Krampus is a queer holiday icon & he’s sleighing the internet
Gay Santa posts sleigh every December, it seems social media has anointed Krampus as the new queer icon of the holidays. For the uninitiated — or those who haven’t seen the 2015 horror film Krampus — this mythological figure is “a half-goat, half-demon, horrific beast who literally beats people into being nice and not naughty,” as National Geographic puts it.Marked by horns, fangs, a devilishly long tongue, Krampus carries around birch rods with which he swats the misbehaving.(And this is where some of the social media users quoted might say, “Yes, daddy.”)For centuries in parts of Germany and Austria, Krampus has been positioned as the anti-Santa, a menace who carts naughty kids down to the underworld when he shows up on Krampusnacht, the night of December 5.In this century, however, Krampus has become a pop-culture fixation. (Remember Bowen Yang played the demon on SNL?) And in a 2019 blog post for Gayly Dreadful, Stephan Hoda presented the case for Krampus as a queer icon:For queer folks such as myself, who are so often confronted with the harsh injustices of patriarchal hegemony, it is easy to see how there might be some identification with the otherness of Krampus. … For those of us who grew up with the more secular figure of Santa Claus, impending queerness can often leave children feeling flawed and sinful, possibly inscribed on that dreaded naughty list!This is where I propose a queer claiming of the American manifestation of the Krampus tradition.
As with many figures of the horror genre, there is a not-so-subtle subtext to this character. If Krampus represents the “naughty” children, those of us who don’t measure up to the establishment’s idea of “nice,” then he is by virtue of his nature a queer figure.Krampus certainly has queer appeal on X, Instagram, TikTok, and Tumblr, as illustrated by the posts below — which include some horny takes on the horned fellow!Krampus was gayi think krampus is gay.
