Live Deliciously: The 2024 Halloween Horrorquest (event) by Jet-Poop

Pop quiz, hotshot! What holiday features revellers dressed in fancy costumes, all enjoying wild parties, treats, parades, festive decorations, lots of fun -- aside from a handful of religious weirdos who hate the holiday with all their might and want to have it banned? Yes, of course it's Pride -- but it's also Halloween! And a lot of things that make Halloween popular are why some LGBTQ people call Halloween "gay Christmas."

A lot of this is because Halloween was one of the rare holidays where you could be openly queer or trans without getting into a lot of trouble for it. Crossdressing was illegal in many states in America for most of the 20th century. Being gay or lesbian? Used to be you could get arrested for it. Going to a bar full of gay people to drink and socialize? The cops used to do raids just to arrest everyone there. But on Halloween, dressing up in costume was okay. Dressing in drag was okay. LGBTQ people had parties and parades in costume, and the police couldn't do much about it because straight people were also having parties and parades in costumes -- and there were tons of straight men dressing in drag, and the cops weren't going to arrest them for wearing a costume on Halloween.

Masks and disguises have nearly always been a big part of Halloween, and that resonates with people who've had to disguise who they are for fear of rejection by families, friends, or employers -- or who have to fear actually being jailed or killed because of who they love or how they identify.

But disguises are also fun, especially when you get to "disguise" yourself as who you really are. Yeah, yeah, on Halloween, all us monster-loving geeks can dress up as vampires or zombies or sexy kitty cats -- but dressing in drag for Halloween has long been a great way for trans people to try on the skin they wish they could wear, even when society says it's not allowed. And sometimes, Halloween drag has helped people realize they'd been living in a disguise their whole life and liked themselves better as different gender. Halloween costumes and Halloween drag are some of the most transgressive acts around -- and they're amazing equalizers. Everyone gets to be someone else, whether it's someone they're pretending to be, or if they've finally shed their daily disguise to show off who they really are.

Today, Halloween parades are fairly rare, while you can't have a Pride celebration without a good parade. But lots of Halloween parades have always had space for queer paraders. The long-running Greenwich Village Halloween parade has been queer-friendly since at least the 1970s, and even before that, groups of queer Halloween partiers parading from one party to the next weren't uncommon in big cities.

Halloween is America's primary transgressive holiday, with heavy elements of misrule, of chaos overthrowing order, of people embracing who they are not and who they wish to be. The nerd can dress up as a jock, the jock can dress up as a cheerleader, the cheerleader can dress up as a gangster. On Halloween, the rules no longer exist, and that gives people the freedom to be who they really are.

But that doesn't mean that Halloween is solely a time for partying for LGBTQ people. There are also plenty of oppotunities to enjoy good old fashioned scares. Queer horror is becoming a stronger sub-genre with each passing year, with authors like Billy Martin, Lucy A. Snyder, Lee Mandelo, Allison Rumfitt, Ian Muneshwar, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Chuck Tingle, Cassandra Khaw, Hailey Piper, and Eric LaRocca becoming more prominent and more popular, while movies and TV shows like "I Saw the TV Glow," "Interview with the Vampire," "Titane," "Raw," "Bodies Bodies Bodies," the "Fear Street" trilogy, "What We Do in the Shadows," and "They/Them" become must-watch events for both critics and fans.

The fact is Halloween is for everyone, straight or gay, cis or trans, monsters or delicious humans, and everyone in between.

(Special thanks to tandex, locke baron, Evil Catullus, and Lucy-S for keeping me honest, and for making sure I didn't embarrass myself or anyone else.)

It's that time of year again. Let's try to scare each other.

Write an original scary story. Write a horror-themed poem. Node a story that is in the public domain. Write a factual writeup that is about horror or scary stuff. Write a biography of a writer or actor closely associated with the horror genre. Create a review of a horror film or story. It can be any length and any topic. Ideally, fiction should be scary, and nonfiction should be thematically appropriate. I reserve the right to not include your writeup here if you try to sneak in unscary or unHalloweeny stuff.

What's the runtime for the Quest? The entire month of October, plus November 1, server time. Halloween is too awesome to limit to just one day a year.

Again, the Quest will run for the entire month of October and November 1. If you post early or late -- too bad, so sad.

When you write a story for the Quest, just /msg me with the node title, then softlink your writeup to this node. I'll include a list of all the Quest participants below.

So start thinking horror, boils and ghouls. Halloween is coming. Let's scare each other.

Fiction:

Poetry:

Fact:

Reviews:

Essays:

Mercury Incident	Libera te Tutemet ex Inferis: The 2023 Halloween Horrorquest	Halloween, An Aftermath	Dead Men Tell No Tales: A True Ghost Story
Behold a Pale Horse: The 2021 Halloween Horrorquest	Pickman's Nodegel: The 2009 Halloween Horrorquest	I can make you howl. And vice versa. Let's get down to business.	ravenous