Is it your polyester Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz costume at your local Spirit Halloween pop-up shop? No, put that back. You can also leave the recycled Disney princess dresses from the past at the bottom of your basket, because this year we are bringing something different out of the closet…
Gone are the days of looking good in a sleek costume version of your favorite movie character, as we pave the way to normalize wearing a car passenger seat, inspired by Chappell Roan’s song “Casual” – complete with seat belt – or dressed as the tennis ball from the homoerotic Zendaya blockbuster Challengers (2024) which made us nauseous in the final scene.
The “gay Halloween” trend consists of a series of posts showcasing unconventional and unusual costumes from pop culture that – let’s face it – can only be found at a queer Halloween party. Along with a photo of their “gay costumes,” observers of the new unofficial holiday share the short caption: “I hate gay Halloween.” What do you mean you’re dressed as ____?”
More often than not, these outfits are ingenious nods to throwaway, niche, and hyper-specific camp and pop culture moments—like the lockers from Bottoms (2023) and the “Whore” by Toy story (1995) – signals a renewed interest in people and things taken from the collective subconscious.
HyperallergicEditor-in-chief Hrag Vartanian and publisher Veken Gueyikian are known to embody the gay Halloween spirit, and their favorite outing was a decade ago when their couple’s costume was a famous photo of art critic Clement Greenberg looking at a painting by Kenneth Noland. Super specific? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely, that’s what gay Halloween dictates.
“Queerness often means being hyper-aware of how the world sees you and how small changes mean different things, because our safety is often tied to passing or hiding, but that’s also how we find kinship with others in subtle ways,” said Vartanian. .
“In London in the late 19th century it was a green carnation to denote a form of male homosexuality, while in Qing China it was symbolized as a cut off sleeve, and in Berlin in the 1920s it was certain types male clothing for lesbians,” he continued. . “So a look, an outfit or a combination changes the meaning and allows us to project our imagination into those visible shifts.”
Choosing a costume every year is our personal hell, but gay Halloween seems to offer a reprieve from the world of mind-numbingly common bunny ears and angel halos and brings us into the world of strange ways of knowing.
Motti, a queer and trans writer and comedian living in New York City, posted what may be the most viewed costume duo — with 5.1 million views and counting — of the Internet craze to date. In a telephone interview with Hyperallergic, Motti said gay Halloween is full of costumes that “think outside the box” and “point to things that were meaningful to our community at the time or at the time.”
Knee-deep in their passenger suits, Motti and their friend Britt Migs, also a comedian and dressed as Chappell Roan, brought to life a scene from one of the singer’s hits. ‘Casual’ tells about a toxic situation on a ship – and a sexually explicit moment in a car.
“It’s kind of like an inside joke, that’s what it feels like to be queer… like thousands and millions of people are experiencing the same inside joke,” Motti said.
While some reports have labeled gay Halloween as a meme trend, Motti said they don’t see their costume that way. Instead, they see them as works of invention. “This is not something that already exists online,” Motti said.
Motti said that while they expect some people to dismiss gay Halloween as a “chronic online gay thing,” it brings attention to the queer space. “Yes, gays are chronically online, because what real-life spaces are you really giving us?” they said.
“We’re going to think outside the box and get creative with it, because it’s fun, but also because we have to,” Motti said. “Look at how drag performers lead the culture by being funny: it’s always comedy first, and then it’s the creativity, the beauty, the craftsmanship.”
The author of the trend, according to Motti, is still unknown to them. “It hurts me that I don’t know who to name as online creators.”
Motti’s perception of the trend as a shared ‘inside joke’ that requires thinking outside the box fits into the canon of contemporary queer theory such as that of Jack Halberstam. The strange art of failure (2011).
Popular knowledge, including the media, Halberstam writes, offers new forms of queer existence in a world where homosexuals exist in opposition to conventional heteronormativity.
Halloween, Vartanian said, “allows us to recreate those overlooked memories that may seem small or forgettable to others and celebrate the absurdity of them.”
“What I find interesting is how many of these supposedly forgettable moments resonate with others,” he added. “One of the best parts of contemporary queerness is finding the glitter in something that others have discarded or devalued.”
And if you’ve made it this far, here are some queer-coded honorable mentions:
