Pop quiz, hotshot! What holiday features revellers dressed in fancy costumes, all enjoying wild parties, treats, parades, festive decorations, lots of fun -- aside from a handful of religious weirdos who hate the holiday with all their might and want to have it banned? Yes, of course it's Pride -- but it's also Halloween! And a lot of things that make Halloween popular are why some LGBTQ people call Halloween "gay Christmas."
A lot of this is because Halloween was one of the rare holidays where you could be openly queer or trans without getting into a lot of trouble for it. Crossdressing was illegal in many states in America for most of the 20th century. Being gay or lesbian? Used to be you could get arrested for it. Going to a bar full of gay people to drink and socialize? The cops used to do raids just to arrest everyone there. But on Halloween, dressing up in costume was okay. Dressing in drag was okay. LGBTQ people had parties and parades in costume, and the police couldn't do much about it because straight people were also having parties and parades in costumes -- and there were tons of straight men dressing in drag, and the cops weren't going to arrest them for wearing a costume on Halloween.
Masks and disguises have nearly always been a big part of Halloween, and that resonates with people who've had to disguise who they are for fear of rejection by families, friends, or employers -- or who have to fear actually being jailed or killed because of who they love or how they identify.
But disguises are also fun, especially when you get to "disguise" yourself as who you really are. Yeah, yeah, on Halloween, all us monster-loving geeks can dress up as vampires or zombies or sexy kitty cats -- but dressing in drag for Halloween has long been a great way for trans people to try on the skin they wish they could wear, even when society says it's not allowed. And sometimes, Halloween drag has helped people realize they'd been living in a disguise their whole life and liked themselves better as different gender. Halloween costumes and Halloween drag are some of the most transgressive acts around -- and they're amazing equalizers. Everyone gets to be someone else, whether it's someone they're pretending to be, or if they've finally shed their daily disguise to show off who they really are.
Today, Halloween parades are fairly rare, while you can't have a Pride celebration without a good parade. But lots of Halloween parades have always had space for queer paraders. The long-running Greenwich Village Halloween parade has been queer-friendly since at least the 1970s, and even before that, groups of queer Halloween partiers parading from one party to the next weren't uncommon in big cities.
Halloween is America's primary transgressive holiday, with heavy elements of misrule, of chaos overthrowing order, of people embracing who they are not and who they wish to be. The nerd can dress up as a jock, the jock can dress up as a cheerleader, the cheerleader can dress up as a gangster. On Halloween, the rules no longer exist, and that gives people the freedom to be who they really are.
But that doesn't mean that Halloween is solely a time for partying for LGBTQ people. There are also plenty of opportunities to enjoy good old fashioned scares. Queer horror is becoming a stronger sub-genre with each passing year, with authors like Billy Martin, Lucy A. Snyder, Lee Mandelo, Allison Rumfitt, Ian Muneshwar, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Chuck Tingle, Cassandra Khaw, Hailey Piper, and Eric LaRocca becoming more prominent and more popular, while movies and TV shows like "I Saw the TV Glow," "Interview with the Vampire," "Titane," "Raw," "Bodies Bodies Bodies," the "Fear Street" trilogy, "What We Do in the Shadows," and "They/Them" become must-watch events for both critics and fans.
The fact is Halloween is for everyone, straight or gay, cis or trans, monsters or delicious humans, and everyone in between.
(Special thanks to tandex, locke baron, Evil Catullus, and Lucy-S for keeping me honest, and for making sure I didn't embarrass myself or anyone else.)
It's that time of year again. Let's try to scare each other.
Write an original scary story. Write a horror-themed poem. Node a story that is in the public domain. Write a factual writeup that is about horror or scary stuff. Write a biography of a writer or actor closely associated with the horror genre. Create a review of a horror film or story. It can be any length and any topic. Ideally, fiction should be scary, and nonfiction should be thematically appropriate. I reserve the right to not include your writeup here if you try to sneak in unscary or unHalloweeny stuff.
What's the runtime for the Quest? The entire month of October, plus November 1, server time. Halloween is too awesome to limit to just one day a year.
If you need inspiration, or if you just want to see some more of the scary stories that Everythingians have produced, check out our previous horror quests: I can make you howl. And vice versa. Let's get down to business., Everything Quests: Scary Stories, The Blood is the Life: A Frightful Halloween Quest, They Hunger For Nodes: An e2 Halloween Scary Story Quest, I Will Show You Fear in a Handful of Text: The 2005 Halloween Horrorquest, It's the Season for Graves Cracking: The 2006 Quest for Fear (a deleted quest announcement, unfortunately), The Poet and the Worm, The Night's Plutonian Shore: The 2007 Halloween Horrorquest, Necronodecon: The 2008 Halloween Horrorquest, Pickman's Nodegel: The 2009 Halloween Horrorquest, Ten Years of Terror: The 2010 Halloween Horrorquest, The Nodegel from Yuggoth: The 2011 Halloween Horrorquest, Children of the Night: The 2012 Halloween Horrorquest, 13 O'Clock: The 2013 Halloween Horrorquest, No More Room in Hell: The 2014 Halloween Horrorquest, In the Nodes of Madness: The 2015 Halloween Horrorquest, Grisly Ghouls from Every Tomb: The 2016 Halloween Horrorquest, We All Float Down Here: The 2017 Halloween Horrorquest, Tender Lumplings Everywhere: The 2018 Halloween Horrorquest, The Culture of Fear: The 2019 Halloween Horrorquest, Send More Paramedics: The 2020 Halloween Horrorquest, Behold a Pale Horse: The 2021 Halloween Horrorquest, Everything Is Going to Be Fine: The 2022 Halloween Horrorquest, and Libera te Tutemet ex Inferis: The 2023 Halloween Horrorquest.
Again, the Quest will run for the entire month of October and November 1. If you post early or late -- too bad, so sad.
When you write a story for the Quest, just /msg me with the node title, then softlink your writeup to this node. I'll include a list of all the Quest participants below.
So start thinking horror, boils and ghouls. Halloween is coming. Let's scare each other.
Fiction:
phantom toe by weroland
Satanic Linux by wertperch
Do you know what pain is? by etouffee
zombie threat summary by weroland
last resort by nuggets
The Counterfeit Old Woman by weroland
Way out in the grey zone of the Ulam Spiral by Glowing Fish
untitled cult horror story by passalidae
seasonings for a witch by weroland
The Puppet's Mark by elmwood
Poetry:
The Fourth Kind of Ghost by Pandeism Fish
martyr in the rafters by nuggets
Throat gum sugar blood sun by etouffee
October 19, 2024 by Girldoll
Fact:
American Road Trip: Cryptid Trail, Part Two by JD
The Hauntings of Knossington Grange by wertperch
mortuusequusphobia by weroland
Equikinemortophobia by Pandeism Fish
Bela Lugosi by Jet-Poop
Santa Mira, California by Pandeism Fish
Apparitions by weroland
September 13, 1678 by everyone
heart-burial by weroland
Hobyah by weroland
Reviews:
The Angel of Indian Lake by Jet-Poop
Night of the Demon by wertperch
Sleepaway Camp by JD
Abigail by JD
Priest by wertperch
Hot Fuzz by wertperch
The Fourth Kind by wertperch
Season of the Witch by wertperch
Season of the Witch by JD
Halloween III: Season of the Witch by JD
Cycle of the Werewolf by Jet-Poop
The Last Supper by wertperch
Midnight Pals by Jet-Poop
Eat the Reich by Jet-Poop
Shards by Jet-Poop
The Near Departed by Glowing Fish
The Horrorquest is ended for another year! Thank you all for your enthusiastic participation!