"why do white people wanna get haunted so bad"

a (slightly edited) journal entry about white queerness

November 10, 2024

This week I spoke at a sparsely organized ritual gathering in [park]. Halloween-style decorations. Fifteen-to-twenty faggots standing or sitting in the evening wind, right at the center of the park. By "ritual" I don't mean anything traditional, not as such. More a catch-all term for activity meant to invoke the sacred, to capture meaning. Mine was the last of three acts, or "rituals." The two before me involved cutting up paper with memories written on them and creating poetry with the fragments. I spoke about the difference between history and memory, asking participants to name a part of the past that animates their body in the present moment. As I finished, a cis man with a beard and a fade came up to the edge of the circle. Seeing him linger, I invited him in.

The man asked, "What is this?"

One of the hosts said, "A ritual."

The man asked, "A ritual for what?" His accent was Hispanic. He looked guarded.

"We're mostly just reading poetry."

"I don't know what you're searching for, spiritually," he said, "but there's a legitimate way to do this. What you're doing here, the occult, this is illegitimate." He knew what he was talking about too, he said; he was a "spiritual expert" in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Muffled protest from the faggots, a large majority of whom were white and spoke Anglo-white English. Most, like myself, were not from this neighborhood. Only started living here in the past four years.

The man continued for some time, utterly confident that our practice was rooted in dark spiritual teachings of the occult. Really, I think it's more accurate to say our practice was rooted in no teachings, or nothing at all. It came together with a lot of laughter and brown paper bags and cigarettes, as if those were the implements of our religion. But the man wasn't entirely wrong if he thought what we were doing was anti-Catholic. It was, I guess, by virtue of our being faggots. Plus, the hosts began the evening by shaking hands with people to their left and right, encouraging others to do the same, saying "Beast be with you," which I at first misheard as "Peace be with you," and I said "And also with you" before realizing what they had actually said and shutting my mouth.

When he finished with "I will pray for you all to find Jesus Christ," the muffled protest of the faggots rose a little and quickly ebbed. He walked away. I stood at the front of the circle still, votive candles burning at my feet. I waited for him to walk away before saying, by way of continuing my ritual: "Legitimate or not, I was gonna say that lately, the history of gays and lesbians holding each other through the AIDS epidemic has been what's animating me."

As soon as I started my sentence "Legitimate or not..." the little crowd erupted in laughter, like a tense rubber band snapping back at me. They laughed loud enough that I'm sure the man heard it by the park exit, which made me wish I'd waited just a little longer to speak.

Slowly, the faggots resumed our air of sort-of-sacredness. Folks shared the things which inspire them from the past, which live on through them as they resist a government that wants them dead or removed from public life. It wasn't long before a woman approached, her face more suspicious, her tone more condemnatory, her accent a little thicker and her hair a little more gray.

"We don't do this here," she told us. "We don't come to you with hate, but you cannot bring the occult to this park. This park is protected by Jesus Christ."

A few faggots spoke up all at once, some angry, some placatory. A host said, "No no no, we're really just reading poetry." Contradicting him directly, another faggot said, "We are a cabal seeking spiritual fulfillment through the illegitimate means of the occult."

Several people spoke over one another. The woman glared at us and said, over and over, "I will pray for you. I will pray for you."

Not knowing which way to go and feeling extremely uncomfortable, I just said, "Thank you. Thank you."

*

This experience felt first and foremost like a power struggle over land and authority. I don't mean to throw my lot in with other whites in what is fundamentally a racial conflict. That holds true whether the whites are gay or straight. All the same, I worry that is exactly what I did.

I'm not losing sleep over the religious admonishment -- I'm sure this is not the first time somebody who doesn't like me has prayed for my soul. I worry more over something the man said: "This is just weird. People didn't do this when I was growing up."

I will glare back at anybody who gawks at me when I board the L train with a dress and no makeup, because I don't like being looked down upon for being trans. But when you walk boldly into a predominantly Catholic neighborhood, set up skulls and candles, and invite passersby into your "ritual"? Maybe you are lacking respect for the place in which you practice. Maybe you, in the company of your ancestors, are seeing the landscape as an empty vessel in which to cultivate the monoculture of your faith.

And then, gay or not, who am I to write off Catholic faith entirely. I was sort of Catholic before my dad left. I'm not Catholic anymore because I believe in a pluralism of all things, including belief in God. But spiritually, to insult a people on their own turf sounds like trouble -- both in this world and any world beyond.

June 17, 2025

Two days ago, I read this essay to some friends and they told me to put it out. Through that conversation I  remembered another one I had about white queer culture back in 2021. My friend was talking about her upbringing with immigrant parents when she posed a question that I still think about: "Why do white people wanna get haunted so bad?"

In a previous post, Unfortunately, The Gothic Horror Is Autofiction, I discussed the lapsed Catholicism of English gothic writer Andrew Michael Hurley. He says, "I do wonder whether horror (writing it and consuming it, in terms of films and books) is a bit of a substitute, actually, for those religious beliefs that I’ve left behind." This insight resonates and inspires my work enormously. Writ large, I think it says something important about contemporary whiteness.

The second half of the 20th century saw the mass dissolution of immigrant European enclaves in US cities. Between the suburban pull of white flight on the one hand and the urban push of gentrification, urban renewal, and discriminatory transit development on the other, ethnic white church congregations and neighborhood institutions were devastated across the country. Institutions that enshrined diverse Euro-American ethnic, national, and language identities were destroyed. In their place, what did we get? Global hegemony of US pop culture? Professional sports fandoms? Horror movies?

Especially in subcultures and fringe communities, certain groups of US whites are coming to understand the extent of our (historically self-imposed) cultural alienation. White queers in places like New York now spin in a strange cultural eddy. Many of us are flung violently from white nationalist religious movements that have festered for decades in the segregated cul-de-sacs of rural and suburban enclaves. Many others find ourselves one or more generations deep in a complicated lineage of self-conscious post-Christianity, coming up into a mélange of wellness cultures, New Age movements, and hyper-rationalist online atheism. It's no wonder why so many white queers cast out for spiritual redefinition. Clearly, we need it.

I'm just wary of the ways we are already renewing old cycles, especially those of us one or two generations out of Christianity. The opposing face of our ancestors' religion is still the same coin, and neither is the spiritual world of Global Majority cultures a reasonable path of escape for white queers. Any remotely fashionable white Zillennial in Brooklyn can tell you that cultural appropriation is wrong, but fewer seem to understand that - like all others - our culture or lack thereof is inextricably rooted in place. This place, this land, does not belong to us. Our spiritual potential is not beyond our political reality. Our political reality is untenable until we successfully break the structures of oppression that we've inherited.

I say this while badly wanting a spiritual home, just like anybody else. I feel its absence more and more every year I get older. And yes, it scares me too that collective liberation is our only option, that the only way out of this is through.

But only with the utmost humility, solidarity, and care can we hope to make a worthwhile home in a place that isn't ours. If we rush that process -- if we approach our attempts at cultural reconstitution with the same nervous clamber we approach our politics -- then I worry whatever home we create will indeed be haunted. Just not in the way we'd hope.

as a side note, all love to the people who organized and attended the ritual gathering in November. i feel we made a mistake but it was a mistake we made together. plus in the big picture, this kind of mistake is extremely common among transplant queers and not at all unique to the gathering in question.

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your oomf,

evergreen<3