Halloween has been a beloved queer holiday for many decades, offering a playful and safe space for LGBTQ+ folks to freely explore our identities through wearing costumes, attending whimsical gatherings, and connecting with the macabre and the monstrous. Even when expressing queerness went against the law, Halloween allowed us to bypass the strict social order and be whoever or whatever we wanted to be for one mysterious night. But how did the day of remembering the dead become the “gay Christmas,” and why are some of us so attracted to all things spooky, scary, and supernatural?
The roots of Halloween lie in an old Gaelic harvest festival of Samhain and a Christian celebration of All Saints’ Eve. Some traditions, such as trick-or-treating, carving jack-o’-lanterns, and lighting bonfires, date back centuries, while parties and parades are a more modern development. One of the first-ever city-wide celebrations in the U.S. occurred in Anoka, Minnesota, in the 1920s, with the goal of discouraging the local youth from pulling pranks.
Over a decade later, a gay Black man in Chicago, Alfred Finnie, started hosting Halloween balls in the basement of a nightclub with hundreds of attendees, both queer and straight. The LGBTQ+ community in Philadelphia dubbed the 31st of October “Bitches Christmas” in the 1950s and celebrated it by going from bar to bar in an extravagant procession. San Francisco’s queer scene also held public costume parties from the 1940s through the 1970s, despite the sodomy and cross-dressing laws that existed at the time.
The 1970s also marked the birth of the Village Halloween Parade in New York, a small theatrical gathering that gradually grew into a grand parade with tens of thousands of participants and millions of spectators. In its early years, it welcomed many drag performers and queer artists, giving them the creative freedom to express their authentic selves or experiment with different identities.
For nearly a century, Halloween has encouraged everyone to transgress the gender norms and provided a much-needed outlet for LGBTQ+ folks who feel constrained by the rigid boundaries of heteronormativity. Subverting the traditional values and rebelling is what makes this holiday queer.
Queerness has long been associated with the weird and the monstrous, a view that became especially prominent in American society during the Hays Code era. The censorship guidelines in the U.S. in the early 1930s prohibited the overt portrayal of homosexuality, branding it as a “sex perversion.” Up until the late 1960s, queer people mainly appeared on the silver screen in the roles of villains, tragic victims or caricatures. During this period, some of the defining works of classic cinema were born: Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and Bride of Frankenstein, all three of which were directed by James Whale, an openly gay Hollywood director. For decades, film scholars have studied the queercoding in these movies.
Such well-known horror figures, as Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula, have also been extensively examined through the lens of queer theory, and biographical evidence suggests that their creators, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, respectively, might have been queer.
To this day, horror media and Halloween are beloved by many LGBTQ+ folks, who may see their lived experiences of marginalization reflected in stories about vengeful vampires, wrong witches, and mistreated monsters. The 31st of October, therefore, becomes a night not only for breaking out of the confines of conventionality but also for celebrating queer identities by reclaiming and recontextualizing the villain that society historically imagined us to be.
