Oct 28, 2005  |  By: GREG MARZULLO  | COMMENTS     

HALLOWEEN IS LIKE gay Christmas, and once again the holiday season is upon us. D.C.’s annual Halloween events, like the Miss Adams Morgan Pageant and the High Heel Race, ushered in a weekend full of drag queens, leather extravaganzas, and devilish dance club madness that is often the party of year.

If you’re too old for trick-or-treating and tired of the same old masquerade balls, you might want to consider some of the other options in town.

Halloween can be a time of intense spiritual revelation, charity work and craft making. If you’re looking to do something different this year, here are a handful of options that are beyond the typical gay celebrations.

Radically fabulous

Plenty of gay men have been called “fairies” in their lives, but among the D.C. Radical Faeries, this word is a revered title.

Started in the 1970s by gay civil rights pioneer Harry Hay and a collective of queer men, the Radical Faeries is a national, earth-based spiritualist group committed to exploring queer spirituality.

“It’s somewhat difficult to be queer in this city,” says “Eldritch,” 44, one of the D.C. chapter’s long-standing members who defines queer as being unafraid to cross and transcend societal boundaries and constructs, especially in terms of gender roles and sexuality.

“The city puts a high priority on being respectable homosexuals, but it’s perfectly okay to be queer, too. We try to nurture each other’s essential fabulosity.”

This year, the D.C. Radical Faeries are holding a Samhain (pronounced like “sow-in”) celebration on Friday, Oct. 28, at a private residence in Takoma Park, Md.

Samhain is the tradition pagan celebration of the new year that eventually spawned the (barely) Christianized Halloween holiday.

“We’ll be looking at those past people who have influenced us as queer people,” says “Fritter,” 29, one of the ritual leaders for the Halloween event. It’s customary for Radical Faeries to take on or be given an alternative name that mixes mirth, reverence and a new identity.

“We’ll honor the past by naming the names of those who influenced us. For the present, we’ll dance around together, honoring ourselves as living beings. For the future part of the ritual, we’ll be thinking and dreaming together, opening our vision of what we could be as queer people in the future,” he says.

The evening will feature music, channeling the dead and feasting. Last year, 30 to 40 people arrived, and the group expects a similar number this year. Attendees can dress as they please, from drag to prep, and it’s polite, but not required, to bring some type of food dish.

Season of the witch

As usual, this Oct. 31 there will be kids dressed up as witches, but what about spending time with some real practitioners of the ancient art of witchcraft?

Spiral Heart is a non-profit corporation that was established to educate and train people in the “Reclaiming Tradition” of witchcraft. The group holds an annual Spiral Dance ritual to honor Halloween.

The Reclaiming Tradition grew out of a teaching coven in San Francisco, the most famous member being Starhawk, author of “The Spiral Dance” and other novels about following an earth-based spiritual path.

Evelyn Wright, a 34-year-old bisexual, describes the Reclaiming Tradition as, “believing very seriously that divinity is inherent in all things, inherent in the earth and its people,” she says.

“The sacred world is here and now. It’s a tradition that focuses very much on liberation and healing on the individual and societal levels,” she says.

The evening will start off with the creation of sacred space, welcoming earth, air, firez and water, plus the ancestors and divinity. This will be followed by a trance journey (similar to guided meditation) to speak with the ancestors, and the evening culminates in the spiral dance, where attendees hold hands in a line and form a spiral.

“The Spiral Dance is a ritual that honors our ancestors and gives people an opportunity to celebrate their lives,” says Wright.

Attendees are welcome to participate in the ritual’s singing, dancing and trance journeys to the extent they feel comfortable. No one’s hand is forced, and they won’t put a spell on you if you don’t join in.

The Samhain Spiral Dance regularly attracts about 100 people, and the community is open to all forms of diversity in sexual orientation. The mode of dress is everything from everyday street clothes to Renaissance fabulous and punk trash.

Leather up

For the last 30 years, the D.C. Eagle, the city’s stalwart leather bar, has been holding its Leather Sabbat at Halloween time. In conjunction with local leather clubs from the ...