Drag queens taking to the stage at one of Calgary’s biggest Halloween events just kind of makes sense in 2025. Queer folks and Halloween go hand-in-hand, with many affectionately calling the spooky holiday “Gay Christmas.”
For Calgary’s queer community, Halloween parties could be considered the beginning of a new time.
“It was reported that on Halloween 1968, about 100 nervous Gays showed up dressed to the nines at the Highland Golf and Country Club. This event gave those anxious organizers courage to start the first gay clubs in the city,” writes historian and author Kevin Allen in a 2018 post on the Calgary Gay History Project blog.
The news article Allen references, published in The Albertan (now the Calgary Sun), discusses that Halloween night with detached curiosity. One of the stand-out points in the piece was the club’s attitude towards cross-dressing — normally not permitted in the club, but with an exception for Halloween.
“In a lot of the 20th century in North America, you could be charged if you were cross-dressing,” said Allen. “But on Halloween, that was the time that the rule was relaxed in society generally, so queer people have really celebrated that as their holiday since.”
Over 50 years since that first ‘public function,’ exploration of identity through Halloween costumes continues. Whether it’s straight men who think dressing as a woman is intriguing or people genuinely questioning their identity, the willingness to bend gender norms is more and more accepted.
“I think Halloween gives people permission to kind of try on different identities and different roles,” said Allen. “As a young university student, I had a friend who I thought was straight, cisgender, who would always dress up as a woman on Halloween … and 20 years later came out as trans.”
‘Ween like a Pro
Whether you’re planning to express yourself with your costume this year, or go as “guy who forgot to get a costume” for the third year in a row, there are plenty of events to hit around Cowtown on this year’s Gay Christmas.
CUFF Halloween Horror Movie Marathon
If your idea of a fun weekend is watching the extended cut of the entire Lord of the Rings series, then you are trained and ready for Calgary Underground Film Festival’s gruelling-but-fun 12-hour-long horror movie marathon.
Catch seven favourites and lesser-known spooky flicks, including Young Frankenstein, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Psycho II, at the Globe Cinema starting at 7 p.m. on October 25, and running until 7:30 a.m. the next day. Tickets are $25 (that’s only $3.50 per movie!), available at calgaryundergroundfilm.org.
Tales from the Crypt Comedy
If you can’t dedicate 12.5 hours of your weekend to watching movies, how about spending October 25 confusing your adrenal system with a horror-comedy show? Kicking off at 7 p.m. at the Rec Room, enjoy an evening of live stand-up and sketch comedy, and a “choose your own adventure” spooky-comedy story where your choices can lead to lots of laughs or lots of scares. Get tickets on eventbrite.com for $17.40.
Buffy The Vampire SLAYer Drag Show
As if there was any chance The Attic wouldn’t deliver some outstanding Halloween drag entertainment. On October 30 at 8 p.m., catch a show hosted by the self-proclaimed “YYC Nerd Clown” Anne Xiety, full of campy references to the beloved supernatural drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Watch some drag queens put on a show that’s equal parts creepy and camp, and get a crash course in how Halloween costumes are really done. Head to theatticyyc.ca to grab your tickets.
