When I was 13, I wanted to be Frank-N-Furter for Halloween. I imagined myself in that iconic black getup with my face painted as campily as that character from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," performing for an imaginary crowd of my trick-or-treating peers. A year later, I imagined myself as Lady Gaga in the “Telephone” music video, dressed in nothing but police tape.

Obviously, I had no idea what was age-appropriate for a 13-year-old boy. Perhaps never celebrating Halloween as a child allowed me to ideate so unabashedly – I wanted to be so much, but I knew it would never happen.

Growing up as a devout Seventh-Day Adventist – my mother had my brother and me in church almost every week – I was taught that Halloween was something to be afraid of. And not in an innocent fun-through-fear way, but an evangelical satanic panic way. Halloween was an incarnation of a world lost in its own demonic desires. It was a sacrilegious event disguised as a benign holiday to convert worldly folks into satanists.

But when I went to school, I couldn’t understand what was so bad. I would overhear my classmates giddily discuss their costumes and trick-or-treat plans. In an attempt to fit in, I would lie and say I planned on celebrating, too, just in a different city so the neighborhood kids wouldn’t........

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