October, y’all, is a particularly delightful time to be queer.
Anne of Green Gables, the character written by L. M. Montgomery famously said, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers,” and many a non fictional queer has felt similarly.
This is the month where we celebrate National Coming Out Day, where the weather begins to allow us to don our best flannel again, and it is the month of Halloween- known by many to be Gay Christmas, basically a second- cooler- time of Pride for many. A time to get bit a bit weird, in the best way.
Halloween is this socially sanctioned chance to perform drag, to live into the queerly gloriously monstrous campy mythology of pirates, mermaids, vampires, and so much more, to celebrate our queer history and culture in colorful joyful ways.
Halloween can be less fun for us queers who are also disabled, since so often Halloween costumes and movies make disabilities scary in a way that causes harm. Don’t even get me started on the whole phenomenon of “asylum haunted houses”, and how the fear of those with mental illnesses or disabilities hurts us all. I’ve never even been to one of those things, and yet I was still weirdly scared to start work as a chaplain on a locked behavioral health unit- what some might call a psych ward. It was my favorite work I did as a chaplain. People experiencing mental health crises aren’t what’s scary, what’s scary is how we as a society treat mental health care. But confronting the ridiculous prejudice that has been implanted in my brain by our culture was hard.
Anyone else have something that you realized you are only afraid of because you were told by our culture you should be?
And of course, like Pride, Halloween is often celebrated in ways that aren’t particularly accessible to many.
So I’m always glad to see ways that folks are making room on the broom, finding creative ways to celebrate body differences and neurodiversity and other disabilities.
Pirates and mermaids are monster heroes for the disabled among us as much as the queer, for example.
Mermaids, which have been monsters representing the dangers of feminine power, have been reclaimed as symbols for trans youth, due to their power of transformation, and as a symbol for wheelchair users.
Pirates, some of my favorite historical monsters, both offered golden age sailors space for queer relationships and gender bending and a form of socialist healthcare for the disabled among them.
The monsters of our mythologies, our folklore, have so often been allegories for queerness and for disabilities.
Like, the changeling child, the stories of trickster fairies who stole human babies and left fey children in their cradles instead- odd elfin children who didn’t behave like “normal” human children, didn’t play the way they were expected, or make eye contact easily, and so on- that’s a pretty clear allegory for autism, right?
And I know as a high masking autistic person I’ve felt that myself- been pushed out of jobs or social situations when I started to freak people out because I can perform neuro privileged behavior – but my fairy nature is going to show through, at some point.
Every national coming out day I think about how I’ve really come out twice in my life- first in college when I realized I was queer, and at the end of my thirties when I got diagnosed with adhd and autism.
I’m a fairy, either way you look at it. Neuroqueer, some folks would say.
Anyway, I look at monsters in our culture and I have two strong opposing inclinations.
I find myself torn between this gloriously ferocious queer urge to reclaim what is intended to be used against us- queer code all the golden age Disney villians? Fine, we’re in our villain era, Ursula forever! Queers are monsters? Fine, all the monsters are queer now, the Babadook is our icon, mothman is adorable, witches forever, our fanfiction about medusa being healed through a loving lesbian relationship shall be legion.
(I just heard a great interview of a classics professor who studies monsters talking about that- how ancient Greek monsters appear in so much monster smut online. Apparently it’s a thing!)
So I want to reclaim.
And then I am also pulled in this direction of wanting to argue what is truly monstrous.
You know, the old argument- is the creature Dr. Frankenstein creates the monster, or is Dr. Frankenstein the monstrous one for abandoning his creation, or is the true monster the person has to point out that the green square face costume with bolts in its neck is Frankenstein’s monster, not Frankenstein?
You know, was witchcraft ever monstrous, or was it the witch hunters who are the true monsters of our history- the pirates may have been monstrous, but the East India Trade Company and the British Navy and the forces of capitalism that treated people like disposable machines were the real villains.
Is disability monstrous, or is using disability and body differences to signal villainy and evil the true monstrosity?
It’s hard to think of examples of characters with disabilities, limb differences, scars or other aspects of their faces and bodies that are “different” or “ugly” or “broken” that get to be the hero instead of the villain.
I think it is so important to notice who we are being told is the monster and to question what we think about that.
I want to be part of the work of shifting our stories, our shared myths, into something more liberatory.
Like, trans people have always existed, what is weird and monstrous is transphobia. History is queer history, is disabled history, because we have always been here.
AND there are these beautiful things that happen when we lean into celebrating monsters, celebrating difference and diversity and plurality.
When we lean into a love for October, into the glory of spooky autumn vibes.
It allows us to be present to what is, and what can be, to mystery, to curiosity, to joy.
It always us to question our fears, and to look at things in new ways.
And for our religious tradition, it calls us to question what we hold as sacred, and what we hold as profane.
Unitarian Universalism has declared:
Trans-ness is sacred
Queerness is sacred
The disabled body and mind are sacred
We hold that the feminine is holy, alongside the masculine, the butch, the gender non conforming, the non binary.
We aim to center what has been othered, to accommodate what has been marginalized, to make more room on the broom and also while we’re at it to celebrate our pagan and wiccan beloveds and all that broom can represent. Hurray for the witches and the wiccans, for the divine feminine and the traditions of the countryside.
We welcome in the spirit of October, and of Halloween.
We come together, knowing that when we make room on the broom for all of us we can conquer all that threatens us, that we will rise out of the mud more powerful than we could ever be on our own.
We are the fairies, the mermaids, the pirates of the myths, and we are awesome.