American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

by Dan Savage

  There’s a direct link between the flogging scenes at Folsom and the flogging scenes depicted on stained glass windows in Catholic churches, in the Stations of the Cross, and in Mel Gibson’s BDSM-tinged snuff flick, The Passion, a film that was shown in Catholic schools all across the country. (“[The Passion] relies for its effect almost entirely on sadomasochistic male narcissism,” the late Christopher Hitchens wrote on Slate, “…massively repressed homoerotic fantasies, a camp interest in military uniforms, [and] an obsession with flogging.”)

  Not every child exposed to Catholicism during his formative years is going to be into BDSM when he grows up. Not all Catholics are kinksters and not all kinksters are Catholic. But a significant number of the men and the women flogging each other on the streets of San Francisco during Folsom—a disproportionate number, I would wager—were raised Catholic. Catholic religious imagery and dogma imprinted the shit out of their erotic imaginations when they were children, and the people selling whips at Folsom are reaping the rewards.

  Because kinksters aren’t born. They’re made. And the Catholic Church creates them by the millions.

  Finally, and in conclusion, I’d like to state that Terry looks really good in leather—wait, did I already say that? I did. But you don’t have to take my word for it. I believe there’s a picture of Terry at IML, decked out in his leathers, on Peter LaBarbera’s website somewhere.

  1 Listening to the tape of Mrs. Kern fuming about depraved sex acts, I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for Mr. Kern. I don’t think Mr. Kern wants to get his kink on with gay dudes—although you never know with the homophobes—but odds are good that Mr. Kern, like so many straight men, has a few non-standard-issue sexual interests. If Mr. Kern has a kink or two (highly probable given the law of averages), he can’t share them with his wife. Because according to Mrs. Kern, kinks that turn your face (and other things) red are for homosexuals. Kinks define homosexuality, according to Mrs. Kern. Which is kind of sad for Mr. Kern if he’s kinky, which he very well could be.

  9. The Straight Pride Parade

  There’s something a little scary—scary in all the wrong ways—about a “Sexy Jane Doe” costume.

  You can buy “Sexy Jane Doe” costumes, which are basically form-fitting body bags complete with toe tags, through Halloween catalogs or in those pop-up Halloween shops that occupy empty storefronts from late August through the end of October. “Sexy Jane Doe” is half of one of those adult his-and-hers Halloween costume sets that drive some people nuts. You know: Sexy Nurse & Doctor, Sexy Nun & Priest, Sexy Pirate & Pirate Captain. They upset people because the costumes for girls bare a lot of flesh, but the companion costumes for boys don’t bare any flesh at all. And that is so sexist and so unfair and—wait a minute.

  Someone is selling sexy corpse costumes?

  Yes, someone is. “Sexy Jane Doe” is part of a CSI-inspired his-and-hers costume set and it’s no exception to the clothed-male/nearly nude-female rule. The official name of the girl’s costume in the set is “Jane Doe DOA Bodybag.” It’s a shiny, black, skintight, miniskirted body bag/dress that “hugs every curve,” and comes with a zip-up-and-over-the-head hood and “toe-tag Jane Doe neckband.” The boy gets a “Coroner” costume, which consists of a baggy black lab coat with the word coroner printed on it, presumably to be worn over street clothes, and a black surgical mask.

  There’s nothing sexy about “a man whose job is to deal with dead people looking at a sexy dead stranger,” a blogger named Lilith wrote in a post at Feministing.com, “an online community for feminists and their allies.” No argument from me there, Lilith, and I agree that a “deliberate power dynamic [is] being displayed” when a woman dresses up as a sexy corpse and lies down on an autopsy table to be ogled by a man in a not-so-sexy lab coat, which was how the “Sexy Jane Doe” and “Coroner” costume set was illustrated in the catalog. Nope. There’s just nothing very sexy about that. (Well, I don’t find it sexy. But sexy is subjective, and this his-and-hers costume set is probably sexy to someone.)

  You know what else isn’t sexy? The grousing I hear from friends and coworkers when ads for “sexy” Halloween costumes start appearing in early September. People I know to be reliably pro-pleasure lefties—people who are all for recreational sex and legal drugs and strap-on dildos—suddenly start sounding like right-wing religious conservatives when Halloween rolls around. A holiday for children has been transformed into an opportunity for stupid grown-up straight people to dress up in revealing outfits and make sex-crazed spectacles of themselves in public. And isn’t that just sad?

  No, it’s not sad. It’s awesome. And it’s long overdue.

  I’m often asked—I’m often confronted—about gay pride parades when I speak at colleges and universities. Usually it’s a conservative student, typically someone who isn’t happy about my being invited to campus in the first place, trying to score a point for the superiority of the heterosexual lifestyle. “Homosexuals like to pretend that being gay is about who you love,” the conservative student will say, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “but look at your so-called gay pride parades, with men in their ass-less chaps and all those bare-chested lesbians.” These exchanges typically end like this:

  CONSERVATIVE STUDENT: You don’t see straight people flaunting our sexuality like that. We don’t have straight “pride” parades.

  ME: You should.

  And it becomes clearer with every passing year—and with each new his-and-hers Halloween costume set sold—that straight people do have pride parades. They take place on October 31, the route meanders from one straight bar to another, and they keep getting bigger and sexier. (And, note to conservative student, straight people flaunt their sexualities in a million ways, large and small—kissing in ballparks, public marriage proposals, holding hands in grocery stores, bachelor and bachelorette parties, ruinously expensive weddings, baby showers, birth announcements, etc.)

  Back in the bad old days—pre-Stonewall, pre–pride parades, pre-the-ability-to-live-openly—Halloween was the gay holiday. It was the one night of the year when a man could go out in leather or feathers and a woman could go out in a zoot suit with her hair greased back in a ducktail without having to fear arrest, exposure, and ruin.

  In Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights, an oral history, Shirley Willer describes pre-Stonewall life in Chicago, now one of the gay-friendliest cities in the country. “The annual Halloween costume balls [were] run by the Mafia,” Willer said. “These balls were big events in Chicago, the only events where all bets were off and the police left us alone…. This was the one time of year when gay people could be gay. It was the only visible sign that there were literally thousands and thousands of gay people in the city.”

  Halloween resonated for pre-Stonewall queers because the closeted life was a never-ending, hugely stressful masquerade. If you were lucky in those days, you might be out to a few very close friends. But you were closeted at work and on the street and to your family. To survive, a queer person had to be very good at masks, at pretense, and at playing dress-up. But on Halloween gay men and lesbians could take off the disguises they wore the other 364 days a year and be the most outrageous, flamboyant versions of their true selves. Halloween allowed gays and lesbians to take a skill set honed under duress—the ability to pretend to be something we were not—and put it to use creating joy.

  While Halloween is still celebrated by LGBT people, it’s no longer the highest holiday on the queer calendar. Oh, we keep it, but we don’t keep it holy. It’s just another excuse for a party—and we’re always on the lookout for an excuse to party—but Halloween has been downgraded, displaced by other and better excuses for parties, from pride parades to crowning a new Mr. Leather to the arrival of the weekend. There are still parties in gay bars on Halloween, of course, and you’ll see people, many of them straight, parading up and down the streets of gay neighborhoods on October 31 in elaborate costumes. But Halloween belongs to heterosexuals no
w.

  According to the National Retail Federation, Americans spent 7 billion dollars on Halloween in 2011, and nearly 70 percent of adults now celebrate the holiday. “Bars all over the country hold parties for the 21-and-up crowd and manufacturers crank out costumes that definitely aren’t meant for family trick-or-treating,” reports Martha C. White, on Time’s Moneyland blog.

  Straight people in the United States needed something like the hyper-sexualized bash that Halloween has become. Straights in Brazil have Carnival; straights in Germany have Fasching—big public parties where straight people show their tits, shake their asses, and flaunt their sexualities. Booze companies in the 1990s spent millions in an attempt to make a national holiday out of Mardi Gras, a big public party where straight people show their tits, shake their asses, and flaunt their sexualities on the streets of New Orleans, but a national Mardi Gras didn’t take. Instead straight people made a collective, subconscious decision to appropriate and redefine Halloween.

  Straight people have also wisely chosen to collectively disregard the dire warnings of batshit fundamentalist nutbags like “Apostle” Kimberly Daniels, an evangelical preacher who sits on the Jacksonville City Council, and Mission America’s Linda Harvey. Daniels warns that Halloween candies are infused with demonic spells (and you thought corn syrup was the problem) and that Halloween parties involve “sex with demons,” “orgies,” and “sacrificing babies.” (Man, I’m not getting invited to the right parties!) Harvey, for her part, has warned straight people against celebrating Halloween. “We all can see [that Halloween] is a huge celebration in the LGBT world, especially for the gender-confused folks,” Harvey said on her radio show shortly before Halloween in 2012. “The core of Halloween is glittering artificiality; you can pretend to be someone you aren’t for a night, you can flirt with danger, you can divine a different destiny…. It’s one of Satan’s oldest tricks!”

  Straight people have made the right choice to disregard Apostle Daniels, Linda Harvey, and all the other batshit fundamentalist nutbags out there and embrace Halloween. It was certainly a better choice than the one booze companies were attempting to make for them. Pride parades are now the big public celebration of queer sexualities in all their tawdry glamour, and Halloween is the big public celebration of straight sexualities, and it’s every bit—every tit—as tawdry and glamorous.

  And necessary.

  Gay people don’t resent straight people for taking Halloween from us. In all honesty, we were hardly using it anymore. And, besides, we know what it’s like to keep your sexuality under wraps, to keep it concealed, to be on your guard and under control at all times. Even today, with more gay people living openly, there are still times in our lives when we have to put that straight mask back on and try to pass (in adolescence, on road trips through red states, in the locker rooms of gyms in small towns). And while heterosexuality isn’t subject to the same sorts of institutionalized repression that homosexuality was and still is, straight people are subject to subtler forms of sexual repression.

  Straight people move through life thinking about sex constantly, always horny and always slightly frustrated (which is a feature of human sexuality, not a bug—we’re wired to be horny all the time), but social convention requires straight people (and gay people) to act as if sex were the last thing on their minds. That can be exhausting. And then there’s the hash so many young straight people make of their lives. When gay people come out, we shrug off the pressure to conform about something so enormous—sexual orientation—that the shrugging off of other, lesser pressures to conform comes easy.

  Straight people don’t have to come out, as heterosexuality is assumed. And while that’s good in many ways—less stress during adolescence is certainly good—it’s not so good in other ways.

  Young straight people are less likely to question choices that their families and societies are attempting to make for them. Even worse, the culture has a way of convincing young straight people that they’re somehow freely making choices that have actually been foisted on them. From the expectation that you will settle down (What if you don’t want to settle down?) to the expectation that you will have kids (What if you don’t want to have kids?) to the expectation that you will choose an appropriate partner (i.e., someone your parents approve of over the kind of partner—or partners, plural—that actually excites you). A lot of straight people move through life following a script that others wrote for them. And many straight people only realize that they didn’t want to settle down or have kids or marry the kind of person they married until it’s too late (i.e., until after they’ve married and had kids with someone their parents like a lot more than they do).

  People under those kinds of pressures, and people who’ve made those kinds of mistakes, desperately need pressure-release valves. And those are precisely the kinds of pressures—to conform to a certain romantic script, to live with sexual and reproductive choices that others made for you—that can make a person want to pull on a pair of ass-less chaps, smear glitter on her tits, and march down the middle of the street. Those are the kinds of pressures that cry out for some form of organized mass release. And they’re the kinds of pressures that only something like a pride parade—straight or gay, Mardi Gras or Halloween, Carnival or Fasching—has the power to release.

  Straight people needed one day in the year to let it all hang out, a day on which they could violate the social norms and expectations they hew to the rest of the year, a day to publicly cross-dress or undress, a day when they could be the piece of meat they know themselves to be and treat other people like the pieces of meat that they are.

  And they got it: Halloween.

  Right now things are a little unfair on the gender front. Okay, they’re a lot unfair. Straight girls are expected to show flesh on Halloween; straight boys aren’t. As an aside: An emerging, and perhaps encouraging, trend for ladies on the choice front is the pairing of sexy with ironic (e.g., sexy iPod nano, sexy Taco Bell Sauce Packet, sexy Chucky). In response to this sexy/ironic trend in the Halloween costume menagerie, Slate contributor Amanda Hess offers this: “When I see women dressed as sexualized fast-food sauces, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the new Sexy Halloween economy, the line between sexy and ironic appears to have evaporated. There’s something hopeful about that—this new permutation of the trend rejects plastic corporate packaging and values a woman’s cleverness instead. As long as she still looks hot.”

  And I don’t think this new trend is a sign that the sexy Halloween costume industry has jumped the shark so much as they’ve discovered a treasure trove in self-mockery. How postmodern of them. They’re incorporating the critique and mocking it at the same time, which allows wearers themselves to mock the “sexy” costume trend while going out in sexy costumes just the same.

  After I talked about the phenomenon on a podcast recently, I got some tweets from female listeners who said I was missing the point. “We shouldn’t be forced to wear sexy costumes if that’s not what we want,” one woman tweeted.

  No one is forcing anyone to wear sexy costumes. Women who don’t want to wear sexy costumes don’t have to. And if the issue is choice—all the costumes for sale for women at the pop-up Halloween shops are “sexy” this and “sexy” that—well, women have the option of buying men’s costumes (which can be taken in with a stapler), or making their own. Lots of gay men go to pride parades in fluorescent thongs—but not all gay men are required to. I’ve never gone to a pride parade in a thong (nor would I ever), but I’ve never felt pressured to go in a thong. Still I would defend to the death the right of other gay men to wear thongs at pride parades if that’s what they want to do.

  I see this attitude from the female tweeter as the pathologizing of other people’s choices: Women who don’t want to wear “sexy” costumes assuming that any woman who is wearing a sexy costume had to have been coerced, and must be unhappy, or is being abused, or she thought she was making a free choice but just doesn’t realize that the culture put th
e zap on her head.

  The sexy/ironic trend aside, I don’t foresee things radically changing in this arena anytime soon, sadly. Because it comes down to something that defies logic, politics, and even free will: People who want to fuck men—straight and bi girls, gay and bi guys—show flesh because it works. Showing flesh attracts positive male attention. (Positive or negative, I guess, since it kind of depends on how you feel about male attention.) But engaging in that kind of sexual display—here are my tits!—is perceived by men and women, gay and straight, as feminizing. So while baring their tits is an effective way for girls to attract male attention, it’s often a less successful mating strategy for men who are looking to attract female attention. Guys who show off their tits risk looking like they’re trying to attract male attention too (i.e., they risk looking like fags). So straight guys who bare their tits on Halloween—or their abs or their asses (especially their asses)—aren’t going to reap the same kind of rewards that tit-baring straight girls do.

  And that’s a shame because there are a lot of straight guys who shouldn’t have to wear baggy lab coats on Halloween. (There’s a “John Doe DOA” costume for sale, too, but it’s a formless, shapeless head-to-toe body bag with a hole cut out for the face.) It would be wonderful to see straight boys out there celebrating their erotic power on October 31 the same way the gay boys do: by allowing themselves to be objectified at the same time that they’re objectifying others. That would make the straight pride parades—all those Halloween-night bar crawls—feel as egalitarian as the gay pride parades on which they are unconsciously modeled.