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.
See also the previous Wild Reed post:
Halloween Thoughts
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