Halloween Is Fairy Time: Queer Reconstruction,
Uses and Meanings of a Formerly Mainstream Celebration

Halloween is generally seen as a deeply-rooted icon of the American culture. In the late 19th century when this ancient British holiday was transplanted in the New World, it was turned to fit in with mainstream America's cultural and social landscape. To this extent All Hallows' Eve, the former modern British celebration, was actually reinvented and turned into contemporary American Halloween. The new observance actually had little in common with the ancient one. The main actors and rites were redefined with a view to helping sustain the new American middle-class Victorian culture which was developping in those days. For the American urban middle classes who promoted its celebration in the US through newspapers, articles, and social and community center activities, its British roots and "touch" were perceived as an interesting means to provide new immigrants with "good" Anglo-Saxon references. The new reinvented holiday was to state that the American calendar was of British origins, that America was still of high-valued Anglo-Saxon stock. Halloween was redesigned as a text which said that despite the millions of Catholic and Jewish emigrants coming from Eastern and Southern Europe the US were definitely likely to remain Anglo-Saxon. Besides, the rites picked up and selected in British folklore collections -17th-to-19th-century Popular Antiquities etc- were aimed at celebrating home, family, neighborhood life, community-orientation, and good fellowship -which were at the bases of the American version of middle-class Victorianism. It was therefore also designed to spread the new social order at stake.

While All Hallows'Eve in modern Britain saw male adults as the prominent actors of its very rites, Halloween as described in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American periodicals was children's time. In America there had already been a few public Halloweens which had disrupted city life and business: in some eastern cities bands of youths, poor, unemployed or African-Americans had stopped traffic, assaulted passers-by with flour and commited petty damage to property. American urban middle classes disapproved of this way of celebrating and feared this holiday might degenerate into an uncontrolled carnival time, or even worse, become a pretext for social unrest, claims and demonstrations for the poor. They saw to it that October 31 no longer involved adults: periodicals advertized the new holiday as children's time. Middle class women, journalists, educators and community workers targeted the youths to make sure that potentially uncontrolled male adults would no longer be involved into the celebration. The rites picked up in British folkore were made into pantomimes, plays and stunts which only children were likely to play.

Moreover, the new rites at stake were chosen to tame poor potentially rowdy youths and teenagers. The goal was to prevent them from celebrating on the streets, in the potentially dangerous "public sphere." The new Halloween observances were to be played at home, eg in the Victorian "sacred sphere" of private life, under the supervision of its "angels", that is mothers. Middle classes attempted to "domesticate" the new childish carnival time, eg have young people be supervised by mothers or community workers instead of stalking the streets. Through the rites selected and made into stunts and games they wanted youths to be taught "good lessons" about American dominant values and identities -which were their very own. This normative new ritual text succeeded in changing Halloween pattern of celebration and turning it into the icon of good-natured childlife we still have in mind today when we think of October 31 in America. Yet since this reinterpretation many groups have tried to redefine it and make it their own. Teenagers especially resisted domestication and control and kept making mischievous pranks to adults: their Halloween became some kind of an integration rite. After its Victorian well-defined reinvention and the long-lasting mainstream image it got then Halloween has yet become a medium for new collective reinterpretations. A virgin sheet of paper for any kind of ritual writing, it has since been ready to use and has actually been re-used by the late 1960s, especially by Gay people.

A century after the Victorian redefinition of Halloween, by the early 1970s new groups grabbed October 31 to make it their own. Artists in Greenwich Village, New York, decided to parade to protest against the gentrification of their neighborhood and the rising leases. They were quickly followed by Gay and Lesbian people who took the fun in the last night of October and turned the latter into their own carnival-time. Since then it has been Fairy Time in most American big cities. This new urban street-life Gay Halloween coincided with the upsurge or "coming out" of Gay movements. It took place a few years only after the Stonewall incident on Christopher Street (1969). It was part of the new open assertion of Gays in the American society, which it soon served to strengthen. It also was part of the raising questioning of the Victorian mainstream consensus still very much at stake in the 1950s and the process of redefining identities, values and norms in a permissive, post-industrial society. To these extents, it was the product of the 1960s.

So Gay and Lesbian Halloweens became a major date for "coming out of the closet" and display a specific culture mostly stifled before this decade of protest. Drag Queens and Fantasticals strolled San Francisco's Polk Street and New York's Christopher Street on October 31 and openly -eg politically too- asserted the existence of their own repressed world which was enlarged to the whole Gay community. This night was a way to publicize Gay Pride and help many Gays get rid of the self-hatred and shame imposed on them by the Victorian society. By the mid 1970s the Carnival or the Promenade on October 31 became with the Gay Pride major queer demonstrations to present openly mainstream society with a specific identity and, in so doing, to claim for recognition and respect. By 1975 Polk Street's Carnival had become very popular, attracting 50,000 spectators. They were 100,000 the following year and got much appreciation from a mainly straight audience. There were few homophobic responses. What is more, by this year San Francisco's public authorities dispatched 60 Gay policemen to help organize the Carnival. This meant public recognition. Even if it was local, it was a first step toward a larger acceptance. At least, it proved that collective mobilization could be successful. To this extent, the whole reinterpretation of Halloween had been fruitful.

Gay Halloweens became extremely popular, to the extent that Gay and Lesbian paraders were soon overwhelmed by straight spectators. This led to new Gay redefinitions of the celebration. Popular and downtown Polk Street's Carnival was followed in 1977 by poshy more distant Castro District's Halloween Parade in San Francisco's well-off Gay district. The spectators and the actors were both mainly Gay, even though the performance was still open to straight audience. Gay bars and clubs also grabbed the commercial bonanza, operating special Halloween events. These attempts to keep Halloweens as their own is to be linked to the psychological function the holiday and colorful or baroque display was to fill in and for the community: to assert pride and to entice individuals still ill-at-ease with their identity to forget stigmas, shame and self-hatred and join the join the open group. In the 1980s it became trendy for Yuppies to join these parades and be at Gay club events. This was also part of an assertion of pride. For these specific versions of Gay Halloween were thus mostly community-oriented and they tried to address particular Gay audiences. At the same time, more and more publicized Gay Halloweens were intending to address and question mainstream society at large.

Halloween traditionally was definitely a carnival time: for a night everything was turned upside down. Creatures from the underworld were released and took hold of the common world. Gay Halloweens restored this ancient aspect. For a night Gay paraders invested streets and sidewalks and even public transportation and inverted everyday life relationships. They were the main actors, while straight spectators were turned into outsiders. Being a particular and relevant stage for Gays and Lesbians to play and display a specific culture, Halloween was also considered as an opportunity to over-play this very culture, eg to play with mainstream "monstrous" images of queer world, to present maintream caricatures of homosexuals and thus show them as representations, that is social constructions that can be qualified, critisized or even reversed. In this respect Halloween was seen as a way to make mainstream clichés change. Furthermore, this new reversed and temporary relationship between straights and gays can be analyzed as a way to approach new social ties for common life and test the possibility of their enforcement in everyday life. It was a way to test a new interaction with mainstream society, thus renegociate the social compact. So Halloweens were first use to give the Gay and Lesbian an open face, a visibility, while "dragging" those who feared their own sexuality and thus reinforcing the community, and, in a very late-20th-century multi-cultural fashion, to renegociate the social compact, eg to present a colorful, funny and good-natured Amendment for recognition, acceptance and eventually rights.