The messages are nearly identical in phrasing. The costumes in question are obscure to the point of nonsensical. And the posts keep coming back, year after year, defying the often short shelf life of memes.
“i hate gay halloween what do you mean you’re the activator from the substance,” one user posted on X.
“i hate gay halloween, what do you mean you’re chappell roan and a passenger seat?” another user posted.
If none of this makes any sense to you, well, that is kind of the point. It’s Gay Halloween.
What Is Going On Here?
Gay Halloween, for anyone who has missed it thus far, is a popular meme that nods at the tendency of some people — often members of the queer community — to dress up as elaborate, hyper-specific and extremely obscure pop culture references “that a very small percent of people will understand, and they’re usually people who are within the gay community,” said Julian McCleary, a singer and sewing teacher who last year dressed up as “gay Batman” in reference to a meme that used artificial intelligence to reimagine superheroes as gay.
The Halloween costumes might reference minor supporting characters, subplots, deep-cut pop culture moments or even random props from a video set and animals.
“It’s a love letter to how tapped in to fandom, pop culture or all of the wonderful brain-rot internet references that our community has such a love for,” said Benjamin Cooper, director of consumer content at the L.G.B.T.Q. dating app Grindr, which this week hosted a Halloween ball. “It’s very much in the ‘if you know, you know’ camp,” he added.
This year, Mr. McCleary mashed up his daily life with lyrics from the Sabrina Carpenter single “Espresso.”
“I was a Singer sewing machine dressed as a vocalizing singer who’s working late because I’m a singer,” he said, referencing a line in the song in which Ms. Carpenter sings “I’m working late, ’cause I’m a singer.”
This week, for a Halloween party at MoMA PS1 in Queens, Mara Webster, a founder and host of the entertainment podcast “In Creative Company,” dressed up as an AMC Theatres cinema, complete with a screen and a projector that played the AMC opening ad, starring Nicole Kidman. Each seat had tiny buckets of popcorn, too. It took Ms. Webster two weeks to make.
“Gay Halloween is cultural references which feel like they connect to gay culture and gay community in some way,” she said. “The idea of the AMC ad is about community and bringing community together in a cinema.”
Last year, Ms. Webster created an entire bodega and dressed up as the cat at the bodega.
How Did It All Start?
As with many social media trends, this one is difficult to trace to a specific origin. According to the website Know Your Meme, references to “gay Halloween” go back to at least 2022, when people frequently started joking about gay Halloween parties where many people were dressed in costumes that were not easily recognizable.
The meme has come back each year in the long lead-up to Halloween. People post photos of their costumes with a caption that typically reads, “I hate gay Halloween, what do you mean you’re …”
The subtext of the caption, Mr. Cooper said, is disbelief or awe at the obscurity of the reference.
“It’s like having the time and energy and passion to come up with something that’s so obscure that if you turn up to a party and you see another gay guy that instantly clocks or references this, you know you’re in the right place,” he said.
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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