I Love Gay Halloween: What Do You Mean You’re a Niche Internet Microtrend?
Words: Emma Cieslik
Make it stand out
What do you mean you’re doing as a Charli Horse, a Charli xcx-themed muscle cramp? What do you mean you’re the Glasgow Willy Wonka Experience, or the dog wearing the propeller hat from the lollipop meme? The more obscure the costume, the better, and if people aren’t asking you what you are, what’s the point of enduring the awkward Uber ride dressed as a slutty Snow White?
While it may seem silly and perhaps a little exclusionary, the “I hate Gay Halloween” fanfare is a necessary reference to the holiday’s queer roots. The “I hate gay Halloween, what do you mean you’re…” meme format is now almost a year old, exploding online for Halloween 2024 with super niche costumes. The meme trend came out right as the United States elected Donald Trump for his second, non-consecutive term. While the outcome was not finalised, last Halloween felt like a celebration at the precipice of disaster.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the meme is alive and well on TikTok today, where people are sharing their favorite niche costumes with the exclamation “I love gay Halloween.”
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True to order, there seems to be an ongoing contest for the most outlandish costumes that necessitate people coming up and asking what you are dressed as. There is some power in this because many of us in the queer community spend much of our lives - especially those of us raised in deeply homophobic communities - struggling to verbalise and visualise who we are.
Masking, in clothing, speech, and behaviour, became and still becomes a tool for survival and stability, and so Halloween, often one of the few spaces for being something we’re not (or rather someone we aspire to be, as I was encouraged when choosing a costume) was and is a rare chance to unmask. Even today, in the United States when LGBTQ+ people, especially trans people of colour, are increasingly targets of violence, Halloween offers a cover.
In fact, some of the best obscure costumes are ones that reimagine the childlike wonder and joy that we might not have had growing up, that reclaim gender euphoria for our young selves.
“In a world where things feel out of control, Gay Halloween is a rejection of the expectation that costumes and people need to be easily readable.”
Personally, as an autistic queer person, I absolutely adore any chance to share my hyper focused interest, and what better a holiday than Halloween, to revel in our queer insider knowledge. Whether it’s Jennifer Coolidge as the evil stepmother getting a suntan in A Cinderella Story (2004), LaLa Ri’s cursed bag dress from RuPaul’s Drag Race, or Alyson Stoner in the Work It video, Gay Halloween is about the humor and joy of insider references, even if they’re references that only we understand.
During a time when the LGBTQ+ community is under attack, when parents are given the option to opt their kids out of lessons with LGBTQ+ stories, when a conversion therapy ban is under review at the Supreme Court along with marriage equality in the United States, Halloween as a sacred queer holiday feels more important than ever. It’s not only about connecting with queer ancestors who held the first Halloween drag balls but it’s about remembering how our past selves found refuge in the liberation of Halloween.
“Gay Christmas,” or as it was known previously “bitches Christmas,” according to historian Marc Stein speaking with them, tied back to costumed caravans in 1950s and 1960s Philadelphia, where LGBTQ+ revelers followed drag artists from bar to bar and were less likely to be arrested for cross-dressing. These haunted calavades spawned Halloween parades across the country, but the resonance of Halloween as a holiday of the “monstrous,” the outsider has its roots much deeper into pagan holidays where the veil between this world and the next was thinnest.
To this day, Halloween resonates with many members of the LGBTQ+ community, especially those raised in conservative Christian communities where we were forbidden not just from dressing up as the devil or a witch but from doing anything even remotely connected to Satan’s supposed birthday. In true reflection to Carnival season in the Christian calendar, another pagan holiday brought into the Christian canon, Halloween is the liberation of cultural norms that exclude and ostracize, a world where queerness is not just the norm but a welcome revelation.
The Gay Halloween costumes shared online this year call out exploitation and abuse, and absolute hilarity and hypocrisy of transphobia. The best examples - Pink New’s suggestion to dress as the dirt that Katy Perry kissed when she got back from her brief trip to space, and the costumes are specifically meant to challenge expectations and get people thinking from Winnie the Pooh dressed up as piglet to Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie as “roommates” to E.T. in drag or maybe Violet Beauregarde or Britney Spears and her love for Pepsi.
In a world where things feel out of control, Gay Halloween is a rejection of the expectation that costumes and people need to be easily readable. We walk into Halloween with the full confidence that our friends, our community, will know who we are, or at least will care enough to ask, as my friends did last year when I walked into the museum where I work as a final boss Debbie Jelinsky from Adams Family Values (1993) wearing steel toes.
In true queer fanfare, I can’t wait to say: “I hate gay Halloween. What do you mean you’re one of the three pickled boys that St. Nicholas resurrected?” this weekend.
