Happy Halloween! 🎃

Halloween is one of the holidays I most enjoy. I don’t have trick or treaters where I live, but I used to at my previous apartment. I always enjoyed seeing the little kids in their costumes. As an adult, I’ve gone to my fair share of adult Halloween parties (and by that I do not mean it in an adult movie kind of way. I merely mean a Halloween party with all adults in attendance. I used to regularly visit a friend of mine who lived in Thibodaux, Louisiana, at Halloween. She always hosted a fun Halloween costume party. A few times we went out to bars in Thibodaux where everyone would be dressed in costumes. Thibodaux is a college town, so there were a lot of hot college guys, usually in sex costumes that were a lot of fun to watch. I haven’t been, nor am I going to any Halloween parties this year because I’ve had a lot of other stuff going on, and I did not want to have to find a costume. Still, I enjoy Halloween.

This guy seems to be preforming a trick that is also quite the treat. 

Halloween is an institution in the LGBTQ+ community and is occasionally referred to as “Gay Christmas.” Halloween has risen from its roots as a pagan fire festival about celebrating harvest and warding off spirits, to a day of celebrating everything spooky, transgressive, and fabulous. Halloween though plays a special role in the LGBTQ+ community not only because it can be a lot of fun, but also because LGBTQ+ people spend large parts of their lives hiding their true selves and presenting in a way that is at odds with their desires and identity. Halloween’s emphasis on dressing up as something you are typically not ends up being a powerful outlet to present ourselves in a way that expresses who you really are.

Each year, my friend Susan send me a Halloween card. This year she sent two. The Hello Kitty cards are always cute no matter what occasion they are for, but I think they are especially cute when they are Halloween cards. The other card she sent looks a lot like Isabella. Black cats get a bad reputation for being bad luck, though they are not seen as bad luck all over the world, but it's a persisting superstition in the United States. One of the joys of having a black cat is that I have a natural decoration for Halloween, especially when she stands in the window and stares out at people.

I did not have a picture of Isabella in the same pose as the cat on the card, but the look in her eyes is similar to those of the cat on the card.

However you think of black cats, my Isabella is a beautiful, kind, and loving cat who brings me a lot of joy and is most certainly not bad luck.