer the older, darker unicorn mythos myself. “They romanticized many of the bestiary images,” she said, but noted ironically that the Victorians also made unicorn porn.
Natural history writer Natalie Lawrence told the Guardian that it was the Victorians who turned the unicorn into a plaything for children. Some folx love the syrupy sweet princess pink unicorn, and others want to remind everyone that the unicorn is a hybrid creature with the head of a stag, the feet of an elephant, and a boar’s tail. The ubiquity of pink fluffy unicorns feels like a commodified avatar for the "gay means happy” stereotype - that fatal insistence that queer folx be sparkling and content no matter how frequently society rejects us.
Ask any queer person and you will likely get a different answer and a compelling story about their own close personal relationship to unicorns. How can a one-horned horse mean so much?Īfter seeking out scholars on the subject of queer unicorns, I came to the conclusion that there’s no consensus on how the unicorn became a gay icon. And somehow, the unicorn is also a self-selected icon that we have used to replace centuries of ugly stereotypes. To me, the ubiquity of pink fluffy unicorns feels like a commodified avatar for the "gay means happy” stereotype - that fatal insistence that queer folx be sparkling and content no matter how frequently society rejects us. On more cynical days, I attribute the link to the fact that we have always been fetishized outcasts that the cis-het capitalist overlords want to brand into profitability. But how did this connection happen - the one between a glowing, colorful mythical creature with bedazzled headgear and queer culture? Some people might venture to say that it's because unicorns are mystical creatures and, well, so are queers. Peruse the internet for a few mere minutes and you’ll find photos of me squished happy and half naked between two women on a unicorn float on my birthday. Some time in the past ten years, unicorns became gay icons, second only to the rainbow flag in symbolizing queerness.