Like any good slut, Halloweekend was my favorite time of year in college.
Okay, so I wasn’t a slut, just an aspiring one. Aspiring and non-practicing. I was ambitious, disciplined, and goal-setting in all parts of my life except this one. I knew, somehow, I was a very sexual person despite having very little sex. I masturbated prolifically but never watched porn, scarier than the scary movies I also refused to watch for fear of looking too closely in the face of something I craved. My interest in sex was distanced, almost academic. And then on Halloweekend, a veil lifted.
Halloweekend was a perfect outlet for my theoretical interest in sex, because it was all sex and artifice. The aspiring slut could finally dress as a legible one.
Halloweekend was either the best or the worst time to be closeted. The best in that it was possible to enact some of your deepest desires in disguise. You could flirt behind a mask and wig. It didn’t count. So much felt like it didn’t count on Halloweekend. You could experiment with gender presentation. You could do a “couples costume” with a friend — platonically, of course. God, what is it about a couples Halloween costume that is so intimate? The idea that you can only really be understood when in proximity to each other, the idea of completing one another, of becoming two parts of one complete set. Coordinating Halloween costumes was almost more erotic than if I’d been brave enough to actually kiss a girl on Halloweekend, which I never did, not once.
Because, yes, Halloweekend is also the worst time to be closeted. The artifice of it all was one big reminder that you were pretending, that this was for show and not actually for you. So many parts of college campus culture felt gay without being gay, you know what I mean? Halloweekend, chief among them. If girls kissing at frat parties was somewhat normal year-round, it was practically expected on Halloweekend.
I hadn’t thought my Halloweekend queer turmoil in a long while. Overcompensating’s Halloweekend episode “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” brought me crashing back to it.
Every character’s Halloweekend angst in the episode feels somehow adjacent to the tension of being closeted for the multi-day celebration, even though only one character’s arc explicitly contends with it. But for every character, the episode captures the strange contradictions of the holiday, made all the stranger when you’re carrying a big secret. Halloweekend’s encouragement of debauchery and disguise is at odds with the rules of it all, because yes, Halloweekend was just another college setting in which social rules could be codified and enforced. I was good at some of these, like adding slutty affectations to my costumes which, sometimes, broke the rules by being a little too complex. In “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” every character butts up against rules and expectations. They’re trying to figure out what it is they want and who they want to be — literally, not just in the context of choosing their costumes.
It’s hard to pick which of the episode’s storylines I relate to most. Grace realizes her former best friend Mimi, who has grown into her own queerness and beyond her limited life with Grace, will not so readily welcome her back into her life. (I’m desperately hoping for a bisexual arc for Grace in season two, because there really is something so queer about her fractured friendship with her lesbian ex-bestie.) Carmen literally transforms into her fantasy alter ego in the episode, something I attempted most Halloweekends. And Benny’s whole world cracks open when his friend-crush-frat-brother Miles suggests they get costumes together. A couples costume? Could it be that Benny’s crush is reciprocated? Neither boy has told the other he is queer, Miles’ sexuality unknown to the audience, too. But matching costumes? Surely that means something, Benny thinks. But then, by the end of the episode, that cracked open world latches right back up in an instant.
Okay, fine, I obviously relate most to Benny.
Or was I the Miles?
We cut to reality, where Benny and Miles are indeed watching the famous Kevin Bacon sex scene and death scene (one and the same) from Friday the 13th.
Reality melts back into fantasy. Benny and Miles lean in to kiss, and it’s interrupted again by the realm of Friday the 13th breaking into their reality, Jason grabbing Benny from behind just like he does in the film’s iconic jumpscare ending. It’s a perfect visual gag, because it feels like a joke and a genuine jumpscare all at once.
“Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” plays out as both comedy and horror. Benny gets so swept up in the possibilities Halloweekend presents. He thinks, finally, it is his time to make a move with Miles. This awkward sweetness between them throughout, but also a buzz of anxiety and dread. That arrow in his fantasy might as well be real; his crush is wounding.
When I think back to all the stupid shit I did while closeted, it plays out like a comedy. At the time, of course, it felt like horror.
She didn’t come, cancelling our Halloweekend plans with less than 24 hours notice. In fact, I never met her in person. And our online relationship, whatever it was, fizzled out. I might have been sadder about this if not for the enormous emotional real estate occupied by my real, flesh and blood crush.
I was not in Greek life like Benny and Miles, but this wounding crush was on a sorority girl. Benny, to his credit, understands what he is experiencing as a crush. I thought I was just possessed or something.
We belonged to different worlds on Halloweekend, me with the artsy, nerdy crowd that occupied a particular neighborhood in my college town, her in the sinister streets of Greek life. Our paths were not supposed to cross on Halloweekend, even though I wanted them to. We had recently become inseparable, and this was my favorite holiday, and couldn’t we go to just one party together? But I also didn’t want to go to the ones she was obligated to go to under the stringent social contracts of sorority sisterhood, not that I was invited.
We fought about this, as we fought about many things. “Couples fights,” our gay guy friend called these as a joke, because we weren’t a couple and never could be. She had a long-distance boyfriend she hated, and I was straight, despite the non-girlfriend online girlfriend no one knew about.
And then, unplanned, our paths did cross on Halloweekend, ever so briefly. I want to say she was dressed as a slutty mummy? That can’t be right. All I can be certain of was that she was wearing the one and only dress she tended to wear when she went out in her other life as a sorority girl, her life that didn’t include me. A bandage dress. She always looked like she was doing drag in it. Around me, it was all henleys, jeans, and puffer vests.
She was drunk and so was I. I was on my second costume: Silk Specter from Watchmen. I’d DIY’d the whole thing myself. We were both on our way to different destinations, in that buzzy between-parties space. It was too cold for either of our outfits, but Michigan’s October weather never stopped the hoes on Halloweekend.
I tried to convince her to come with me. My internet girlfriend was supposed to be here, but she isn’t, I could have said, if I were a different person entirely.
A month before, we’d apparently been caught in a compromising position at a party. This was all according to that same gay guy friend. He said he was pretty sure he’d seen me pin my friend against a wall as if I were about to kiss her but stopped just short of it. He was also pretty sure he’d seen us straddling each other on a couch, later that night. I feigned virginal innocence, said we were probably just joking around. In truth, the night was hazy. I always drank a lot around her. That was easier than confronting the horror of a crush.
I couldn’t remember it, but I imagined it, playing the scene of us together against a wall and on a couch in my head with a mix of erotic tension and horror not unlike Benny’s freaky Friday the 13th fantasy-nightmare. The part that scared me most was that other people could see us.
Overcompensating is purposefully made to feel like it could take place in any number of years from like 2008 to 2014ish, with needledrops from the 2020s also slipping in. Overcompensating’s collapsed temporality is one of my favorite things about it. When I watch it, I’m in 2011, in 2025, in some in-between time and space. On its surface, it’s a silly campus show satire. But in its oblique surreality, it taps into something real and, in the case of its Halloweekend episode, something nightmarish.
Years later, my friend asked me why I didn’t tell her I was gay sooner. She was mad, I realized, even though so much time had passed, even after we’d more or less lost touch for years until this reunion. We were both out now and living our best gay lives. Or, well, living gay lives that ebbed and flowed — I was going through a bad breakup.
You weren’t exactly out either, I pointed out.
We swapped some memories, as one does when reconnecting with a college friend, and realized we remembered them all a little differently.
I wasn’t a particularly kind person before I came out. I’m not sure all of it can be blamed on the pressures of the closet. But some of my crueler actions were so directly linked to my anxiety over my suppressed queerness that it feels heavy-handed, obvious.
I couldn’t handle the crush I had on my friend, couldn’t even name it, so I slept with her best friend, a guy. Part of me knew it would ruin whatever it was buzzing between us. I did it anyway.
They dance in slow motion, and it’s as if no one else is there. From a distance, Benny’s best friend Carmen, who he’s going through a rough patch with, watches.
Later, Miles asks if Benny’s roommate is still out of town, and Benny brightens at the possibilities implied in the question. Yes, his roommate is still out of town.
“Would it be okay if we went back there to, you know, use the room?” Miles asks.
The seismic shifts in the following sequence barrel one right into the other, all unfolding over the course of a few mere seconds. “Oh my god, yeah,” Benny says in wonder, looking up to see a random girl standing with Miles, realizing Miles is talking about himself using the room with her and not with him, his face falling as he pivots his answer to a more casual yeah, of course. The latch closes. Benny and Miles are no longer in the bubble that held them earlier in the party.
Miles leaves. The fantasy twists into nightmare.
From across the dance floor, Benny locks eyes with Carmen, and it’s like she can see every contour of those seismic shifts he just experienced. They have the kind of telepathic conversation only best friends can, Carmen seeing his pain, Benny nodding in affirmation. He cries, and they tell each other I love you.
When they embrace, everyone else in the room actually disappears. It isn’t like before with Miles when it merely felt like they were the only ones in the room. As Benny and Carmen reconnect, it really does become just them, just for a few seconds. Then the scene seamlessly transitions back to the full party surrounding them, set perfectly to “Claws” by Charli XCX. (Desiree Akhavan deserves awards for this episode, for her direction of it but also for her delivery of “How long did Alison Roman say to simmer these clams?” in her cameo as Mimi’s girlfriend.)
Overcompensating’s Halloweekend episode would have already been perfect if it had ended on the quiet devastation of Miles asking to use Benny’s room to hook up with someone else. But this coda centering Benny and Carmen’s friendship? It pushes the episode into true brilliance. The ending makes me sob every time, not because Benny gets his heart broken but because his friendship with Carmen so quickly stitches it back together.
I had a best friend throughout college who was exactly that every single time I had my heart broken, especially the times I didn’t even know that’s what was happening. I spent every single college Halloweekend with her. We were randomly assigned roommates in the dorms we lived in for two years, and then we continued to live together in an old, ugly brown house with too many other people — her in a bedroom on the second floor, me in the uninsulated attic for one year and then a warmer room next to hers.
At some point in the house, she started letting me sleep in her bed with her, under a massive plush red blanket I loved. This was all purely, beautifully platonic. I did love her, the way Benny and Carmen love each other more than anyone else in that Halloweekend moment. We think we’re watching the beginning of Benny and Miles’ love story in the episode, but really we’re watching Benny and Carmen’s.
I would not have survived the harsh winters nor the painful queer crushes of college without my best friend, who saw things about myself before I did. It was shortly after the Halloweekend where I was stood up by a girl who was probably never actually my girlfriend anyway that I came out to her. I told her that was also why I’d been acting weird during Halloweekend, leaving out anything about my on-campus crush, though she, like many others, eventually picked up on that one before I did, too.
As soon as I came out to her, I wish I’d done it sooner. All those nights in her bed, she knew it was about more than just my preference for her red blanket. I’d been craving the quiet comforts of intimacy, of touch. It was all platonic, but it meant so much more than my fake relationship with someone online I’d never met.
There were many times at a house party when I felt like the only person I could see in a crowded, musty room was my best friend. Because so often she was the only person really seeing me. The end of Halloweekend often made me feel bereft, this sad and sudden transition back into regular, normal life. But at the end of every Halloweekend, she was always there, our friendship steady and constant and unshakeable no matter what other seismic shifts hit other parts of my life and relationships.
The first time I watched Overcompensating, I thought I was Benny. Then I realized, in horror, I was Miles. Worse, my betrayal had been more intentional.
One thing’s for sure: Being closeted on Halloweekend is its own kind of horror. Overcompensating captures that all too well.
