Exhausting, isn't it? It makes you long for moments when you can let it all hang out, when you can violate the social taboos you honor most of the rest of time, when you can be the piece of meat you are and treat other people like the pieces of meat they are. You move through life thinking about sex, constantly but keenly aware that social convention requires you to act as if sex were the last thing on your mind. While you don't suffer anywhere near the kind of repression we did (and in many times and places still do), straight people are sexually repressed, too. We know what it's like to keep your sexuality under wraps, to keep it concealed, to be on your guard and under control at all times. We don't resent you for taking Halloween as your own.
![halloween gay pride flags halloween gay pride flags](https://spookylittlehalloween.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/halloween-pride-halloween-herbivore-art.jpg)
Whereas the pride parade is now the big public celebration of queer sexuality with all its squalor and glamour, Halloween is now the big public celebration of straight sexuality, of heterosexual desire, every bit-tit?-as squalid and glamorous. You made a good choice, straight people, a better one than the booze companies were trying to make for you. But straight people seem to have made a collective unconscious decision to adopt Halloween instead. Booze companies attempted to make a national holiday out of Mardi Gras, without much success.
![halloween gay pride flags halloween gay pride flags](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/f0a8badc-4b9d-43f5-9d2d-98d314f21ac7.954fab2f958942258e778126b6d3d197.jpeg)
Straight people in Brazil have Carnival, straight Nor-thern Europeans have Fasching, straight people in New Orleans have Mardi Gras-all big public parties where straight people show their tits, shake their asses, and flaunt their sexualities. But Halloween belongs to heterosexuals now.Īnd you need it more than we do. There are still parties in gay bars on Halloween, of course, and you'll see plenty of homos in costume on Capitol Hill this weekend. It's just another excuse for a party-and we're always on the lookout for an excuse-but Halloween has been downgraded, displaced by other and better excuses for parties, by pride parades and Folsoms and the weekend. While Halloween is still celebrated by gays and lesbians, it's no longer the most important date on the gay calendar. A children's holiday has been transformed into an opportunity for stupid straight people to dress up in revealing outfits and make sex-crazed spectacles of themselves in public.
![halloween gay pride flags halloween gay pride flags](https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/3/halloween-lgbt-rainbow-witch-gay-ride-pride-lgbtq-haselshirt.jpg)
People I know to be reliably pro-pleasure lefties-people who are all for recreational sex and legal drugs and strap-on dildos-sound like religious conservatives when Halloween rolls around. You know what else isn't sexy? The grousing you hear, even in the offices of The Stranger, when ads for "sexy" Halloween costumes start appearing in early September. There's nothing sexy about "a man whose job is to deal with dead people looking at a sexy dead stranger," Lilith wrote in an October 2008 post at, "an online community for feminists and their allies." No argument from me there, Lilith, and I agree that there's definitely a "power dynamic being displayed" when a woman dresses up as a sexy cadaver for a man on Halloween and lies down on an autopsy table, per the photograph from the catalogue. The girl gets a black, skintight, miniskirted body bag (!) complete with a zip-up-and-over-the-head hood, while the boy gets a baggy black lab coat with the word "coroner" printed on it, presumably worn over street clothes. Someone out there is selling a sexy CSI Halloween costume set, and it's no exception to the clothed-male/nearly-nude-female rule.