Halloween's Popularity Rooted In Gay Culture?

David Frum, a conservative columnist and former George W. Bush speechwriter has written a column for CNN.com about the international popularity of Halloween and its roots in the 1970s gay subculture of San Francisco.

Some perspective here: On Tuesday, some 37 percent of Americans are expected to turn out to vote. On Sunday, some 66 percent of Americans celebrated Halloween.


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Halloween is overwhelmingly an adult holiday. This year, for example, Americans spent an estimated $800 million on costumes for children, $1 billion on costumes for adults. Where did that adult dress-up party begin?

As best we can tell: in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood. In the 1970s, that neighborhood emerged as the heart of a new home-owning, bourgeois, coupled gay community. A local variety store had long sponsored a Halloween street festival for kids. In the 1970s, the street festival transitioned into an adult party of lavish costumed theatricality. The "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" -- a troupe of transvestite nuns -- got their start here.

The Castro Halloween party 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.

From the spread of disco in the 1970s -- to the habit of paying money for sparkling waters such as Perrier -- culminating in Halloween, gays have incubated and developed major cultural trends. Straights adopt, and then ungratefully forget whom they are adopting from -- just as American Christians forget how much of the modern Christmas music they enjoy was written by Jews, starting with the most popular of them all, Irving Berlin's "White Christmas." The majority culture forgets what the minority culture has produced.[emphasis added]

What's interesting about the piece is that although Frum is very conservative on gay rights generally (we may read his article from the mid-1990s where he called for the re-imposition of sodomy laws to forestall the legalization of gay marriage later in the semester), here he doesn't seem to be complaining about the cultural transference from a "subculture" to the mainstream.

Thoughts?

Realizing Race is a Social Construct

For the first page or two of this paper, I scratched my head every time the author said that people didn’t know how to truly define race. Isn’t it obvious? Black, white, Asian... how else can you define it? When he did finally explain what race actually is by writing that it is “an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing, plastic process subject to the macro forces of social and political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions,” I wrote a big, bold, frustrated “What?” next to the sentence. In my mind, it was obvious that we were all divided by race. Looking around in LA, you can see how divided the races can be, such as the mostly Latino community of Highland Park and the predominantly Asian city of San Marino.

It wasn’t until I read, “There are no genetic characteristics possessed by all Blacks but not by non-Blacks,” that it finally clicked in my head. Duh! Obviously our DNA and genes are not necessarily specific to and determined by our ancestral backgrounds and the color of our skin. Society has conditioned us to believe that our behavior, thoughts, actions, and beliefs are linked to our race. But the divisions that I had been assuming were about race have nothing to do with race at all; it’s about culture. For example, it’s not because you’re of “Korean/Asian race” that you are familiar with kimchi and watch dramatic Korean dramas. It’s because you were raised with Korean culture in the home. The thing that can and does separate some of us is culture, not race. Of course, there are other things that can separate us, too, like our gender, sexual orientation, class, etc., but those are also all different types of cultures. And what is culture but a construct of society?