Gay Halloween: Have We Forgotten Our Past?

by Ebun Lawore, Staff Writer

I love gay halloween.

When I say gay halloween, I mean the idea that gay people tend to dress up in the most elaborately niche costumes for Halloween, often grabbing inspiration from an obscure piece of entertainment or a micro-famous internet trend. Examples of gay Halloween costumes include Sue Sylvester's track suit wedding dress from the hit show Glee, sexy Squidward, or Fergie’s exact outfit from her iconic national anthem moment.

For a while I’ve had this sneaking suspicion that gay Halloween is not the just the funny internet phenomenon that we all think it is. And I was right: it's not.

There is a deep historical connection between the LGBTQ+ community and Halloween. I mean, the whole holiday is centered around dressing up as something you are not, which makes it completely acceptable for boys to dress as girls, for girls to dress as boys, and for anyone to look just generally sexually confusing. Halloween time and time again has given people the unique opportunity to dress super queer and not experience discrimination for it.  

Because of the safety net that Halloween provides for queer people, they have historically always thrown the littest Halloween parties. Even as early as 1935, a gay black man named Alfred Finnie was known for throwing glamorous halloween balls in the South Side of Chicago. The ’50s were the time of “Bitches Christmas,” Philadelphia’s unofficial Halloween parade that would bring drag performers and queer people from gay bar to gay bar. This event was permanently shut down by the police in the 60s, but soon after came New York’s Village Halloween parade in 1974, San Francisco’s Polk Street Halloween in the 60’s, and Los Angeles’ West Hollywood Halloween in 1987.

All of those queer-centered Halloween celebrations continue to live on in some form today, but not without opposition. For example, Polk Street’s celebrations often attracted homophobes who would come in costumes with weapons in order to commit violent hate crimes—so much so that throughout the 60’s they had to move the celebration to the Castro District in order to ensure people’s safety. However, violence still occurred. In 2006, a mass shooting occurred at the event, leaving nine people wounded.

So that is actually gay Halloween. And learning all of that information makes me feel a little weird about the gay Halloween memes that live in my social media. I can’t help but think that maybe by diminishing the meaning of gay halloween to silly, niche costumes, we may be ignoring the true weight that Halloween carries for the queer community. I really hate to be that guy and ruin the joke by being too woke about it, but unfortunately that is just who I am.

For a community that has experienced such incredible amounts of violence in the past and present, it’s kind of crazy how often queer people so easily sacrifice their history for internet jokes. Yes, sexy Squidward costumes are funny, but is it really more important for us to hold the image of a fictional squid’s pursed lips in our brains, or the memories of queer people who have struggled to find ways to express themselves without being attacked? It’s not impossible to hold both in your head, but I have yet to meet a person who has. 

For now I’ll say that I love gay Halloween. And by that I mean that I love the drag kings and queens, the cross-dressers, the closeted queer people, and black trans women who made my gay Halloween possible. Let me not spit a meme on their graves.