Ah, Halloween. What could be better than a holiday with costumes, masks, plenty of parties, and no gift or family obligations? It’s all about you, baby. It’s the unofficial gay holiday, the day when most of us get dressed up as someone (or something) we’re not, and head for one or more of the many events hosted for our entertainment and gratification.

It’s fun to head to fantasyland and pretend we’re someone else for a while. It’s a fairly harmless way to spend a night — or even a few nights, since we have a tendency to turn holidays into holiweeks.

Still, it’s no way to live an entire life.

For instance, we know a gay man who lives in fear of being “discovered” because he works for the district attorney’s office. He is convinced that everyone he works with believes he’s straight, and that his life would be horribly altered if anyone found out the truth. The thing is, he works for the DA in San Francisco. Yes, that San Francisco, the city that is the epicenter of the gay universe, and famous (some might say infamous) for its liberal GLBT policies and protections.

Imagine, this poor man spends a great deal of time and energy pretending to be something he’s not and worrying that he’ll be exposed as a fraud, when coming out is more likely to help his career than harm it. Besides, how many people do you think he’s really fooling up there in GLBT land? A blip goes off on the collective gaydar of the entire city every time he crosses the bridge.

Like many others, he’s probably not fooling anyone but himself.

A friend of this poor guy used to tell coworkers that he was straight. The funny thing about it was that everyone assumed he was gay the moment they met him, and no one ever seemed to have any problem with it – other than extreme confusion when he kept bringing his “fiancée” to company events. Fortunately, he finally found his way out of the closet and is now happily singing showtunes for a living.

Of course, there are times when being openly gay could be genuinely harmful, but let’s be honest, they are far fewer than we like to pretend.

Yes, it’s scary to think about what might happen when you come out, especially since most people really are more comfortable with “the devil they know” – at least they know what to expect. But why spend all that time dreading the day everyone finds out? It’s going to happen eventually, so why not cut to the chase and quit pretending now? The end result may be the same, but you can save yourself years of worry and guilt – and the wrinkles that go with them. And nobody wants to show up to the party ten years too late.

Do we simply need some reason to feel guilty? Is there some part of our collective consciousness that is so used to hearing “gay is bad” that even if we manage to convince ourselves that we’re gay and that’s okay, we still look for reasons to beat ourselves up? We deserve better than to let fear squeeze the joy out of our lives.

The key to happiness is learning to live with who we really are. We all wear masks sometimes, but we need to learn when to let go of them. It’s one thing to pretend to be having more fun than you really are when you’re at a company social event and you’d rather be home nursing a beer and watching a weeks worth of “Passions” on Tivo; it’s entirely another to manufacture a completely different persona.

How many times have you read an online profile, only to fall over laughing when you realize the young, hung, Adonis top you just read about is actually your chicken-hawking next door neighbor, who lives with his mother and never met a leather daddy he didn’t like?

How many bulked-up gym queens have you met whose show muscles wouldn’t let them run a mile if their life depended on it, and who have nightmares (or ‘roid rages) at the thought of having to throw a ball? Or lesbians who say they’re “totally over their ex,” then spend every weekend night doing drive-bys?

How many times have you wished to meet someone who wasn’t a series of disappointing discoveries? For that matter, when was the last time you didn’t have to worry about someone else being disappointed in you?

You will never fully enjoy your life if you can’t live it as the person you truly are.

We really are our own worst enemies. Masks are for Halloween. If we took all the time and energy we spend trying to keep those masks from slipping and invested it in something constructive, we’d probably be running the country by now and making all those right wing nightmares come true. We’d also be enjoying our lives instead of waking up one morning and wondering where all the joy went.