We don’t have straight ‘pride’ parades.”Īnd it seems clearer with every passing Halloween that straight people do.īack in the bad old days-pre-Stonewall, pre-pride-parades, pre-presidential-gay-history- month-proclamations-Halloween was the gay holiday. We gay people like to pretend that we’re all about love and marriage, the conservative student will insist, but look at your pride parades! Look at those guys in assless chaps and all those bare-chested lesbians dancing! Just look! The exchange almost always ends with this:Ĭonservative student: “Straight people don’t flaunt our sexuality like that. Usually it’s a conservative student, typically someone who isn’t happy about my being invited to campus in the first place. I’m often asked- confronted-about gay pride parades when I speak at colleges and universities.
Let us know what you think and Happy Heteroween! There is certainly much here for analysis as a cultural text. However, other points I think are worth considering. He also often tends to glide over issues of sexism, and doesn’t mention the use of race or class stereotypes in the production of some halloween performances. Savage unfortunately employs the same repression/release analysis long ago refuted by Foucault and other critical sexuality scholars. Just a head’s up: the language here is bawdier than our typical format at Sexuality & Society (I’ve cut out some sections but you can read the entire story from the link above). In that spirit, I’m going to share with Sexuality & Society readers some quintessential Dan Savage analysis - on Halloween as a Heterosexual Pride parade.
For this, I credit to Savage as being one of several key cultural workers who indirectly supported the development of cutting edge (third wave feminist, postmodern, queer) sexuality and gender scholarship. Though not an “academic,” Savage introduced a sort of Pop -Queer Theor y to University of Washington’s students prior to any formal classes in this area. I would pick up The Stranger on the steps of Savery Hall and read it before and after my graduate classes in classical and feminist theory. I’ve been reading Dan Savage since the day of his first publication of the now nearly iconic Seattle alternative newspaper, The Stranger, in the early 1990s - this was before the Savage’s advice column, “Savage Love” became syndicated and before his appearances with Anderson Cooper on CNN.