Tossing The Costume Aside 

It’s the Halloween season again. Rituals of seasonal drinks, terrifying decor and festive fun is about to culminate in a “Halloweekend” fraught with parties, movies and celebrations. 

This time of year holds a special significance for many — not only for its nostalgia and traditions, but for the space it gives for individual expression.

With the talk of Halloween costumes coming down like a heavy fog over students’ minds, I’ve been mulling over the significance of the holiday to those who haven’t always had the freedom or security to express themselves. 

I’ve been reflecting on costumes I’ve worn in the past. Not just the tacky, maybe even outrageous ones worn Oct. 31, but the ones worn everyday — my own sort of mask. 

Costumes can be a type of social armor. Whether they’re polyester, gauze or leather, they serve to protect the bodies who don them. They allow, if only for a night or two, an individual to assume and explore a character divorced from their everyday selves. 

But costumes are also clothes. 

And for far too long, my clothes have been a costume.

For the first half of my life I lived in Andersonville — a neighborhood well-known for its inclusivity and queer friendly culture — a few blocks off of Clark Street. What once was home I’m now estranged from. I’ve spent the last nine years — my entire adolescence — in the suburbs of Wisconsin in a public school hostile to the queer culture synonymous with my childhood hometown.

Moving to a new Wisconsin community, I found myself in a sort of Halloween party — one where everyone but me was wearing the costume of conservative culture: scruffy mullets, noisy cowboy boots and spray-on tans. 

Like any adolescent desperate to fit in, I learned to build a costume of my own, decked out in cotton button-up shirts, iron-pressed pants and leather shoes — an expression of a need to dress in an acceptably masculine fashion.

I’m grateful for this costume. For so many years, it was safety itself. It was the thing cloaking the queer man underneath, shielding me from unkind words or nasty glares. 

But as I write this in Andersonville’s Collectivo Coffee, surrounded by visibly gay men, I’m confronted by my relationship to my costume.

Is it time to let it go? How do I shed what has become a second skin to me?

These past few months on campus have been a reversal of circumstances— one where, in a sea of Loyola’s vibrant and authentic queer community, it’s I who pulled up in an obnoxious mask. 

Chatting with other students, I know I’m not the only one. My hope, for myself and others, is to learn, step-by-step, how to peel off this outer facade. 

I want to let my guard down, to be open to self-expression without fear of push-back and to join the myriads of students who will toss their Halloween costume aside at the end of fall’s festivities, and just like those students, never wear it again.