Halloween: Is the Party Over?

“i remember the year i noticed the shift,” says Jeanne Fleming, a longtime organizer of New York City’s Village Halloween Parade. The year was 1989. Downtown Manhattan was a gritty, crime-ridden outpost of artists, homos, junkies, and freaks. So perhaps it’s fitting that Fleming’s epiphany came in the form of passing garbage trucks.

“We had sanitation trucks as part of the parade,” she recalls. “They were mirrored on all sides -- an artist would cover them with Mylar, and seven of them would drive through and do this fantastic choreographed routine.” Watching the trucks go by and getting a good look at the crowds reflected in the trucks’ sides, Fleming suddenly realized: Oh, my God, I’m running a straight event. How did that happen?

She wasn’t alone. Across the country Halloween festival organizers were coming to the same realization: Their local gayborhood parties were attracting an annual pilgrimage of heterosexuals -- college kids in pea coats, suburban Republicans, teens from the rough side of town. They arrived, costume-free, to get drunk, climb lampposts, whoop and gawk, take pictures, and, occasionally, harass.

Granted, it’s a show worth watching. Halloween street parties have always been the perfect excuse for gays to showcase their creativity in an atmosphere free of judgment and scorn. “There were lots of very imaginative gay people who would come in wonderful things, like dressed as Imelda Marcos’s shoes,” says Ralph Lee, who is credited with starting the Village Parade in 1974. “One year there were these four guys dressed as stewardesses, with little carry-ons, each with a letter on it, and when they lined up it spelled T-W-A-T.” Costumes often tend to be topical too, reflecting the zeitgeist. The year 1979 saw an army of Eva Perons -- Evita had hit Broadway that year -- the more creative ones sporting a bank of microphones ingeniously designed into the dress to mimic Peron on her balcony.

In such a festive atmosphere, is it any wonder that Halloween became a gay national holiday -- it’s “gay Christmas.” And through most of the ’80s at least, before such events became formally organized and publicized, these parties were ours, a place where we could let our hair down and get crazy with our peers. It was our secret -- until word got out, and the mainstream decided to crash the party.

While the crowds of straight spectators at Halloween carnivals have been growing for years, 2006 may have been a tipping point. Last year, according to organizers, the festivities in New York and Washington, D.C., drew their largest crowds ever, with the parade in the Village stretching for a full hour longer than the previous year’s. The West Hollywood Halloween Carnaval on Santa Monica Boulevard, which today draws half a million, was “like a mosh pit for a mile and a half,” says Jeff Scott, a longtime attendee. For the first time in 18 years, he says, he went home early.

The media that dominate today’s events only add to the chaos. New York’s event is covered by 38 international television crews, says Fleming, who in late September had just fielded a photo request from Time Out Beijing.

As far back as 1998, a gay council member representing the Village asked the city to cancel or move the event, citing “a sea of homophobia.” A gay community board member summed up his feelings as a parade participant: “Many of these people who come out now are not there to laugh with us. They are there to laugh at us,” he told The New York Times.

Because the parties aren’t the domain of straight attendees, they don’t have a stake in their sustainability. “The gay people, you tell them to get behind the line, and they will,” says David Perruzza, organizer of Washington, D.C.’s Halloween High Heel Race. “The straight people, you tell them 500 times, and they keep pushing forward.”

It’s not just ridicule and unruliness that threaten the events, though -- it’s violence. Last year in San Francisco, where the party in the Castro has recently been bursting at the seams, gunfire exchanged between two gangs with automatic weapons left 10 people wounded, prompting the city to call off this year’s event. For the first time in three decades, there will be no official Halloween party in the Castro.

Bevan Dufty, city supervisor for the Castro district and the person who, with the mayor, spearheaded the movement to cancel the party, says, “Halloween is the most miserable issue I’ve worked on in my years as a public official.” It could be argued they waited too long to cancel: The year Dufty was elected, in 2002, five people at the event were stabbed, and another person brought along a working chain saw as part of his costume. “It was like Escape From New York,” Dufty says.

Though many attempts were made to bring the San Francisco event under control, things have just gotten more dangerous. Dufty claims that the party in the Castro has become “a rite of passage for young gang members” to attend and spark violence. Furthermore, he says, “all my neighborhood groups in the greater Castro area are just disgusted with it.”

The day after the 2006 shootings the San Francisco Chronicle’s online comments section was blanketed with calls to move or cancel future events. “The shootings occurred a mere two blocks from where I live,” read one typical post. “After they shut down the party, it continued for hours afterward on my street, which was clogged with people not from the neighborhood but tourists from other parts of the city and the East Bay…. Cancel it.”

But canceling gay Christmas, in the gayest neighborhood in the gayest city in America, is like canceling New Year’s Eve in Times Square -- which is to say, Won’t people show up anyway? That’s the question that now has San Francisco holding its breath. “I have lived in the Castro for 13 years,” says Donna Sachet, a drag artiste whose bewigged and bejeweled visage was the public face of the celebration on fliers, billboards, and bus ads from 2003 to 2005. “There are certain organic things that happen. The pride celebration -- it may be held at the Civic Center, but after it’s over, everyone comes back to the Castro. New Year’s Eve? Back to the Castro.”