Crying “Loren Coleman thinks Bigfoot is an anal-sex-loving homo(sasquatchsexual?) sexual freak-montster!!!” is a means of attacking the very foundations of cryptozoology with sensationalist garbage. The skeptics, cynics and naysayers will seize on *every* opportunity to degrade the general public’s interest in these subjects.

It’s important to respond patiently to any accusations. But it’s equally important to remember that these people have a very specific agenda in sensationalizing any possible statement. There is nothing to be gained by worrying about this sort of thing. Say your piece and ignore it. It will go away, eventually.

For instance the story states He once told the wife he was in the county seat of Washington Pa at the Holiday Inn to give a lecture. He isn’t clear whether it was the county seat of the county where he taught ,or where he lived with the wife. However he does say that he once walked from his home to the diggins a distance of 8 miles,which earlier he had said that he had driven north of the diggins entrance road -to north of dunbar to hide the whereabouts from a friend-during which account he mentions a tributary that flows into Dunbar Creek.

That leads one to think that the cabin was somewhere in or around the Dunbar mountains-part of Chestnut Ridge–6-8 miles from where i live. All of this in Fayette County.

Now if he lived in Washington County and not Fayette, it is impossible to reach the Dunbar area -let alone the surrounding mountains in 8 miles -even if taking the nearest less traveled road.

So that leads one to believe he worked in Washington County-and lived in Fayette County-and only 1 University is situated in Washington County that would be somewhat in the logical area for reasonable commute from Fayette County daily and also allow the home, if in Fayette county, to be close enough to comfortably walk to the Dunbar area.This would be California University of Pa. at Califronia Pa. in Washington County just across the river border from fayette County-and taking backroads does dramatically reduce mileage from there to the Grindstone , Smock and Liesenring areas which gets you relatively close to Dunbar.

All of this is in Fayette County -county seat is Uniontown.

I believe the man has deliberately misrepresented this type of stuff to throw off those of us who are curious as to his identity

Clearly, even I gave forth with bias, as such is culturally impossible sometimes to not do, in the form of communicating with other humans, despite my best efforts to do otherwise. During my attempts to intellectually and, sometimes, with humor, challenge others, I too act human. I’ve tried to overcome that, but sometimes I fail.
The underlying theme - of cultural and biological ethnocentrism of humans as projected on Bigfoot - is certainly underlying what I am attempting to discuss here.

I am, however, troubled by the gender discourse operating in your discussion of Bigfoot’s stance in that image as “effeminate.” First, I believe in theories of sociality and sexual politics that suggests that there is no inherent link between one’s sexuality and one’s behavior. As Judith Butler argues, (and I quote from wikipedia here just because it is early and I am lazy), “gender” is a kind of repeated, largely “forced” (Foucault’s “discipline”) enactment or “performance” that in that very repetitive performance produces the imaginary fiction of a “core gender,” as well as the distinction between the surface/exterior of “the body” and the “interior core.” Paradoxically, it is a kind of forced, repetitive “doing” of gender that itself produces the fiction that an individual “has a” stable “gender” that “she/he” is just “expressing” in “her/his actions.” And this imaginary fiction crucially produces an equally fictive distinction between an “interior” of “the body” and an “exterior” of “the body.” All identify, but, especially sexual identity, has meaning in a social context that privileges different sexual signifies. One’s “sex” is their sexual orientation, one’s “gender,” contrasted to biological sex, is the constructed and social and cultural norms by which masculinity and femininity are signified. Being homosexual does not make one “effeminate,” which is a term related to notions of delicacy, luxuriousness, and weakness because “female” is seen as the Other to the normative state of masculinity. Men can possesses traits commonly derided as “effeminate” without being homosexual, but society reads notions attached to women (which are equally mythic and gender biased) as weakness.

What I am trying to get at is in interpreting the image as an “effeminate stance to a clearly male Bigfoot,” you are still projecting a gendered discourse onto the creature that posits masculinity as normal (no one ever questions or assumes the depiction of Bigfoot in “masculine” poses is unusual or unconscious, or that the normative behavior of a masculine Bigfoot would be unlike that of a human’s) and equates female stereotypes with homosexuality. There’s very little in that image to suggest the creature is “effeminate”, except perhaps the turning in of the leg, and isn’t it curious that such a minor and perhaps coincidental signifier suddenly resounds with our cultural frames of reference to suggest effeminacy and all those abstract notions attached to womanhood?

What’s more, is it even productive to speak of homosexuality or heterosexuality in a creature that is not human when these ideas are clearly informed and shaped by human perceptions of social relations and how gender should be divided (i.e. heterosexual men = dominate and heterosexual female = passivity, therefore homosexual men = passivity)? I am willing to see that humans and other simian mammals with complex social relations display instinctual sexual behavior related to their sex, and in homosexual activity among primates – such as Roy and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins at New York’s Central Park Zoo, who display heterosexual pair-bonding behavior such as the entwining of necks, mutual preening, flipper flapping, and sexual intercourse - homosexual activity takes on a gendered context. However, homosexuality has also been documented in other mammals and non-mammals where there is less evidence of social understanding and pair-bonding, but we wouldn’t assume homosexual beetles act out human social gender stereotypes. A homosexual male dolphin, which may engage in sexual contact with other males of its species, does not swim like female dolphin. My female cat does not walk or act much differently from a male cat.

I suppose, I resist the anthropomorphization of Bigfoot in the assumption that if the creature existed it would act (carry itself) similar to human conceptions of sexuality, gender, and subjective identity which themselves are predicated on myths and stereotypes and social structure that privileges certain performative signifiers of sexual identity as normative and others as deviate. Although I can see that Loren was trying to challenge the status-quo related to the gendering of Bigfoot, in going about it this way, I still think it doesn’t challenge the anthropomorphization of the creature or go far enough to point out the gender myths we project onto this creature which may not exist and of which we have little concrete evidence of how and to what extent its social behavior looks like.