Eli McCann: Remembering my first Halloween as a ‘holy drag queen’ with my fellow LDS friend

My childhood best friend was a boy named Sam. We met when we were 9 and discovered we had compatible imaginations that didn’t seem to match those of our peers.

We’d make up games. The rules were not consistent, and the points didn’t matter. Most of the games involved various reenactments of some prime-time television series geared toward adults, which we nonetheless watched.

We did pretend to be superheroes on the playground but not in the way of most of our contemporaries. This was the mid-1990s and the popular soap-adjacent series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” was airing on Sunday evenings. Instead of imagining we could fly, Sam and I would reenact dramatic dialogue-heavy scenes between Clark Kent and Lois Lane. (We always fought over whose turn it was to play Lois.)

By far our favorite role play involved “The Sound of Music,” wherein we, I’m sure to the silent objection of our family members, sang in hyperbolic operatic voices “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria” but altered the lyrics to include at least a touch of potty humor.

Rise of the nuns

It was around this time that one or both of us had the idea that we should dress up as nuns for Halloween. We presented this plan to our fatigued mothers who didn’t have internet access or any other reasonable way to procure a costume that no other 9-year-old in 1995 had even thought to request.

“Are you sure you don’t want to be, oh, I don’t know, a skeleton? Or a ghost?” they pleaded with us.

Nevertheless, we begged. Yes, we begged our Latter-day Saint mothers to turn us into nuns.

Sam’s mom cornered my mom that Sunday in the church foyer. “Do you have any idea how to make a nun costume?” she whispered.

“I’ve sketched out some models,” my mom told her. “But I don’t know. Maybe we can brainstorm and figure this out?”

Over the next few weeks, I’d peek my head into my mother’s sewing room to find her hunched over her Singer machine, running a black piece of fabric under the pulsating needle. Piles of temporarily abandoned projects were scattered about this woman, who certainly never expected her decades of exceptional crafting experience to be channeled toward turning her 9-year-old son into a holy drag queen for all our South Jordan neighborhood to enjoy.

Finally, sometime around the end of October, Sam called. “Is your nun outfit ready?” He sounded giddy. “It’s perfect,” I told him, standing in my habit at the exact moment that my mother, on her knees and with a number of pins sticking out of her mouth, adjusted the hem in meticulous professionalism, taking this as seriously as if this gown would soon be on exhibit at the Met.

Class act

Our school invited us to wear our costumes to class on Halloween. Princesses, superheroes, ghosts and ninjas walked among us, as Sam and I tucked our hands into our tunics and marched in solemn character, elated to finally be living this dream.

We didn’t view our evening of trick-or-treating as a quest to collect candy but rather a fulfillment of our civic duty to perform. To entertain. To dazzle.

With the recent popularity of Whoopi Goldberg’s “Sister Act” to add to what Julie Andrews had already given us, we had enough music in our repertoire to fill out an entire album.

We marched from home to home, performing each tune, straight-faced and with excessive vibrato, before accepting any confectionary offering from the homeowner. Before long, neighbors began calling other neighbors to let them know Eli and Sam, the singing nuns, were on their way, and to be sure to make time for us. By evening’s end, our reputations had so preceded us that entire families were answering their doors to give us a proper audience.

Our parents had received phone calls throughout the evening — neighbors giving their enthusiastic reviews and asking whether there was any way the show could get an extended run.

We couldn’t have been prouder of ourselves.

The spectacle was such a hit, we reprised our roles the following Halloween for our last year of trick-or-treating, before puberty would begin to rob us of the innocence and self-confidence of childhood.

‘There were signs’

This next reveal may shock you, but Sam and I came out as gay in our 20s, long after the habits no longer fit, long after we retired our drag queen careers.

Shortly after we came out, I was talking to Sam’s mom about our nunning days and I facetiously asked if she was surprised we both turned out to be raging homosexuals. She looked at me with such care, tilted her head slightly, and mumbled, “there were signs.”

There were signs.

We couldn’t disagree. And considering those signs, there’s a piece of me that is baffled, and even a little proud, that in our conservative 1995 Utah town, our mothers’ only hesitation in turning us into nuns was that they didn’t know if they were up to the textile task. That our classmates didn’t bully us but instead asked us where we got our cool hats. That neighborhood moms and dads didn’t merely accept our flamboyance but shepherded us up and down our streets, with glee — never demanding we stop and instead requesting an encore.

A year ago, Sam and I both became dads within just a few weeks of each other. We now live in different states but have remained as close as brothers in the 30 years since we donned our gay apparel that 1995 Halloween.

Shortly after the birth of our sons, Sam and his husband, Travis, came to Salt Lake City to visit Sam’s family and show off their infant. While they were in town, we took an evening to introduce our newborns to each other, even though at that point they were still essentially potatoes.

“Do you think they’ll grow up to be best friends?” one of us asked.

“Do you think they’ll have our odd imaginations?”

“Do you think they’ll one day ask us to figure out how to turn them into nuns for Halloween?”

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but sitting there, looking at our sons, I couldn’t help but think the response to each might be yes.

If we’re lucky.

Note to readers • Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband, new child and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. You can find Eli on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother.