Monday, November 01, 2010

Quote of the Day

To understand the global appeal of the Halloween holiday, go back to its origins. Those origins are found not in mystic Celtic folklore, but in modern gay culture.

. . . [San Francisco's] Castro Halloween party [which began in the 1970s] spread to other gay neighborhoods in the 1980s: Greenwich Village, West Hollywood, Key West, Florida. In 1994, University of Florida anthropologist Jerry Kugelmass published a book on the new trend, Masked Culture, describing Halloween as an emerging gay "high holiday."


And after a while – the straights imitated.

. . . The "masked culture" first developed by the gays of San Francisco has reached across the lines of orientation – and now jumped across the boundaries between nations and languages. It's not just a party. It's an ideal of personal emancipation, self-expression and self-fulfillment – an ideal that loses none of its power when it takes the form of a sexy . . . outfit.

– David Frum
"Halloween Craze Started in Gay Culture"
CNN
November 1, 2010


See also the previous Wild Reed post:
Halloween Thoughts


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