Halloween: Is It Zooey?
Happy post-Halloween to all you zoos and zooettes out there. Hope you had a blast putting on a costume, throwing on a scary movie, eating way too much candy or doing too many shots or both depending on your age bracket.
Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. For one, it's one of the few that isn't directly just tied to religion. Or at least, not to Christianity. It's also not tied to any kind of nationalism. Sure, different places around the world do or don't celebrate Halloween to different degrees, but it's not like the concept of Halloween itself is to recognize any specific nation. As far as holidays go, I'd argue that it's kinda like the indie underdog. The hometown hero.
It's also different because it's got a very clear theme, but the theme kinda slaps? Some other holidays have themes don't get me wrong, but not like, REALLY. Easter is about eggs? National holidays are about the country I guess? In the US, the fourth of July is about fireworks and beer and loving America or whatever, but that's not really a theme so much as just an excuse to do shit people like in general. Christmas is the one other holiday that has a real theme, but it's kinda.. Bland, no? The theme of the December holiday is wintery. That's just the time of year. Unless you do summer Christmases in Australia which does sound like it goes kinda hard. It's winter trees and snowflakes and sure you can add in the more Santa-aligned stuff like reindeer and candy canes and what not, but if you separate the "it's just winter time" from the Santa Clause aesthetic I feel like you end up with not a lot left going for you.
Meanwhile, Halloween has a wide berth to really be whatever it wants to be. Other holidays are about loving your family and taking time to appreciate the things around you and coming together. Halloween? Nah, fuck all that shit. It's about darkness. It's about fear. And sure, we've got the kidded down sanitized version where people put on cute costumes and go and get candy and that's not really "scary" per say. But I sure saw a lot of kids dressed up as classic iconic slasher characters in my area this year. What other context would it be cool to have your ten year old wear a Jason Voorhees costume and carry around a big fake knife? Even in the family friendly version of Halloween I think we give people more space to have fun, and play with the idea that the world doesn't need to be so clean. We can let loose a little and play with the darkness. And even thinking back to when I was a kid, I might not have gotten all the context around what various costumes were and the larger narrative around what Halloween "is", but I do know that my favorite houses to visit were the ones that put the most time and energy into being actually scary. Places that made me FEEL afraid.
And then there's the fact that Halloween also has the not kid friendly sides to it. I'm not just talking about sexy nurse outfits here. I think Halloween gives us as adults a chance to explore different things that we wouldn't in other times of the year. You might be familiar with things like "kinktober", which is an artist trend where people draw various kinks that might be outside their normal scope. And, as artists do that, new people are exposed to those kinks that might not have been before. They aren't even all like, "bad" kinks, sometimes it's just a chance to try something you wouldn't have otherwise because it's presented in a different way.
That's not to say that there isn't also exploration of more dark and twisted themes that come as a result of Halloween too. And I think that's awesome. We live in very pleasant times, all things considered. Yes, there's currently a lot in the world that's going extremely wrong, and we're for sure facing a backslide on a ton of the progress we've made. But also, how likely is it that you're going to see dead people in your day to day life? How likely is it that you're going to have people you know starve to death, or die of horrible diseases or get murdered because the neighboring tribe decided they like your plot of land more. And I think it's GREAT that we don't have to face those things as regular concerns. But I also think that does a lot to separate us from nature, and from the fact that we too are just bags of meat that have happened to come into existence. I want the world to be a better place, but I think the fact that there's a holiday all about facing the reality of the world gives us a chance to ground ourselves. To make us feel things that our lizard brain was built to feel.
Ready for the best transition of all time? I think zoosexuality is kinda the Halloween of Holidays. Hear me out here. Halloween is objectively a holiday. Nobody would say otherwise. But like I said, it's kinda just.. Different than other ones. I think that's pretty similar to how most sexualities describe the ways that humans interact with each other, but zoosexuality describes something more. That doesn't make it bad obviously, but it is just kinda different.
You might think this comparison is unflattering. That comparing zoosexuality to Halloween makes it feel like I'm saying that zoosexuality is dark, or evil, or scary, but that's not it. I think Halloween is the holiday that connects us most with who we are not as distinct beings, but as animals. And I mean, that makes sense, right? The earliest history of Halloween comes (as best we can translate it) from old school paganism, and the tradition of Samhain where people would don costumes usually made like animals in order to avoid being found by evil spirits. Literally people were fursuiting up way back in the B.C.E., that sounds pretty zooey to me.
The other thing that Samhain is, is a time to remember those that have passed. If you're a ZooTT fan, you're probably familiar with their Samhain tradition where people can write in to the show about loved ones that they've lost as a way of giving remembrance to them. Each story or account is followed by the cast literally chanting "we remember". And as zoos, on average we know a lot more about losing partners than the average person who exclusively dates humans. Not to get too depressing here or anything, but lifespans sure are different between various species, and Samhain has always been something of a way to acknowledge death together.
Halloween is also the holiday of costumes and disguises, and don't we know a lot about that. We might not be wearing costumes to avoid evil spirits, but I do have an avatar, a mask, that I wear when I'm celebrating my zoosexuality to avoid evil people, who would like nothing more than to tear off my mask and ruin my life. All of us are wearing costumes, some more elaborate than others, but when it comes to the current existence of zoosexuals if you're the one person at the party not in a costume you're the one standing out. But still, even though there might be danger outside, I'm still going to celebrate my sexuality. It's scary, and it's objectively less safe than doing nothing, but I think the spirit of both zoosexuality and Halloween is that you challenge the darkness, not hide from it.
Even with the costumes though, the zoosexual community is a space where people come together to be who they really are. I might be talking as "Tarro" when I'm in group chats, but even though that's not my real legal name, I feel more like myself than I do a lot of the times when I'm with people in real life. Halloween isn't about dressing up to hide your identity. It's about putting on a costume to express something about yourself. The guy that dresses up as a hot dog is saying something about himself that's different than the guy who dresses up as the grim reaper. Which is saying something different than the girl who dresses up as sexy Scooby Doo. When we celebrate Halloween, we get to choose who we are with unlimited levels of expression. When we join zoo spaces, we give ourselves the same ability. We become part of a community where we can choose who we want to be.
I think people misunderstand Halloween on a conceptual level. Granted, this is probably the longest thing you've ever read about the nature of Halloween before, unless you're a freak like me. But I think that the take away most people have is wrong. Darkness isn't about soaking in it. It's about getting through it. When you go through a haunted house, the idea isn't that you want to just kinda hang out and vibe. You want to get through. To make it to the exit. Horror movies are all about who survives the night. The whole idea of Halloween, and about this artificial fear that we create for ourselves is the rush we feel when we've done it. We face our fears and we conquer them.
Being a zoosexual is really fucking scary sometimes. I've written about it before, but it's hard living with a constant baseline level of anxiety that any day I might wake up to 20 Twitter notifications and my face all over the internet. That I might say the wrong thing to the wrong person and suddenly everyone knows my big dark secret. I have to constantly face darkness. People tell me all the time about how they want to violently kill me. They send me pictures of real life death and gore and say that's what they want for me. It's a lot sometimes. But just like Halloween, I do what I can to try and celebrate this moment. To understand it. To recognize that this is the darkness that we're all facing together. We're in the midst of the horrors of the world and we've come together to show that we're better than that. That we can find our way through, and still be alive to see the sunrise.
I don't know if I'd say Halloween is "zooey", in that I don't really think the actual holiday and the actual sexuality have that much to do with each other. but I do think that Halloween is a holiday that speaks to me as a Zoosexual, in a way where I feel very understood. And in that sense, Halloween is zooey as hell.
Happy Halloween, dear readers. Let's send off the darkness together.
Article written by Tarro (November 2025)
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