Shapeshifting in Suburbia: How Bisexuality Made My Monsters

by Em Reed

The oppressive sense of alienation and dread doesn’t come from the fear of invaders in this case, but the stultifying suburban setting that enforces conformity and tries to root out the changeable, the unexpected, the strange… for the sake of excluding it with the label “monstrous.”

I recently read The Saucerian, Gabriel McKee’s biography of cult UFO publisher (and frequent hoaxer) Gray Barker. One thing that stuck out to me was how McKee connected Barker’s identity, as a gay man in rural Appalachia in the 1950s, to his fascination with the whole spectrum of vaguely plausible to totally bogus flying saucer, monster and cryptid sightings of the time.

His fascination could sometimes be condescending, since there’s many cases of him stating frankly in private letters that he thinks certain witnesses he’s published are totally crazy or faking it, but the longevity of his involvement seemed to also come from a place of empathy towards what society treated as monstrous (or simply ridiculous). He occupied a position of winking plausible deniability– this all could be true, make up your own mind– that remains a practical and psychological survival strategy for queer and questioning people walking among the straight world to this day.

I’ve always been fascinated by UFO sightings and abductions, and how the narratives and beliefs around them can fall just as easily into wild conspiracy as they can utopic liberation, of hoping for there to be something more out there. Aliens in these reports and their counterparts in fiction who struggle to communicate with humans, relate to their norms or shapeshift to blend in, are not just potent metaphors for everyday alienation in general, but were often moving, sympathetic figures to me.

Sometimes it felt like their perceived monstrosity only came from looking or acting a bit weird. I was scandalized when Dr. Crusher rejected her Trill symbiont lover after a cross-gender body transfer in TNG; like Carol in Patricia Highsmith’s classic The Price of Salt, I thought if anyone could love an alien like me, they’d have to be “flung out of space” themselves. 

But the invader or shapeshifter, if not strictly extraterrestrial in origin, is a frequent trope horror movies and films draw on to create a sense of uncanniness or threat. That someone’s initial appearance, or our impression of how they act and speak can differ from deeper or simultaneously-existing truths about them provokes anxiety, because it means their role in relation to us, rather than being set for life, can shift in unexpected ways at any time.

This can be reinforced by a sexuality I soon discovered was my own too; bisexuality famously has no lack of villains and monsters flying its flag in fiction. About Catherine Tramell, the bisexual serial killer at the center of the thriller Basic Instinct, director Paul Verhoeven said: “Catherine is the devil– that’s why she is bisexual.”

Exploring why bisexuality is so often a villainous trait in fiction, Jo Eadie interprets this quote to mean that “because she is evil in a certain way (universal, archetypal, eternal, metaphysical, seductive)” the sexual and gender role indeterminacy represented by bisexuality is “necessary” to her character. To Eadie, the quote doesn’t make the argument the other way around– that bisexuality is the source of the monstrousness itself, but it does indicate a strong thematic association between bisexuality and the dangers of deceit and temptation.

Coming out to acceptance is often the high point of positive LGBTQ stories, but it’s not always how it goes. Someone may even accept those hypothetical other people, over there, already confidently doing their thing, but respond to you expressing doubts or asserting a new identity to them as a sudden imposition, like you had been tricking or hiding something from them all along. The image in their mind of you is the real thing, and suddenly, you’re the devious invader. 

When I started writing More Bugs, my debut novel, I had been stewing in almost a decade of these experiences, in romantic and platonic relationships, in overheard remarks and cultural representations, in the general feeling that people would just like me more if I nailed myself down one way or the other on the relationship or gender thing. Then there’d (supposedly) be no more surprises or changes to adapt to. While I didn’t set out explicitly intending to work in direct metaphor, I wanted to make my extraterrestrial creatures (who are, of course, right under the protagonist’s nose) changeable in a way that fascinated me; I didn’t want this to make them inherently deceptive or evil. 

Both nature and literature provided me with lots of examples where something changing form, appearing initially as something else, shifting roles or identities, could instead be a matter of survival, connection, even consensual symbiosis. It gave both myself and my characters a way to imagine a situation where changes are expected, but not as an encroaching threat that leads to betrayal or rejection.

The oppressive sense of alienation and dread doesn’t come from the fear of invaders in this case, but the stultifying suburban setting that enforces conformity and tries to root out the changeable, the unexpected, the strange… for the sake of excluding it with the label “monstrous.” But the monsters, and the monstrous more generally, finds a way to persist, and to find its kin; perhaps an inevitable outcome for someone who always had a soft spot for monsters, before I could fully articulate what I saw in them, and myself. 

Em Reed

Bio: Em Reed is a writer originally from Central Pennsylvania and currently based in Glasgow. Their debut novel More Bugs was published by Knight Errant Press in the UK in 2024, and their nonfiction work on technology and science fiction has previously appeared in Real Life, EGM, and Murdered Futures: A David Cronenberg Fanzine.

Link to book: https://www.knighterrantpress.com/product-page/more-bugs-by-em-reed (print) https://www.knighterrantpress.com/product-page/more-bugs-by-em-reed-1 (ebook)

More Bugs by Em Reed

“A book-length compulsion to pull off the scab and look underneath […] an expectationfuck of a novel in the most affectionate sense!” – Ryszard Merey of tRaum Books

“Meditative, philosophical, but also gloriously weird yet painfully familiar.” – Ai Jiang, Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker Award nominee and author of LINGHUN and I AM AI

“shocking, surreal, and even erotic moments of body horror” – Briar Ripley Page, author of The False Sister and Corrupted vessels.


Dumped, broke and stranded at her mother’s house, Amy has few options for escape.

Hanging out with her ex comes with getting to know his new girlfriend, someone who looks suspiciously like Amy’s younger, straighter doppelgänger. Strapped for cash and desperate to be out of her mother’s home, she ends up babysitting the UFO-obsessed kids of the hot

working mom down the street. Over a dull, torrid summer in the Pennsylvania suburbs, strange lights linger on the horizon, and subterranean connections reach out their tendrils in the dark, signalling another, otherworldly possibility…

Genre: SF/F; Literary Fiction
Extent: 320 pp
Epub ISBN:  978-1-916665-04-0

Further Reading

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