The Bigfoot conference has already begun when I slip into the windowless ballroom.
Looking around in the dim light, I’m shocked by the number of people here — almost 100, by my count. I study the faces in the audience, trying to place them on the spectrum of skepticism. I recognize the believers, not by appearance, but by their reverent attention: heads down, pens poised like parishioners taking sermon notes. The woman in front of me has a cable-knit sweater tossed over her shoulders. She’s not the kind of person I imagine spends hours on cryptid forums. Then again, you can never really tell.
I was not a Bigfoot believer. I’d never had a sighting or firsthand encounter. Before, if I thought of Bigfoot at all, I pictured National Enquirer headlines like “I Married Sasquatch” or camouflaged conspiracy theorists in night-vision goggles. Yet I found myself here — at the Blue Ridge Bigfoot Conference, in the basement of a damp ski lodge — searching for proof.
It started on a road trip through Tennessee with my girlfriend, a label that still felt foreign after decades of dating men. Driving down a country road, we passed a sign with a long, curling tentacle emerging from a coffee mug under the words “The Cryptid Café.”
“We have to,” Sarah said, grinning as she pulled the car over.
Brightly colored posters of Mothman and the Loch Ness Monster hung from the walls. Patrons ate waffles. At the counter, Sarah linked her arm in mine, and I stiffened. I still wasn’t used to showing casual affection without first scanning the room for threats, especially not in the rural South. But no one looked up from their plates.
I had first met Sarah when she reached out after reading an essay I wrote in which I mentioned, tentatively, that I was bisexual. At the time, I’d only recently left the evangelical church and ended a seven-year marriage. My sexuality was mostly theoretical. Even seeing it in print, I had a hard time believing it. At any moment, I expected someone to leap from the wings and shout: “Prove it!”
The gray-haired barista, with a biscuits-and-gravy accent, handed us a list of lattes with names like Chupacabra, Kraken, and Jackalope. She pointed to one called the Brimstone Booger.
“That’s our local cryptid,” she told us. “Kind of like Bigfoot. I’ve seen it myself, darting across the road at night.”
“What’s a cryptid?” I asked.
“Something we believe exists but can’t be certain of,” she said.
By now, Sarah and I had been dating for six months. I’d introduced her to my parents and taken her to family dinners at my sister’s house. We’d said “I love you” and I meant it. And yet — despite my instant attraction, the romantic giddiness and revelatory sex — deep down, I still didn’t fully believe.
For the first 30 years of my life, I never considered that I might be queer. The church taught me the love between women wasn’t real. Popular media taught me bisexual men were really gay and bisexual women were just straight girls experimenting. Either way, they didn’t exist. Now, even as I fell in love with Sarah, I feared I was faking it, secretly sure I was fooling everyone, including her. Including myself.
If I were really queer, I reasoned, I would have known before now. Because how could something real have remained hidden for so long?
After that day at The Cryptid Cafe, I became obsessed. I joined over 20 regional Facebook groups devoted to tracking Bigfoot. For weeks, I scrolled Reddit threads, watched grainy trail cam footage, and zoomed in on blurry photos.
Every year, thousands of people claim to have seen a Bigfoot. On a pixelated Geocities-style website, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization maintains a database of all known sightings with titles like “Man Sees Large Animal By Roadside” and “Greenish Eyes Outside Mother’s Window At 3 a.m.”
It’s easy to write off believers as kooks. But when Jane Goodall was asked for her personal opinion about Bigfoot in a 2002 interview on NPR, she said, “You will be amazed when I tell you I’m sure they exist.”
The one piece of evidence that has never been conclusively debunked is a 59.5-second-long film from 1967. In it, a shaggy, bipedal beast walks along the treeline of a California forest. A noted primatologist deemed the film a likely hoax, but admitted: “I could not see the zipper; and I still can’t.”
So why has the existence of Bigfoot never been proven? Two possibilities: Either they are not real, or they are exceptionally good at hiding.
To say I had been “closeted” implies that I knew something and kept it hidden. But if I was hiding it from anyone, I was hiding it from myself.
Here is where I might put a story of early sapphic desire, if I had one — but I don’t. At least none that count. Of course, I do the backwards math, combing through the archives of my adolescence for possible sightings:
Pretending To Be A Guy In Online Chatrooms So I Could Talk To Girls
The Constant Presence Of Women In My Fantasy Life
The Unusually Intense, Obsessive Jealousy I Felt Toward My College Roommate
The Kiss I Shared With My Best Friend The Night Of My Bachelorette Party
All meaning was retroactively applied. I had no memories of conscious longing. No stolen glances, charged hand-brushing or secret sleepover kisses. I envied other people these milestones, which seemed to reveal a deep self-knowledge I didn’t have.
To explain the absence of a question, I can only point to the answers that crowded it out. Our church library was stocked with Focus on the Family magazines and shiny pamphlets with scripts for debunking the “lies” of abortion, evolution and homosexuality.
When I was 12, on the way home from gymnastics, my dad told us we needed to stop by the store for toothpaste. We couldn’t use Crest anymore because we were boycotting Procter & Gamble for promoting the gay agenda. From the backseat, in my blue leotard, I remember being awed by all the ways wickedness tried to reach us.
“By the time I walked down the aisle two weeks after graduation, I didn’t think something was missing; I thought this was all there was.”
True Love Waits, the abstinence-only movement that served as my only sex education, arose in response to increased support for LGBTQ+ students coming out of the closet. It encouraged Christian teenagers to “come out” too — as virgins, saving themselves for biblical marriage between a man and a woman. In Sunday school, I was given an index card to list the godly qualities I should look for in my future husband.
Queerness didn’t cross my mind as I dated boys but remained a “virgin,” or when I went to college in Alabama and met my future husband at church freshman year. By the time I walked down the aisle two weeks after graduation, I didn’t think something was missing; I thought this was all there was.
Then, seven years into our marriage, my spouse — assigned male at birth — had come out to me as a transgender woman. From the outside, we had been living as man and wife. But if she had always been a woman and I had always been queer, then perhaps we were both longing, beneath any conscious knowing, to become ourselves. The marriage eventually ended, but she had shown me that there was more to the world than meets the eye.
I began to wonder what I, too, had been hiding.
“A lot of you are here because you’ve had an experience,” says the Bigfoot conference emcee, a goateed man in a fedora and tie-dye t-shirt. A Mothman fishing lure dangles from his hat.
During my internet deep dive, I’d briefly entertained journeying into the Appalachian wilderness with a stranger from one of my many Facebook groups. When I saw a post saying the Blue Ridge Bigfoot Conference would be taking place that weekend, within driving distance, it seemed like the more sensible option.
“Would anyone like to share their story?” the emcee says, extending the microphone to the crowd.
Immediately, I am transported back to the fundamentalist summer camps I’d attended as a kid, where hundreds of us would gather to be worked into a fevered state of religious ecstasy. Children would walk down the aisle to share their personal stories of finding salvation through Jesus. We called it “witnessing” when we shared these testimonies with unbelievers.
One man displays a thigh-wide poplar sapling, mounted on a piece of plywood. It had been twisted from the top like a corkscrew, curled around itself, tender insides exposed in a burst of splinters. “I mean, how do you explain that?” he asks.
A woman takes the microphone and, near tears, recounts being in the woods with her brother as a kid, feeling like she was being watched. “I don’t know what else would have looked at two children with such malice and anger,” she says.
God, for one, I think.
“There’s a pastor at my church who believes in Bigfoot,” an acquaintance told me recently. “The spiritual and the physical worlds intersect in the Bible all the time. Some people think there are ‘thin places’ where things can pass through.”
“Incredible,” I responded. His church, like the one I’d grown up in, condemned homosexuality as unnatural. In high school, our community had been scandalized when a pretty PTA mom left her husband for her best friend. Praying for her, we never used the word “lesbian” or “gay,” but insisted she was only “struggling with same-sex attraction.”
So what I really meant was: Incredible that a Christian would be able to hold space for a Bigfoot teleporting in from another dimension, yet not for the existence of gay people.
It hadn’t felt like a huge deal to toggle on the “Women” option in Hinge. Just to see. After the divorce and deconstruction, my latent curiosity finally had room to roam. I began experimenting with what if. Growing up in a world where imagination itself was forbidden, the question still felt deviant on my tongue.
In my late-night Googling, I discovered others like me: former evangelical women questioning their queerness after decades as a good Christian wife. I found them the same way cryptid researchers find each other: through online forums. These women, like me, had trouble believing and sought outside sources of proof. “Am I gay?” quizzes, the Lesbian Masterdoc, Reddit threads, and the TikTok algorithm.
“Here’s how to know you’re gay...” one sapphic creator said, then paused so long I thought the video had glitched. “...If you’re still watching, there’s your answer.”
When I arrived at the dimly lit cocktail lounge for my first date with a woman, she was already seated at the bar. She was petite and masc, with buzzed hair and a safety pin fastened at her collar. I’d panicked about what to wear and settled, inexplicably, on a turtleneck. I hugged her hello, certain my fraudulence would soon be found out, a Scooby-Doo-style unmasking that would reveal me as the imposter I was.
But it was completely natural. We flirted over gin cocktails. She touched my knee and I fizzed — but I still didn’t believe. Not when she leaned in close during our game of pool, or at the warmth of her hand in mine, or when I cupped her soft face as we kissed in the parking lot.
I saw her again, and other women after that. No evidence was enough. The skeptic in my mind still insisted This is fake. This is a hoax. Soon, we will see the zipper.
No one is more ready to disprove Bigfoot evidence than the Bigfoot believers themselves.
The next speaker, Nikki, has an entire platform devoted to exposing hoaxes. One by one, she debunks alleged sightings, harboring particular ire toward one notorious scammer who toured a fake Bigfoot body around the country to the tune of $500,000 in ticket sales.
As Nikki flips through images of latex masks and matted faux-fur, I imagine the case against me. The most damning evidence, I think, was the very fact of my disbelief. Uncertainty shadowed even Sarah and my sweetest moments: sipping coffee in the soft morning sun, stroking her hair as we watched a movie on the couch, falling asleep with our warm bodies pressed close together. Every tender moment, accompanied by an asterisk. Maybe I really was straight and inadvertently fulfilling the “fake” bisexual stereotypes I’d internalized. But if that were the case, there was evidence I couldn’t explain.
One afternoon, early into dating, Sarah was caught in a torrential rainstorm riding her scooter to my house. When she arrived, she was laughing. Her hair was plastered to her head. Her shoes were full of water. Her bare face, freckled and tanned, glowed in the dim garage. She wore a novelty T-shirt that said FLORIDA under a picture of two galloping horses, and the transparent fabric clung to her body. She gathered the wet cotton in her hands and wrung it out, still laughing. I’d never let myself look at a woman like that before. It still felt illicit, like I shouldn’t be doing it, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
“No evidence was enough. The skeptic in my mind still insisted, ‘This is fake. This is a hoax. Soon, we will see the zipper.’”
But I still felt the doubt, too. If you had gone your whole life thinking something was a myth, the first time you saw it, would you be able to accept it as real? Or would you explain it away? It’s a bear. It’s a costume. It’s a guy with a collection of large wooden feet in his basement.
Nikki’s tone changes when she shares her own close encounter with Bigfoot. Camping overnight, she says, she heard a rustling outside of her tent and saw the shadow of a bipedal figure, which announced its presence with one single syllable: “Chaaa.” But Nikki remained in her tent, terrified. When the moment came, she had been too afraid to look at this thing she’d wondered about her whole life. Afraid it might be true. Afraid it might not be.
The next morning, when Nikki emerged, she saw a footprint. On the slide projector, she pulls up a photo of the forest floor — dirt and leaves, nothing discernible — then the same photo with a wobbly red outline in the shape of a foot. I can’t make it out.
“Chaaa,” Nikki says again, looking around the room expectantly. Belief can be so humiliating.
“So do you still believe in God?” Sarah asked on our second date, resting her chin on her tattooed hand.
Immediately upon meeting Sarah, I knew I was attracted to her. This was new. It had been nearly three years since I’d started experimenting with what if, trying to tune in to the cues of my body. Before, decoding attraction had felt like a complicated math problem, but this feeling was instant. All night, I had wanted to touch her.
“That wrathful capital-G God from church? Definitely not,” I said. “But there’s this — I don’t know — voice, maybe? I’ve felt it with me since I was little.”
Across the bar, two statuesque femmes French-kissed.
Sarah nodded. She had been a missionary and worship pastor until she resigned after coming out.
“Church made truth a place you had to go to them for, not a feeling located inside yourself,” she said. “So maybe that voice isn’t God. Maybe it’s you.”
After dinner, we sat in her car. I expected the standard small talk that typically precedes a first kiss. Easter was the next weekend, which is the only explanation I can give for what came next.
“I’ve been reading a lot about the crucifixion,” Sarah said, leaning in.
We kissed, my fingers fluttering to her cheek and down to her delicate collarbone. Even after only a few weeks of knowing Sarah, I had the startling sensation of being seen by her. Where I had been able to hide with the men I’d dated, Sarah noticed if I disappeared. I couldn’t get close enough.
“Hey, um,” She pulled back, looking embarrassed. “Sorry I talked about the crucifixion right before our first kiss.”
Though Sarah wasn’t the first woman I’d dated, she was the first one I had sex with.
Trying to picture queer sex was like viewing a blank film reel. I had no mental model. No script. In preparation, I frantically binged “The L-Word,” watched ethical porn and consulted my queer friends. Something wasn’t clicking. I could not, I realized, picture sex that centered women. With men, there’d been a template. I didn’t need to know what I wanted. Now, I was discovering with shame what a stranger I was to my own desires.
I finally told Sarah I was nervous that I wouldn’t know what to do. Squeezing my knee, she said: “The fun part of not knowing is that we get to figure it out together.”
In the end, in Sarah’s moss-green sheets, it was easy. Her body against mine like whipped cream, my tongue on her, watching her back arch from below. I understood things about desire that had been indecipherable before, slack-jawed as an adolescent boy seeing his first centerfold. Unbelievable is the word that kept running through my mind. I’m allowed to have this?
After, Sarah and I lay together, curtains fluttering against the window, limbs loose and heavy. With her, I got access to a whole new part of myself, which felt like stepping through a hidden door. For a moment, I glimpsed that other glittering dimension.
“I can’t believe this existed and I had no idea,” I said, then burst into tears.
Even an ancient mythical beast like Bigfoot is not immune to Live-Laugh-Love-ification. Outside the conference room, vendors sell Bigfoot-themed scented candles, slap bracelets and Christmas stockings. Proselytizers bear plaster-cast footprints and specialized hunting gear.
At a table in the corner, a small man named Chubby hands me a magnifying glass to inspect a coarse brown hair pasted to a mailing envelope.
“They’re out there,” Chubby tells me with complete conviction. I nod politely, thinking about how many times I’ve let a white-haired man convince me of far-fetched and fantastical things.
At the end of the hallway, I spot the day’s final speaker, Melissa, standing by a table with hot pink signage that says BIGFOOT CHICK. Unlike some of the more wild-eyed believers in attendance, she has a self-possessed warmth. Melissa tells me that she loves how searching for Bigfoot gets her out into nature and helps her look more closely at the world around her.
“It’s our last great mystery,” she says.
The conference was coming to a close, and I still hadn’t been converted, although I had spent an inadvisable amount of money on Bigfoot merch. Now, here was someone who had spent her entire adult life searching for something she’d heard about, even hoped for, but never actually found.
“What proof do you need to believe?” I ask. It was the same question I’d been asking myself for the past six months.
“I just want to see one with my own eyes,” Melissa says. She smiles and gives a little shrug. “Then I would know it was real. I’d have that experience, and no one could take that away from me.”
Her answer returned me to a moment on the road trip with Sarah. In our cabin in rural Tennessee, after dinner and wine around the campfire, Sarah and I had curled up close together in the candlelight. Dark forest surrounded us on all sides, though I could only make out the glowing embers of the night’s fire. We kissed, her hand draped across my waist. Alone in the woods, something animal took over. For the first time, I wasn’t watching myself from the outside. I wasn’t thinking about what I was supposed to want or whether this was real. I was hardly thinking at all. Desire pulsed through my body, so loud that it left no room for doubt.
After so many months and years of panicked searching, I was surprised by how softly the answer arrived. I’d spent years waiting for someone else to tell me what was true. But this was a knowing that bloomed in my body. The sensation was like a cage lifting.
It wasn’t just sex, or even Sarah. It was the way queerness itself demanded imagination, required me to reject old templates and imagine new worlds. In doing so, it opened a portal: back into my body and myself. Inside me, a sequined universe unfolded — a big bang of possibility.
The joy of that realization was dizzying — so why was I crying? Lips pressed to Sarah’s soft shoulder, the tears came hot and fast. It wasn’t until I fully realized what I had that I could mourn what I lost. Sorrow swarmed over the decades I’d been kept from my own body and desires. How well I’d remained hidden from myself. How long I’d accepted a small room as the entire world. The countless times I’d convinced myself that desire was only a shadow at the treeline, a trick of the light. The sobs shook my entire body, surprising me with their intensity. Sarah put a gentle hand on my back. Later, she would tell me, “It seemed like you were grieving how long it took you to believe something that has been true the whole time.”
Now, I recognized that grief, which had so mystified me at the time, for what it was: proof. I had been so caught up in combing the archives for evidence, looking for some external marker of legitimacy. But queerness was never about figuring out where to look. It was about learning how to see.
We all file back into the ballroom for the Bigfoot-calling contest, where children and adults line up to emit their most convincing howls. I find myself grinning and cheering and flirting a bit with the person in a Sasquatch costume roaming the aisles.
The girl in the row ahead of me turns to her friend and rolls her eyes. Her friend snickers. I glare at them both. Without realizing it, I’ve grown quite protective of this Bigfoot community and their willingness to imagine, even speculatively, a world beyond the one we know.
On my phone, I pull up the photo I snapped of Nikki’s footprint and zoom in. This time, I swear I can make out the distinct imprint of five large toes. From there, I swipe backward to that camping trip with Sarah.
We’d left The Cryptid Café cradling our too-sweet coffees and climbed back into the car. We wound down country roads to the hiking spot the barista had recommended, near where their local Bigfoot had been spotted. Ignoring a sign that said PATH CLOSED, we parked at the trailhead and crossed a swinging footbridge to the empty and overgrown island.
Grass grew hip-high and spiders suspended like jewels in webs that spanned our path. We followed the trail to the water’s edge where a rocky beach opened up in bright white splendor. Sarah dove under the water and emerged, her dark hair shining.
In a video of the two of us in the water, the sun is bright behind us. We are holding one another close. The smooth length of her body pressed against mine. Her mouth tasted like mint and lavender. Lemon-yellow sunshine burst behind my closed eyelids as we kissed.
There it was: a sighting. This time, it was indisputable.
Lane Scott Jones is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose work explores the afterlife of inherited beliefs. Her essays have appeared in Longreads, Autostraddle, HuffPost, and elsewhere. Lane has been a featured speaker at events hosted by TEDx, CreativeMornings and more. She is currently at work on a memoir. Find her on social media @lanescottjones and subscribe to her Substack at lanescottjones.substack.com.
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