Camping with Bigfoot: Sasquatch and the Varieties of Middle‐Class Resistance to Consumer Culture in Late Twentieth‐Century North America

O N 3 NOVEMBER 1972, THE LEGENDARY MONSTER SASQUATCH appeared in a large room above the parish hall of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, on 10th Street and Second Avenue in New York City. The room was the Theatre Genesis, one of the key locations in the so-called Off-Off-Broadway scene, and it was where Ronald Tavel’s play Bigfoot was being performed. The Theatre Genesis was about as far away from the traditional home of Bigfoot—in terms of miles and cultural distance—as possible: the Manhattan theater catered to a middle-class audience, staging experimental, selfconscious plays that often celebrated homosexuality. By contrast, Bigfoot had entered the American cultural landscape in the late 1950s when Jerry Crew, a northern California construction worker, reported finding large footprints encircling his bulldozer. The creature became the star of tabloids, men’s adventure magazines, cheap paperbacks, and B-movies. These amusements were pitched at white workingclass men—blue-collar and lower white-collar workers with limited educations who, while sometimes paid well, labored at jobs in which they were heavily supervised—and offered predictable tales that glorified strong, free men who overcame evil and the odds through dint of hard work and skill (Parfrey 5–10; Fussell 43). Bigfoot’s appearance in an Off-Off-Broadway playhouse was more than idiosyncratic; it was the beginning of the creature’s bourgeois career. Sporadically in the 1970s and more definitively in the 1980s,