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Letting your queerness show — letting your “very shiny nose” glow — can literally get you killed, as the threat posed by the Abominable Snow Monster of the North quite plainly demonstrates. Perhaps the assertion that you’re not who you know yourself to be isn’t some hard truth you need to accept, but merely gaslighting spurred by the fear and ignorance of the culture you were born into.

I think it’s more useful, though, to think of them as representing different stages of a queer kid’s coming to terms with their “nonconformity,” as narrator Sam the Snowman (Burl Ives) describes Rudolph’s nose. One obvious one is nostalgia. 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.

The program didn’t pull any punches about the difficulties of this journey. Which one speaks to you more?

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📌 Creative Notice

These artworks feature fictional AI-generated characters.

Both of these equivalences have been widely observed.

More than one writer has contrasted the latter’s unwillingness to stay in the closet with the former’s reticence on this point. He’ll never be a toymaker — he’ll never be other than what he is. But nostalgia is a complicated emotion for me. As the young me translated this lesson: perhaps the menace of the Abominable that your community used to drive you into the closet is really nothing more than the idiocy of the Head Elf’s “important stuff” writ large.

So too has the role of Yukon Cornelius as gay mentor and hyper-masculine “bear” or (my favorite) “lumbersexual.” (Just consider for a second the stuff he does with his pickaxe if you have any doubts about his orientation.) There’s more to say about the nature of Yukon’s mentoring, however.

Let’s consider the episode in which he chops away an ice flow and enables them to escape from the Abominable.

Much of the nostalgia I associate with Rudolph, then, lay in how it connects me to a time when my difficulties were new, and my life less complicated (if no less challenging).

There’s also, of course, my affinity with the program’s “misfits.” In recent years, I’ve come to recognize how deep this affinity ran when I was young, and how differently the celebration of a red-nosed reindeer and a dentist elf must resonate with young viewers today.

The complexities of this subtext, though, haven’t been fully explored.

Take for example the way Rudolph and Hermey’s experiences complement each other. The Abominable Snow Monster of the North (hereafter “the Abominable”) was of course the ever-present and seemingly overwhelming danger that the world posed, while the Island of Misfit Toys was the marginal space queer folks occupied after they came out.

Rudolph’s aching, inarticulate “I wish…I wish…,” which prompts the song, expressed the deeply conflicting desires I and I’m sure many queer kids had to be “normal” like other kids and to be accepted for who we were.