That's so gay… no really

Yeah, I know this is a few days late. The first half of the week gets hectic.

A friend asked me what I had planned for Halloween. I said my plans were to disappear. I have no kids and can't eat the leftover candy. So I just ignore the whole thing, and have done so for about 25 years.

This past Monday I had a quick dinner, then saw the movie The Help. Many who have seen this movie are, of course, appalled at the way many white characters treated the black characters. They did a very good job of seriously messing with the mental health of their black employees and did all they could to prevent any type of community between the two races.

I was struck, however, with the way the black maids genuinely cared for the white children in their care. They worked to build up the mental health of those kids, not simply meet basic needs. One of the themes of the movie was the care they lavished on their white charges while knowing their own children were cared for by someone else. Part of caring for the white kids was the hope those kids would somehow manage to grow up and not be as racist as their parents. Sometimes they even succeeded. However, there were people in that society who required others to be as racist as they were.

Given half a chance, the black maids genuinely cared for their white employers. One of the white women was shunned by most of the other white women, but she and her maid became good friends.

Back to Halloween. Rev. Irene Monroe, writing for Pam's House Blend, says Halloween is America's gay holiday. The reason she gives is on that day we have permission from the rest of society to be as gay as we want to be. Gender-bending is encouraged instead of frowned upon. Monroe dates the phenomenon back to the 1970s and the huge annual street party in the Castro district of San Francisco.

But I've heard stories that gay Halloween is even older. Charles Alexander, a columnist for Detroit's gay newspaper Between the Lines, has told of Halloween in Detroit in the 1950s where tourists came to see the drag queens strut their stuff. So in talking of this holiday we can say, "That's so gay!" and mean it without sounding mean.

Of course, this gay holiday comes with a backlash. Many Fundie churches put on Hell Houses in which they depict such things as a woman who has had an abortion and a gay man with AIDS being carted off to Hell.