Despite what the popular meme format “I hate gay Halloween, what do you mean you’re…” says, I fucking love gay Halloween. Gay people are the most creative, most absurd, and most chronically online individuals ever, and popular culture is better for it. Every year, we see true artists at work turning niche internet moments into wearable jokes, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful things that brings us closer as a community. This year, my girlfriend — comedian and actress Britt Migs — had the pleasure of contributing to this precious pastime with our couple’s costume: Chappell Roan and the passenger seat from her hit song “Casual.”

The Backstory

Britt and I have both, separately, been fans of Chappell Roan for years now. Not to brag, but we’ve both seen her live when tickets were under $100 and in venues that didn’t require us to watch from the tops of parking garages. I first heard of Chappell in 2022 and made an Instagram story dancing in my tiny Brooklyn bedroom to “Pink Pony Club,” which was soon taken down due to copyright laws. I decided to make a running joke about it on my story, posting fake screenshots of conversations with Chappell’s management team and even Chappell herself, pretending to offer free promo to my at-the-time 11,000 followers if they’d just let me use the song. So many people (gay men) reached out to me asking how I had a Chappell Roan contact, not understanding I was full of shit.

Back in 2020, before Chappell even had merch, Britt DMed her to see if there was anything she could buy for her best friend as a holiday gift. Obviously, she didn’t answer, so Britt got a t-shirt made with her “Pink Pony Club” cover art, which he wore to a show they went to in 2022. It’s so fun to think about the two of us, a year before we’d meet, having our own separate fan moments.

Last October, four months into dating and realizing our shared love for Chappell, we got to see her New York leg of her Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess tour at Brooklyn Steel along with some other queer comedy friends. Our show was slumber party-themed, but Britt really wanted it to have been “My Kink is Karma” or “Pink Pony Club” because she had the “perfect” outfit planned. Despite her disappointment, we put on our pajamas and slippers and enjoyed what is likely one of her last small-venue shows of her career.

The Idea

As we all know, Chappell Roan’s career skyrocketed, rightfully so, in the last year. So naturally, when thinking about what we wanted to be for Halloween this year, Chappell was a no-brainer. I mean, Britt has red hair and is the same height as Chappell. Also, it would allow Britt to live out the “perfect” outfit she had picked out for the tour last year. As soon as the idea of doing something Chappell-related was thrown around, I knew immediately that I wanted to dress up as a passenger seat. There was a bit of hesitation as to whether or not everyone would get it, but I felt confident that her launch into mainstream, and the song “Casual in particular” — considering it went viral not just with queer people but the straights on TikTok, too — made it recognizable enough to work. We knew there was the possibility there would be other Chappells, but we knew they would mostly be solo costumes. So it was settled as early as August: Britt would be Chappell, and I would be a literal passenger seat.

The Execution

Like I said, Britt already knew how she wanted to dress up for a Chappell costume. She secured her Pink Pony Club-inspired leotard, a sparkly pink cowboy hat, hot pink cowboy boots, jeweled tights and some elbow-length gloves to boot. Easy peasy. The rest, she was born for.

My costume, obviously, would take a ton more planning and designing. We kept our idea pretty quiet since we didn’t want anyone to steal it (I asked our very own editor to omit it from this year’s Autostraddle costume suggestions because I am selfish!), but the few friends we did tell all had the same question: “How the fuck are you going to be a passenger seat?” And while I did not have a definitive plan just yet, I could see it in my head. That’s all it takes, folks: a clear vision and unfounded confidence.

I knew right away I would definitely want to look as much like a floating passenger seat as possible, which meant I’d need a black morph suit. I also knew that I wanted to be a passenger seat that fit in the Chappell theme, which meant finding a passenger seat cover that had pink in it. Yes, I used a literal passenger car seat cover. As it turns out, my upper body is the literal shape and size of a passenger seat, and so I was able to stick my head through the headrest hole, and then I cut holes on either side for my arms to stick through. That was the easy part.

The harder part was figuring out the actual seat itself and how to make it look like it has a cushion. I knew I couldn’t make the seat itself too heavy by adding a pillow or blanket for stuffing, but at the very least I knew I had to start with a cardboard base. I cut a thick poster board in the shape of the seat cover and got to thinking about how to give it cushion. I considered memory foam and cotton stuffing, but ultimately decided on the inflatable packing bubbles you sometimes get in fragile shipments, which turned out to be super easy to acquire and to make. They came in a continuous roll that you can rip off to create any length you need. I spent an evening watching Scream and inflating these bubbles and fastening them to the poster board cut out with tape. Thankfully, the way the car seat cover is designed, I was able to slip the poster board cut out right into the cover, and it fit perfectly.

My upper body filled out the top half of the car seat cover pretty neatly, but I still needed to create a cushion effect for the front of my body to make it more seat-like. I inflated three separate columns of the packing bubbles and taped them all together to create a solid panel that I could easily slip between my body and the car seat cover fabric. Better yet, I didn’t even need to fasten it, which was a logistic I was worried about, because it sat secure inside the cover and against my body.

Now, I knew I wanted to make this look as realistic as possible, which meant having a seat belt. It’s surprisingly difficult to procure a standalone seatbelt online, so I settled for a seat belt designed for go-karts and called it a day. I hot glued the buckle itself to the front of the car seat cover fabric, and then hot glued the top of the belt to my right shoulder. A lot of people online are pointing out how cool it is that I accurately put the seat belt on the left side, and to those folks I’d just like to say, that was completely unintentional but I will take the compliment. Other people have pointed out it doesn’t make sense for it to be buckled if no one is sitting in it, and to them, I say get a hobby. Lastly, some people were super curious as to whether or not the seat belt actually worked, and the answer is yes! My friends and strangers were unbuckling and buckling me all night, and no, that is not a euphemism.

The final part of this costume design and perhaps the most crucial was figuring out how to get the seat to sit in an L-shape. I knew from early on that I wanted to find some thin, clear string to hoist up the lower half, but I wasn’t quite sure how to execute it. I saved this detail for last and went to four different stores before I found the perfect material: frame hanging wire. Annoyingly, once I found the material, this was the easiest part of the whole costume. I was able to effortlessly poke the wire through the material of the car seat cover on all four corners of it, both of my shoulders and the outer corners of the seat. A simple double knot on each end was all it took to secure it into place, and that was that. I really thought I was going to have to go full engineer-mode for this part, but I got lucky.

There you have it: a fully functional floating passenger seat.

The Reaction

Britt and I went to our friend’s birthday party hosted at a bar in Williamsburg that was mostly attended by comics, a lot of them queer comics. We were so excited to debut these costumes but first had to take public transit from where we live on the Upper East Side to Brooklyn. As soon as we entered our subway station, we were turning heads. We walked by groups of friends who’d whisper “Oh my God, she’s Chappell Roan and he’s a passenger seat! That’s sooo good.” Perhaps the funniest part of this entire costume is that I have quite literally never been gendered more correctly than I was when I was dressed as a chair. Truly every single stranger we interacted with, which was many, were using he and him pronouns for me, calling me “man” and “dude” and “boyfriend.” I’m like okay… so the secret to passing is being inanimate. Got it!

When we eventually posted pictures of the costumes online, everyone there was also perceiving me as a man. One guy responded to the post saying “It’s hard to believe this is the same gender that fought and won WWII. Maybe Alex Jones is right about the water.” This is, of course, referencing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ claim that the hormones in water are making frogs gay. Spooky!

Britt and I knew this costume would be a hit, but we couldn’t have predicted just how viral it would go. Not to sound like a dick, but neither of us are strangers to going viral. We’re both comedians and content creators and can expect a post to take off every so often. But the public reaction to this costume has been so much fun and so supportive. My tweet about the costume currently has 5 million views, 300,000 likes, and 16,000 reposts. This kind of attention can be scary, especially for queer and trans people, but so far the hate has been almost non-existent. We were reposted by numerous meme accounts in round-ups of other gay Halloween costumes, including some real bangers like the Oompa Loompa from “Willy’s Chocolate Experience,” NeNe Leakes and a white refrigerator, the tennis ball POV from Challengers, the Four Seasons Orlando baby, and so many more strokes of genius.

We even made it into Vulture’s round up of gay Halloween costumes, which is very exciting for us as comedians. Although, it is very funny to have my debut in Vulture to not be related to my stand-up comedy, but instead me being a chair. But hey, I’ll take what I can get.

A note on having gay sex in passenger seats

The last thing I’d like to say about this costume, and about the line from Casual, “knee deep in the passenger seat and you’re eating me out, is it casual now?” is that it is absolutely possible to be eaten out, and to eat out, in the passenger seat of a car. Ever since the song entered the mainstream, I’ve seen folks questioning the logistics of a) being knee deep in a passenger seat and b) getting eaten out in a passenger seat. I’m here to say that both are possible and this is actually how I lost my lesbian v-card — in the passenger seat of my dad’s Hyundai Elantra with a girl that went to a different school that I met on Tinder. I see a lot of people arguing that, based on the song’s cover art, the passenger seat Chappell’s referring to is a truck bench. This is a fine theory, but it’s taking a lot of liberties as to how literal the art direction for the photoshoot is to the experience. It’s not entirely likely that the choice to use a truck bench as the passenger seat for the cover art was made because that’s where she was knee deep/eaten out.

It’s much more likely that, like me, Chappell, or at least the fictional Chappell from the song, did indeed have lesbian sex in the passenger seat of a car. Listen, I’m 5”8 and I was able to do it. Chappell is only 5”2, so she would have no problem doing it. What I’m taking away from this disbelief is that some of you are lacking the tenacity and creativity, and frankly the Catholic school closeted experience where your only option to gay fuck is your dad’s sedan to get the job done. Sometimes to get in the box, you gotta think outside the box. Do better, lesbians.

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