[Pride 2020] There's A Monster At The End Of This Essay

The first book I ever loved was The Monster at the End of this Book. I was three or four, and it was one of many books my mother would read to me. But it was my favorite. I made her read it to me so many times that I didn’t need her after a while. I’d memorized every page, so I started reading it, word for word, to her. Sometimes, just to myself. That book was my first friend.

For the unfamiliar: The Monster at the End of This Book starred the lovable, furry old Grover from Sesame Street. He’s freaking out, because word on the Street (and the book’s first page) is scary: there’s a monster at the end of the book. Grover’s terrified of monsters, so he begs and pleads with you, Gentle Reader, to not turn any pages. Simple plan, right? If you don’t get to the end, you don’t meet any monsters.

When you don’t follow directions and keep turning pages, Grover takes matters into his own hands. He ties the pages shut with ropes, he puts up wooden scaffolds, and he builds a brick wall, all to keep the end and the monster from arriving. But every page turn demolishes his efforts. “Do you know that you are very strong?” he says under a pile of bricks.

You get to the end, of course. And Grover’s in a panic. There really is a monster there. But it’s Grover. He’s the monster at the end of the book.

He tries to brush it off. “I told you and told you there was nothing to be afraid of.”

Typical Grover. All that worry. He was the monster all along.

*

Queerness has always been an uncomfortable experience for me. I’ve never felt like I’ve “done it right,” always feeling like I’m just slightly out of step with other queer people, always left of some kind of queer center. Part of it is just the difficulty of being queer in a culture that’s still fundamentally discriminatory. Part of it is my asexual identity, which puts me out of step with many of the sexual norms of queer cis male culture. And part of it is just me, a function of who I am.

I was seeing a therapist a few years ago for my anxiety, and in the middle of a session, he dropped a bomb: “You know, Cody, this is just hitting me as relevant to our work here. But it seems to me that a common theme in your experiences, the ones you're sharing with me, is that you don’t know what it feels like to belong.”

I don’t. That’s not a skill I developed. And while it’s not necessarily tied to my queerness, being queer has certainly nurtured my inability to belong. It’s like Miracle Gro. Coming out reinforced all the feelings of not belonging I already had in my life, and behold! Tall vines of awkwardness and insecurity, scaling the walls of my little queer brain.

It’s why I like monsters. It’s why I like horror. The genre is a place to explore the anxieties and terrors of otherness, and sometimes you’re the monster, and sometimes you’re the final girl, and sometimes you’re uncomfortably both. But always -- always -- horror acknowledges that the world is a bloody, chaotic place, where the inexplicable happens and nothing’s really normal. Horror explains how not belonging feels.

It explains the horror of our bodies wanting something we shouldn’t, the pain of being erased by the people who love us. It explains the knife stab of the word “faggot,” the panic of the closet. It explains the violence of being left out of the “us” of the world.

But horror also empowers us. It tells us that we don’t have to be a victim of the bloody, chaotic mess of the world. We can fight. We can push against the darkness. We can own our otherness and use it as a weapon to carve out a space for ourselves.

Horror explains myself to me. It gets me. It’s maybe the only thing to make me feel like I belong.

*

There are a lot of reasons I think Grover is a queer icon. (I don’t have the time to go into them all here. But he lives for the drama, doesn’t he? Girl.) But in The Monster at the End of This Book, Grover is speaking to every little queer kid who knows they don’t belong, to the ones who don’t know it yet, the ones who are gonna know soon enough.

Grover was speaking to me.

It’s okay to be afraid. If you’re afraid of the monsters, say you’re afraid.

You’ll put up walls. You’ll board up the windows. You’ll try to keep the monsters out. That’s okay. Give it a try. Those tricks won’t be as strong as you think they are. Not against this, anyway. You’ll break them all down.

Do you know that you are very strong?

You can’t run away from your monsters. They’re not going away. You have to face them. You have to get to the end, so you can look them in the eye.

Because you’re the monster. The monster is you. And that’s the secret, Gentle Reader. The thing you’re scared of doesn’t have to hurt you. It can protect you.

I told you and told you, there was nothing to be afraid of.

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