UF researcher: Gays transform Halloween with spin-off parades

October 26, 2005

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Dress-up and the ability to disguise one’s gender give Halloween special meaning for many gays and lesbians, who have played a leading role in transforming the popular children’s holiday into one for adults, says a University of Florida researcher.

“For gays, Halloween is like a high holiday, it’s a major, major event,” said Jack Kugelmass, a UF anthropology professor who has studied the phenomenon. “Because it is about masquerade, dress-up and choosing one’s identity, Halloween has become very significant to the gay community.”

One of the most visible signs of the gay presence is the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, which began in the 1970s as a neighborhood celebration showcasing colorful, life-size puppets and has evolved into New York City’s answer to Mardi Gras, Kugelmass said. This grand urban spectacle, which straddles the line between civic festival and carnival with drag queens clad in outlandish transvestite costumes, attracts hundreds of thousands of parade watchers and pumps millions of dollars into the city’s economy, he said.

The parade has stimulated the growth of spin-off parades in other cities both in and outside the United States, said Kugelmass, who wrote a book about the village parade, “The Masked Culture” that was published several years ago by Columbia University Press.

As gays travel or move from place to place, it is natural for them to take their celebrations with them, Kugelmass said. “If they’ve visited New York or San Francisco and seen Halloween parades, then they are likely to want them in Melbourne or Hamburg,” he said.

Halloween has assumed special meaning for gays because many homosexuals experience tension in reconciling their needs with conventional beliefs, rituals and religions, Kugelmass said. That’s partly because gays traditionally have been excluded from various cultural observances, he said.

“Even if they would participate in mainstream religions, they needed something that was uniquely their own, which spoke to their own identity,” Kugelmass said. “Halloween does this with its emphasis on disguising gender with make-up and dress-up, as well as by allowing people to claim a gender, which gays find appealing.”

Other holidays have lost some credibility because of their ties to the past, Kugelmass said. For example, Independence Day may be questioned by some highly educated people who believe the negative side of patriotism leads to unnecessary wars, he said.

And gays have mixed feelings about religious holidays, Kugelmass said. For that matter, he said, what is an American religious holiday?

“Christmas is hardly a religious celebration, it’s a consumer holiday,” he said. “And does anyone understand the connection between Thanksgiving and its original intent? People know Thanksgiving as the kickoff to the holiday buying season.”

Nor does Halloween bear any resemblance to its pre-Christian roots in ancient Celtic religion, emerging today as a holiday that relates more to the issue of identity than it does to the spiritual world, he said. “The beauty of Halloween is it promotes playfulness and irony, in that things can appear to be one thing and actually be something else,” he said. “It adds to a made-up quality by addressing make-believe, choice and duality of identity. Beneath one identity is another identity. It’s all about masking and unmasking.”

Besides exhibiting a fluidity of male and female elements in their disguises, gay parade participants might experiment with cross-over identities in other imaginative ways, such as by fusing fruit or animal features with human ones, he said.

Kugelmass believes the ability to mold identity is healthy because it lets people know they have choices, freeing them from the constriction of having to be who they have always been. “It behooves us to think about those choices and relish the fact that we don’t have to mindlessly parrot the lives of our parents and grandparents,” he said. “They weren’t always such interesting lives.”

However they interpret Halloween, gays likely will have widespread influence on how the holiday is observed, Kugelmass said. “Whether this means Halloween will someday be celebrated in China, I don’t know, but the likely route of transmigration is through the gay community because the holiday has tremendous resonance with them,” he said.

Leigh E. Schmidt, a Princeton religious professor and author of “Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays” said Halloween is rich in cultural conflict and creativity, solidifying debates over sexuality, identity and religion. “No one has paid closer ethnographic attention to these developments than Kugelmass, and it is good to see him now pursuing the global consequences of these local celebrations,” he said.