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Halloween allows many LGBT Americans at least one night annually of safely being out and "unmasked," free to wear drag or play around with gender. Indeed, it is the Gay community that has been arguably most responsible for Halloween’s adult rejuvenation." Nicholas Rogers, author of "Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night," points out that while Halloween is enjoyed by everyone, "it has been the Gay community that has most flamboyantly exploited Halloween’s potential as a transgressive festival, as one that operates outside or on the margins of orthodox time, space, and hierarchy. It’s an ideal of personal emancipation, self-expression and self-fulfillment - an ideal that loses none of its power when it takes the form of a sexy nurse’s outfit," CNN contributor David Frum wrote last year. "The 'masked culture' first developed by the gays of San Francisco has reached across the lines of orientation-and now jumped across the boundaries between nations and languages. Gay cultural influence on Halloween has become such an unstoppable phenomenon here and abroad that anthropologist Jerry Kugelmass of the University of Florida published a book in 1994 on the new trend, "Masked Culture," describing Halloween as an emerging gay "high holiday." And the Halloween parades still attract tens of thousands of straight and gay spectators. Long before June officially became LGBT Pride Month, and October became LGBT History Month and included National Coming Out Day, Halloween was unofficially our yearly celebrated "holiday," dating as far back at the 1970s, when it was a massive annual street party in San Francisco’s Castro District.īy the 1980s, gay enclaves like Key West, West Hollywood, and Greenwich Village were holding Halloween street parties. In the words of the lesbian poet and scholar Judy Grahn, Halloween is "the great gay holiday."Īnd this weekend of lavish costumed theatricality will attract everyone, but especially lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer revelers.īack in the day, Halloween-the night before All Hallows Day (All Saints Day)-was linked to the ancient Celtic festival Samhain in the British Isles, meaning "summer’s end." And because the celebration is associated with mystery, magic, superstition, witches, and ghosts, the festivity was limited in colonial New England because of its Puritanical belief system.īut today it’s an LGBT extravaganza that rivals-if not out-showcases-Pride festivals.