A new meme has swept the internet: Gay Halloween. Apparently, this means dressing up as obscure references to reality TV moments, iconic music videos, 1990s teen movies, niche consumer products, and drugs. Some of these posts – which mostly cropped up on Twitter – portray costumes people have actually worn, while others are merely speculative. Taken together, they showcase a vast, elaborate constellation of the contemporary queer lexicon, and the cultural references that bind us together.

Halloween has long possessed a special significance for the queer community. For a start, the holiday has its roots in a pagan festival practiced by the ancient Celts, a group of people who were notoriously fond of gay sex – and while I’m no historian, I’d be prepared to bet a bucket of candy that the OG Halloween was decidedly not a chaste, heterosexual affair. By going all out for Halloween, queer people today are simply honouring the legacy of their horny forebears.

Halloween is sometimes referred to as “gay Christmas”, and even in more recent history, this idea is nothing new. In the 20th century USA, when cross-dressing was criminalised across many states, Halloween provided a safe opportunity to head out in drag. According to an article published on Them, Black gay men were throwing extravagant Halloween balls as far back as the 1950s. Whether their costumes involved ironic references to the pop culture of the day, which have been lost to history, we can only guess.

Even today, the holiday affords a similar kind of disruption to the social order, and a similar kind of permission, allowing us to get away with more flamboyance and gender nonconformity than we normally would. As a teenager in a fairly homophobic small town, I did enjoy the opportunity to go out wearing make-up (even if the concept was as half-arsed as ‘Robert Smith from The Cure at the beach’), with the slightly smaller risk of getting beaten up – who would dare call me a “poof” on such a sacred occasion, and risk angering the Celtic gods?? As anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes are rising and gender nonconformity of all kinds is increasingly met with punishment, it’s easy to see why Halloween affords a sense of release.

As for the “I hate gay Halloween...” meme, I’m not sure it’s entirely representative of reality. While there are no doubt some queer people heading out dressed as contestants from The X Factor, the standard still seems to be: hot zombie, hot skeleton, hot werewolf, hot Dracula, hot Frankenstein’s Monster, hot ghoul, hot goblin, hot Loch Ness Monster, hot Creature from the Black Lagoon, hot Mummy, and so on. And rightly so! I’m a firm believer that we should Make Halloween Spooky Again, but this doesn’t mean we have to disavow looking slutty.

But if we are to draw from the shared lexicon of gay culture, we should be a little more ambitious than only ever referencing trash TV and celebrity trivia. Why not: I hate gay Halloween, what do you mean your costume represents the concept of yearning? What do you mean you’re dressed as Michel Foucault’s notion that the best moment of sex is when the lover leaves in a taxi? What do you mean you’re “the alien from Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin”? There is more to gay Halloween – and indeed life itself – than memes.