Hallowed
31/10/11 Filed in: Holiday | Human Nature
"I have always loved Halloween," the essayist said. "I even loved it before it was co-opted by the gays."
The line shocked me, not just because I didn't expect to hear someone on National Public Radio use the bigoted/clueless phrase, "the gays," but also because it wasn't possible. Gay people had been celebrating Halloween as a community since at least the 1930s. And I knew the essayist speaking those words had been born later than that.
He went on to talk about how Halloween has "always" been a holiday for kids, and how sad he was that politics and adult shenanigans have now ruined it.
So his ignorance was even worse than I initially thought. At least he wasn't also spouting nonsense about Halloween being originally a pagan holiday until it was co-opted by the church.
For at least 1300 years Halloween (All Hallow's Eve) has been a Christian holiday, and there is virtually no evidence that any of the European pre-Christian cultures observed a major celebration resembling Halloween or the Day of the Dead at that time of year before the Christian observance came into existence.
The notion that Halloween grew out of a pagan Celtic ritual called Samhain was first alleged by Christian monks in the late 10th Century — a bit more than 400 years after Ireland had itself been converted to Christianity. Whereas documents written in Old Irish survive from as long back as the 4th Century, none of them refer to Samhain as a Festival of the Dead and Celtic New Year which the 10th Century Christian documents insist were part of the Celtic tradition. The closest we can get is a 2nd Century Bronze calendar inscribed in Gaulish (a Celtic language that is a sort of cousin of Primitive Irish, the predecessor of Old Irish), which has a month called Samonios that marks the beginning of winter.
In the 8th Century, Pope Gregory III began celebrating a Feast for All Saints on November 1, and over the next few centuries various means of observing the holiday evolved. In many places people, usually poor people, would go door to door offering to pray for the salvation of the souls of dead. It was traditional to offer the person food or payment in exchange for this. This practice was called "souling."
Many European medieval communities already observed a similar practice of farm laborers going door to door wassailing for several nights in a row after the harvest had been completed. This may have been where the idea of souling came from.
In any case, by the 16th Century the practice of ritual begging on or near All Saint's Day was common enough to form the basis of a joke in one of Shakespeare's plays. And early 19th Century literature and paintings depict parties on Halloween night where games such as Bobbing for Apples was considered traditional.
Dressing up in costume, or "guising" didn't come into the celebration until the 1890s in Scotland. The practice is first mentioned in the North America in 1911, but doesn't seem to have become a common part of the door-to-door ritual until the 1930s, though homemade costumes for Halloween parties are mentioned occasionally in the 1920s.
By the 1930s, department stores offered pre-made Halloween costumes—and reported selling adult and child versions in equal quantities.
It was during the 1930s that certain cabarets (and speakeasies) began advertising their "annual Halloween costume balls." It might have been just a coincidence that the night spots that featured drag shows or otherwise bore a reputation of being frequented by homosexuals were also the ones that always hosted the Halloween parties. More likely it wasn't a coincidence at all. Before the era of gay rights, the only way for gay or lesbian people to survive is to get very good at pretending to be something we aren't.
Not all gay people are naturally flamboyant and fabulous and sassy, but even the most gender-conforming, straight-edge gay people have to hide at least one aspect of themselves from their homophobic neighbors and family members. So we all were good at making masks, sometimes out of nothing more than determination. So if you let us loose with some feathers, makeup, sequins, and fabric, look out!
After prohibition ended, and after the war, bars frequented by gays continued to host the most well-attended costume parties around Halloween. Costume parties for adults of all sorts continued, of course, but if you wanted to see a party where more than a small fraction of the customers were dressed up, you needed to head to the clubs with a reputation for "that kind" of clientele.
By the '50s and '60s the notion of Halloween being primarily a children's holiday of trick-or-treating was well established. Adult dressing up still occurred, but it was far less common, as evidenced by changing patterns of pre-made costume sales.
So, in the 1970s as gays became less invisible in society, and events such as the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade became known outside the community, I understand how it could seem that we had suddenly decided to steal this holiday.
But as the cause of gay rights advanced, the need for gay and lesbian people to be masters of disguise faded. By the time I was coming out in the late '80s, there were already older people in the community lamenting that Halloween was no long the High Holy Days of the gay community. We still observed it. Gay and lesbian bars were packed wall-to-wall with people in every type of costume imaginable (and a few unimaginable), but the spark was going away.
A strange thing was happening, as Halloween became less important than Pride Weekend to the gay community: straight adults started to turn Halloween into a kind of Straight Pride celebration. You can't walk into even the most family-friendly of department stores this time of year without finding dozens of Sexy Doctor, Sexy Fireman, Sexy Nurse, and Sexy Cop costumes in adult sizes—often pairs of his-and-her Sexy fill-in-the-blanks.
Kids still go trick-or-treating. Yet, sales of adult costumes and accessories far exceed sales of children's costumes. Of those adult costumes, the vast majority have at least some erotic aspect.
If Gay Pride is about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and otherwise non-heterosexual people declaring their existence and refusing to knuckle under oppression, Halloween seems to be becoming about straight people refusing to knuckle under sexual repression.
A lot of people have a difficult time understanding that. On one end of the political spectrum, they claim there is too much sex and/or sexual freedom in society. At the other end of the spectrum, they claim that emphasis on sexuality is inherently demeaning and dangerous.
Hypocritically, the former are more than happy to exploit sexual scandals and sexual misinformation to further their political goals. Just as they are more than happy to let their benefactors use sex to sell things. While the latter ignore the empowerment and liberation that can come for a healthy expression of one's sexuality.
Both groups want each of us to keep that part of us hidden. They try to control when and how we express it through a variety of means. Whether they want us to be ashamed of it because it is "dirty" or because it is "demeaning" doesn't really matter. They both are about repression and control.
When the happily married couple decide to dress up as the Sexy Cop and the Sexy Thief, they're taking a bit of that control back. Being objectified isn't always bad: the whole point of courting someone you love is to become the object of their affection, in every form that may take. And when you love someone, you hope that your friends and neighbors understand that your beloved is desirable.
Desire and passion as just as much a part of love as joy, empathy, understanding, and compassion. Likewise, desire and passion (and the urge to be desired) are just as deserving of being considered "hallowed" as all other aspects of love. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Originally published 31 October 2011.
The line shocked me, not just because I didn't expect to hear someone on National Public Radio use the bigoted/clueless phrase, "the gays," but also because it wasn't possible. Gay people had been celebrating Halloween as a community since at least the 1930s. And I knew the essayist speaking those words had been born later than that.
He went on to talk about how Halloween has "always" been a holiday for kids, and how sad he was that politics and adult shenanigans have now ruined it.
So his ignorance was even worse than I initially thought. At least he wasn't also spouting nonsense about Halloween being originally a pagan holiday until it was co-opted by the church.
For at least 1300 years Halloween (All Hallow's Eve) has been a Christian holiday, and there is virtually no evidence that any of the European pre-Christian cultures observed a major celebration resembling Halloween or the Day of the Dead at that time of year before the Christian observance came into existence.
The notion that Halloween grew out of a pagan Celtic ritual called Samhain was first alleged by Christian monks in the late 10th Century — a bit more than 400 years after Ireland had itself been converted to Christianity. Whereas documents written in Old Irish survive from as long back as the 4th Century, none of them refer to Samhain as a Festival of the Dead and Celtic New Year which the 10th Century Christian documents insist were part of the Celtic tradition. The closest we can get is a 2nd Century Bronze calendar inscribed in Gaulish (a Celtic language that is a sort of cousin of Primitive Irish, the predecessor of Old Irish), which has a month called Samonios that marks the beginning of winter.
In the 8th Century, Pope Gregory III began celebrating a Feast for All Saints on November 1, and over the next few centuries various means of observing the holiday evolved. In many places people, usually poor people, would go door to door offering to pray for the salvation of the souls of dead. It was traditional to offer the person food or payment in exchange for this. This practice was called "souling."
Many European medieval communities already observed a similar practice of farm laborers going door to door wassailing for several nights in a row after the harvest had been completed. This may have been where the idea of souling came from.
In any case, by the 16th Century the practice of ritual begging on or near All Saint's Day was common enough to form the basis of a joke in one of Shakespeare's plays. And early 19th Century literature and paintings depict parties on Halloween night where games such as Bobbing for Apples was considered traditional.
Dressing up in costume, or "guising" didn't come into the celebration until the 1890s in Scotland. The practice is first mentioned in the North America in 1911, but doesn't seem to have become a common part of the door-to-door ritual until the 1930s, though homemade costumes for Halloween parties are mentioned occasionally in the 1920s.
By the 1930s, department stores offered pre-made Halloween costumes—and reported selling adult and child versions in equal quantities.
It was during the 1930s that certain cabarets (and speakeasies) began advertising their "annual Halloween costume balls." It might have been just a coincidence that the night spots that featured drag shows or otherwise bore a reputation of being frequented by homosexuals were also the ones that always hosted the Halloween parties. More likely it wasn't a coincidence at all. Before the era of gay rights, the only way for gay or lesbian people to survive is to get very good at pretending to be something we aren't.
Not all gay people are naturally flamboyant and fabulous and sassy, but even the most gender-conforming, straight-edge gay people have to hide at least one aspect of themselves from their homophobic neighbors and family members. So we all were good at making masks, sometimes out of nothing more than determination. So if you let us loose with some feathers, makeup, sequins, and fabric, look out!
After prohibition ended, and after the war, bars frequented by gays continued to host the most well-attended costume parties around Halloween. Costume parties for adults of all sorts continued, of course, but if you wanted to see a party where more than a small fraction of the customers were dressed up, you needed to head to the clubs with a reputation for "that kind" of clientele.
By the '50s and '60s the notion of Halloween being primarily a children's holiday of trick-or-treating was well established. Adult dressing up still occurred, but it was far less common, as evidenced by changing patterns of pre-made costume sales.
So, in the 1970s as gays became less invisible in society, and events such as the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade became known outside the community, I understand how it could seem that we had suddenly decided to steal this holiday.
But as the cause of gay rights advanced, the need for gay and lesbian people to be masters of disguise faded. By the time I was coming out in the late '80s, there were already older people in the community lamenting that Halloween was no long the High Holy Days of the gay community. We still observed it. Gay and lesbian bars were packed wall-to-wall with people in every type of costume imaginable (and a few unimaginable), but the spark was going away.
A strange thing was happening, as Halloween became less important than Pride Weekend to the gay community: straight adults started to turn Halloween into a kind of Straight Pride celebration. You can't walk into even the most family-friendly of department stores this time of year without finding dozens of Sexy Doctor, Sexy Fireman, Sexy Nurse, and Sexy Cop costumes in adult sizes—often pairs of his-and-her Sexy fill-in-the-blanks.
Kids still go trick-or-treating. Yet, sales of adult costumes and accessories far exceed sales of children's costumes. Of those adult costumes, the vast majority have at least some erotic aspect.
If Gay Pride is about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and otherwise non-heterosexual people declaring their existence and refusing to knuckle under oppression, Halloween seems to be becoming about straight people refusing to knuckle under sexual repression.
A lot of people have a difficult time understanding that. On one end of the political spectrum, they claim there is too much sex and/or sexual freedom in society. At the other end of the spectrum, they claim that emphasis on sexuality is inherently demeaning and dangerous.
Hypocritically, the former are more than happy to exploit sexual scandals and sexual misinformation to further their political goals. Just as they are more than happy to let their benefactors use sex to sell things. While the latter ignore the empowerment and liberation that can come for a healthy expression of one's sexuality.
Both groups want each of us to keep that part of us hidden. They try to control when and how we express it through a variety of means. Whether they want us to be ashamed of it because it is "dirty" or because it is "demeaning" doesn't really matter. They both are about repression and control.
When the happily married couple decide to dress up as the Sexy Cop and the Sexy Thief, they're taking a bit of that control back. Being objectified isn't always bad: the whole point of courting someone you love is to become the object of their affection, in every form that may take. And when you love someone, you hope that your friends and neighbors understand that your beloved is desirable.
Desire and passion as just as much a part of love as joy, empathy, understanding, and compassion. Likewise, desire and passion (and the urge to be desired) are just as deserving of being considered "hallowed" as all other aspects of love. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Originally published 31 October 2011.