A couple of months ago, I found myself hiding in my bedroom while my roommate interviewed Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller via Zoom in our living room (this is the kind of thing that happens when two Fannibals who also happen to be journalists decide to live together). As I crept around and tried not to knock things over, part of their conversation caught my attention.

“He’s pansexual,” Fuller said of Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). “Whatever is beautiful is what he’s attracted to, and [Mikkelsen] kind of un-genders Hannibal’s attraction, which I think is really progressive and insightful. In conversations with Mads talking about Hannibal, he doesn’t speak of him with any sort of binary gendered identity… He’s Hannibal. He’s genderless. He’s manifesting in this form in a way that the devil has chosen.”

I swore I wasn’t going to write something about Hannibal again so soon (I just wrote a 10th anniversary piece for Fangoria, not to mention talking about the series’ queerness for this very site a few Prides ago). But how could I resist with Fuller saying something as fascinating as that? This idea of a genderless central character whose sexual attraction is not tied to gender would be refreshing for a series made today, let alone one that first aired over a decade ago. But Hannibal was ahead of its time in many ways when it comes to the presentation of gender, sexuality, and identity. That may be why so many fans, myself included, cite it as playing a key role in their own journeys of queer awakening and acceptance.

At its core, Hannibal is a show about two lonely, misunderstood people finding the one other person in the world who sees them for what they are and understands them completely. That in itself is a storyline that countless queer horror fans can relate to. Who among us hasn’t experienced a painful pang of empathy for the hideous monster hiding its face from society, for we too have felt “othered” in some way? And how often have we ourselves hidden our true face out of fear while secretly yearning to be seen?

It just so happens that in Hannibal, the two people hiding yet yearning are a cannibalistic serial killer and an FBI special investigator with such complete empathy that he is shocked at his own associations, appalled at his dreams. Both also happen to present as men, though neither fits comfortably into the mold of manhood that Western society has constructed.

I’m hardly the first person to point out that investigator Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) is imbued with all the outward signifiers of modern manhood (facial hair, earth-tone clothing, a love of fishing and scotch and a penchant for wearing aftershave that smells like something with a ship on the bottle) while being intrinsically linked with the traditionally “feminine” trait of empathy. At the same time, Lecter, the cannibalistically inclined of the two, defies simple categorization. He loves to cook, but also kill. He cries at the opera. His psychiatrist, Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson), refers to the “well-tailored person suit” he wears, while Dr. Frederick Chilton (Raúl Esparza) writes that “he may not even be a man at all.”

Lecter’s person suit is not as literal as the one being constructed by serial killer Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs, one of the Thomas Harris books upon which Hannibal was based, but it is nonetheless a gendered construction. Where Gumb was skinning women and stitching the pieces together to create a physical woman suit (sparking a decades-long debate over transphobia in the process), the suit worn by Hannibal’s Lecter is a carefully crafted visage of a respectable man, pocket square and all. As Fuller put it, the real Lecter, glimpsed only through the stitching, is genderless. He’s just more conscious of gender expression than most and uses it to his advantage.

This is never openly discussed, nor is gender an overt theme in the series. But it also isn’t a confining force, with characters regularly stepping outside the expectations of their gender. Freddie Lounds (Lara Jean Chorostecki) is the best example of this. Arrogant, ruthless, and monstrously ambitious, Freddie exhibits traits that are associated with and often rewarded in men. Indeed, the character was a man in Harris’ 1981 novel Red Dragon and previous adaptations. In swapping Freddie’s gender, Hannibal quietly made her one of the most interesting and transgressive characters. It’s telling that so many casual viewers always hated her.

Sexuality, too, is rarely drawn attention to in Hannibal. Other than a few comments about the “proclivities” of canonical lesbian Margot Verger (Katharine Isabelle) as relates to the plot and a few catty references to breeding and “finger-wagging” from a bored, imprisoned Lecter, characters are never explicitly labeled as gay, straight, or any other fixed point on the spectrum. Rather, the audience’s understanding of their sexuality evolves as we see them falling in and out of romantic and sexual entanglements.

Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas), for example, might be assumed to be straight in the first two seasons, where she engages in a sexual relationship with Hannibal Lecter and has a “professional curiosity” toward Will Graham that almost results in a kiss. But in the third season, she meets and falls in love with Margot Verger, culminating in a kaleidoscopically beautiful sex scene, a mutual murder involving an eel, and a child together (and they say queer women move fast!).

To some viewers, particularly those of the heterosexual persuasion, Bloom “switching teams” might have come as a shock, just as many were surprised when Graham and Lecter began to move inexorably closer to one another, exchanging meaningful glances and throwing the word “love” around like it was going out of fashion. But unlike other shows that came out around the same time, many of which had a tendency to pander or else compulsively “no homo,” Hannibal never felt the need to signpost its characters’ sexuality. Sexuality is not a fixed, immutable concept in the series, just as it isn’t necessarily tied to gender, and some characters may not fully know themselves yet.

Graham, in particular, seems to be on a journey of radical self-discovery. Perhaps he once believed himself to be fundamentally straight, just as he probably believed that he’d never fall for a cannibalistic murderer (quite literally). Then he met Hannibal Lecter.

In creating this space for questioning and exploration, expression and evolution, Hannibal helped a lot of queer fans find themselves and find their community. As a transgressive, deeply queer genre, horror has been creating spaces like that for fans for years, but few existed on network television at the time. Hannibal smuggled one onto NBC under the pretense of a police procedural. Lecter wasn’t the only creature masquerading as another.

Hannibal was never about sexuality or gender. But its unspoken acknowledgement that these aspects of human existence aren’t rigid and immutable struck a chord with many queer fans, some of whom didn’t even know they were queer at the time. Between creative crime scenes and cat-and-mouse games, it offered a view of world were gender and sexual identity weren’t binary, narrow, and preset for life. In doing so, it perhaps forced viewers to question why they expected characters to act in certain ways, opening the door for more personal interrogations.

Ultimately, what Hannibal taught us is that it's fine to be weird. It’s fine to not know who you are yet and figure it out as you go. And I personally, along with many others fans, don’t know where I’d be today if it hadn’t.