How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [22]
Changing baby boomer attitudes probably had something to do with a surge in the grown-up dollars given over to the holiday, but I also don’t think we can underestimate the gay influence. In the last twenty years, in cities all across the nation, Halloween has become larger than life through gay parades and celebrations. And as the years go on, straight people are looking more toward the gay community to define a Halloween celebration.
As early as 1995, straight revelers outnumbered gay participants at the Halloween parade in San Francisco’s Castro district. The parade had started as an event for neighborhood children in the 1980s, but then transformed into a gay event as the Castro became, essentially, a gay ghetto. Farther south in California, in the gay enclave of West Hollywood, a parade had also started in the mid-eighties. According to West Hollywood’s official website, in 2001, 55 percent of parade attendees were straight, 37 percent were gay, and 8 percent were lesbian.
Gay and straight people are mingling at Halloween events all across the country; many Halloween events are becoming destination events, attracting heterosexuals as well as homosexuals. Peter Tatchell, writing in the travel section of the British paper The Guardian in 2001, gave the thumbs-up to the annual Fantasy Fest, a weeklong carnival that takes place in Key West, Florida.
Middle America can go jump in the Atlantic (it’s at the end of the main street). A third of the town’s population is gay, and liberal values reign supreme. Although Fantasy Fest is not a gay event, the gay influence is everywhere. Queers know how to party and heterosexuals are grateful for an invitation. Families mix happily with dykes and fags. This is the world how it should be—love and let love.
If gay men have claimed and reinvented the all-American Halloween, can Christmas be far behind? In the New York City Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2003, the crowd saw two Santa Claus figures: the “real” Santa Claus, who always rides at the end of the parade, and “Mrs. Santa Claus,” played in drag by Harvey Fierstein. When Fierstein wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times, saying that Mrs. Claus was part of a same-sex marriage, public-relations chaos ensued. Macy’s stressed that Mrs. Claus was not really being being played by a gay man, but rather by Harvey’s female character, Edna Turnblad, the star of the Broadway show Hairspray—a strange distinction. The Macy’s spokesperson also noted that Fierstein’s Mrs. Claus was in no way meant to be a substitute for Santa Claus. Clearly, though, we were seeing gay inroads being made into mainstream Christmas traditions.
He’s Dead, but We Can Still Have a Party: Gay Advances in Mourning Rituals
In Richard Curtis’s romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), a gay character, Matthew, chooses to read W. H. Auden’s intense poem, “Funeral Blues,” in honor of his lover at his funeral: “He was my North, my South, my East and West./ My working week and my Sunday rest . . .” The inclusion of the poem in the film led to renewed fascination with the gay poet Auden’s work. Small editions of the work were republished in Great Britain and the United States. Mostly, I think that people were captivated by the romantic sentiment of the work. Rarely, before 1988 or so, were people accustomed to hearing impassioned readings or funeral speeches. Funerals were not very unique occasions. But the death of so many young gay men in the 1980s changed our funeral customs. For the first time since World War I, vast numbers of gay and straight people had to come to terms with early death.
When someone dies in the prime of life, it is easy to me morialize his more flamboyant traits. I recall one man who died of AIDS in Philadelphia; he had been in city government, and had also been a fanatic fan of the Mummers, the city’s unique befeathered string bands. His funeral featured a squad of Mummers bursting