In English, the first major glossary of gay slang was written in 1941 by American folklorist and student of literary erotica Gershon Legman. It appeared as an appendix to a two-volume medical study of homosexuality that featured everything from case studies of sphincter tightness to X-rays of lesbian pelvic areas (scientist, pervert . . . tomato, to-mah-to). This appendix listed precisely 329 items, some of which I have never seen (take sister in distress, meaning, “a homosexual male in trouble, usually with the police” or church mouse: a homosexual who frequents churches and cathedrals in order to cruise pious young men) and others that definitely ring a bell (like fish, which refers to a homosexual man who is very feminine—fish is a somewhat problematic metaphor used to describe vaginas).
It did not slip past Legman that most of these terms were male oriented. The lack of lesbian slang was, as he wrote, “very noticeable.” Legman postulated that perhaps this slang disparity was due to the fact that female homosexuality simply didn’t exist. Being interested in women was, by his measure, just a hobby for flighty rich girls who were either bored, faking it, or severely repressed by the men in their lives. “Lesbianism in America—and perhaps elsewhere—seems in a large measure factitious,” Legman wrote, “a faddish vice among the intelligentsia, a good avenue of entry in the theatre, and most of all, a safe resource for timid women and demi-virgins, an erotic outlet for the psychosexually traumatised daughters of tyrannous fathers and a despairing retreat for the wives and ex-wives of clumsy, brutal or ineffectual lovers.” None of that, he suggested, lent itself to good slang.
This may sound like the thinking of a sexist jerk, but there are real factors that might have led Legman to his conclusions. One is that before LGBTQ+ liberation in the 1960s and ’70s, gay men were much more likely to be arrested and imprisoned for their sexuality than lesbians were. “Homosexual acts” (mostly meaning sodomy) were illegal in the majority of English-speaking countries through most of the twentieth century. In Scotland, for example, the ban on anal sex between men was not officially lifted until 2013. The heightened risk that came with being a gay male could have elevated the need for an exclusive vocabulary with which to communicate in public. It protected gay men and also strengthened their solidarity.
“Even the word gay is an example,” American University linguist William Leap told me, referencing a time in mid-twentieth-century America when most mainstream speakers still recognized the word gay to mean “happy.” By asking someone in public, “Do you know any gay places around here?” gay men could identify who was a part of their community and who could be trusted. There are dozens of other undercover code words like this, dating back decades. I try to keep a straight face as Leap tells me about another popular metaphor once used by gay men to pinpoint others—“I adore seafood, but I can’t stand fish”—which can be found in documents as old as the 1940s.
Some of the most persecuted queer communities in English-speaking history are in fact responsible for much of mainstream culture’s best slang. You might be familiar with terms like throwing shade (meaning, “to insult”), werk (an expression of praise), and slay (to do something very well), which are just a handful of the beloved twenty-first-century slang words that originated in black and Latinx* ballroom culture.
Ballroom culture, from which so many beloved English slang terms originate, centers around drag competitions whose heyday was in 1980s Harlem, New York. These were events where gay and trans performers of color could dress in fabulous feminine clothing, walk the runway, and find close community and acceptance, which they were often missing from the families they were born into. So much amazing pop culture originated in the ballroom scene, including the vogue style of dance (no, it didn’t come from Madonna), plus treasured slang terms like werk, read, face beat, hunty, extra, gagging, serving realness, tea, kiki, and yas, which, as of the time I’m writing this book, have become so commonly used, especially on the internet, that many folks think they were invented there.
Canadian linguist Gretchen McCulloch can explain the difference between internet slang and slang that’s simply used on the internet: true internet slang is language that came to be through the medium of typing via chat rooms, social media, and online games (think acronyms, emoji, hashtags, typos, memes, digital terminology), and it inherently could not exist before or without the internet. To say something like “Lol, unsubscribe” or “Tbh, he’s even a troll IRL”—and certainly to type something like tl;dr, NSFW, asdfghjkl;, or “you’ve been pwned!”—would be to employ genuine internet slang. But simply using a slang word on Reddit that already existed offline for decades technically does not make it internet lingo. After all, any slang that’s widely used in real life is inevitably going to end up on the internet.
In an episode of the podcast Reply All, hosted by two straight white dudes in their thirties (which I happen to like very much despite these shortcomings), the guys were very confidently explaining that the slang word yas originated on Twitter as an enthusiastic take on the word yes and was popularized thanks to the television show Broad City. Upon hearing this, many of their listeners (myself included) had a teeny-weeny aneurysm. Because yas is not nerdy white-people Twitter slang. Not even close.
Reply All’s audience quickly called them on their mistake about the origins of yas, and in the following episode, a performer who was active in the 1980s ballroom scene named Jose Xtravaganza was invited on the show. Xtravaganza expressed that for the community that invented yas, the stakes were much higher than appearing hip online. It was a matter of survival—of banding together to cope with the bigotry they were faced with every day. “We were speaking code,” he said. “For no one else to understand. . . . For just us, you know? It was our code against society.”
Sonja Lanehart has made the point that straight white (or even gay white) people using words like yas and werk to seem hip is sort of like white pop singers wearing dreadlocks, gold chains, and low-hanging jeans; it’s an act of lifting the “cool” parts of an oppressed culture while conveniently leaving behind the things that make actually being a part of that culture, which invented the cool stuff in the first place, very hard.
Generously, Lanehart also says that straight white people don’t have to stop saying “yas queen” just as Justin Bieber doesn’t have to remove his jewelry; but if they are going to continue making use of the products of marginalized groups, then at the very least, they can recognize and support these communities in exchange. The ballroom collective House of Xtravaganza once summed up their position on the matter in a succinct Instagram post: “You can’t be homophobic/transphobic and use terms such as ‘yaaass’ or ‘giving me life’ or ‘werk’ or ‘throwing shade’ or ‘reading’ or ‘spilling tea.’ These phrases are direct products of drag and ball culture. You don’t get to dehumanize black and Latinx queer/trans people and then appropriate our shit.”
There are other English-speaking countries whose queer communities are responsible for their best slang. Another robust gay vocabulary comes from British English: it’s called Polari. During the early to mid-twentieth century, many gay men in Britain were fluent in this form of cant slang (that’s a lexicon created explicitly to deceive or confuse outsiders). Used as early as the 1500s, Polari—an iteration of the Italian verb parlare, meaning “to speak”—was an eclectic mix of London slang, words pronounced backward, and broken Romani, Yiddish, and Italian. The vocabulary contained several hundred words, and if you knew what to listen for, you could hear them among everyone from actors and circus performers to wrestlers and navy sailors to members of various gay subcultures. But to everyone else, it sounded like gobbledygook. That was the whole idea.
Polari culture is really only remembered by those who were there during its peak in the 1950s and ’60s. I was able to find a couple YouTube clips of its speakers; in one, a seventy-six-year-old former drag performer named Stan Murano lists his best-loved terms from back in the day: “If we saw a nice looking man, we’d say ‘bona ro me, dear.’ . . . Your fingers
were your martinis; your bum, they called that your brandygage . . . your ogles were your eyes, hair was your riah . . . your shoes were your bats.” He smiles as he reminisces.
Polari became less of a secret in the mid-1960s due to a popular BBC radio show that featured a couple of Polari-speaking characters (don’t you just hate it when mainstream media ruins your favorite underground cant slang?). And after homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain in 1967, gay liberationist activists, who saw the lingo as politically regressive, discouraged people from using it. Still, several Polari words can be found in modern British (and sometimes American) slang, including bear (a large, hairy gay man), twink (a young gay man with no body hair), bumming (anal sex), cottaging (cruising for sex in public bathrooms), camp (effeminate), trade (sexual partner), and fantabulous (self-explanatory).
Lesbian slang, by contrast, doesn’t have a history as rich as that of ballroom slang or Polari. Or at least it doesn’t have nearly as strong a record. There are two main reasons for the lack of documentation on lesbian language: First, there’s the fact that even though gay women were less likely to be arrested pre-LGBTQ+ liberation, it was also extremely hard for them to live independently of men, and that made it more difficult to develop an extensive, widely known lexicon. Simply put, society made it trickier for lesbians to find each other in the first place. (Another possible reason why Gershon Legman didn’t believe they existed at all.) As lesbian feminist linguist Julia Penelope once explained, “Lesbians have been socially and historically invisible in our society and isolated from one another as a consequence.” For this reason, they didn’t have the chance to build a “cohesive community in which a lesbian aesthetic could have developed,” Penelope says.
At the same time, we know that lesbian slang in the pre-LGBTQ+ liberation era definitely did exist. We’re sure of this in part because of a social scientist named Rose Giallombardo, who published a 1966 study of women’s prisons, part of which involved examining a number of letters exchanged by female inmates in romantic relationships. (One thing she found was that a lot of the slang used in these letters revolved around the butch/femme role dynamic. Butches, also known as studs, kings, and mantees, fulfilled a dominant role; femmes were submissive.)
Generally speaking, slang thrives in what some sociologists term “total institutions,” which have historically been sex-segregated: prisons, the army, summer camps, boarding schools. In decades past, researchers like Legman didn’t exactly perceive women’s prisons as hotbeds of linguistic discovery. (Plus, they didn’t have easy access to such places.) So the lesbian slang at which Giallombardo got a small peek in the 1960s was largely missed.
Even though vocabularies like lesbian gender role terminology, Polari, swardspeak, and ballroom slang exist (or did once), just like the gay voice, it’s not as if all gay people use or even know about them. After all, LGBTQ+ folks come from a near infinite number of different geographic, racial, educational, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and not all of them would even have access to the language of these individual subcultures. In the mid-1970s, a team of researchers looked into gay men’s knowledge of what was supposed to be “their” slang and found that plenty of them had never heard of the words at all. If people had cared to look into lesbian slang at the time, the same probably could have been said for them. That’s likely even more true for gay women, whose history is marked by so much isolation.
In the age of the internet, and especially as ideas of sexual fluidity become more accepted, none of the language we’ve discussed in this chapter so far is really considered all that “gay” anymore. Deborah Cameron and another linguist named Don Kulick once said that rather than perceiving a sibilant s or gender pronoun inversion as descriptive of how gay people talk, it is instead more logical and productive to think of them as linguistic resources that are “available for anyone—regardless of their erotic orientation” to draw on in order to produce an effect. Think of all the gay icons that speak “like gay men” to create a certain persona, but aren’t gay men themselves (Miss Piggy, Mae West). Or people like Oprah and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who are regarded by some as queer icons for women, but aren’t actually lesbians.
If this sounds like another example of LGBTQ+ communities losing their language to straight people, like in the case of attributing yas to Twitter, rest assured that it isn’t. Instead, this is a case of leveling the linguistic playing field, so that “straight speech” no longer enjoys its default, unmarked status. After all, wouldn’t it be better to live in a world where a man sounding like a woman is not only no longer a symbol of gayness or invitation for harassment, but isn’t even an idea that crosses people’s minds? Wouldn’t it be better to live in a world where a woman sounding “angry” or “assertive” didn’t necessarily make her a lesbian (and vice versa)?
In such a world, David Thorpe’s sibilant s’s and Taylor’s “abrasive”-sounding subjects would only be considered “gay” if they consciously chose to camp these features up as a way to express some sort of statement or effect. And when they did, the idea of someone transgressing linguistic gender norms would be so accepted, so innocuous, that a listener would hear it and think, Oh, this is a comment on gay identity, cool, the same as they would think, Oh, this is a comment on Midwest identity upon hearing someone speak with a satirically over-the-top Chicago accent.
In 2012 two artists from Manchester collaborated with a Lancaster University linguist to launch an app called Polari Mission, which features a dictionary of more than five hundred Polari words, as well as—and whoever thought of this really deserves a prize—the King James Bible translated, from start to finish, into Polari. The document commences: “In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth. . . . And the fairy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas. And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle.”
I’m grateful that we no longer live in a world where this version of the Bible needs to exist, that we’ve come far enough that queer people don’t have to use secret codes anymore to survive. But as a word geek, I find myself quite charmed that we have a record of it—proof that in the darkest times, language can offer people a creative and colorful safe haven.
Also, motion to bring back the verb cackle as a synonym for say. Dare I cackle, I’m a big, big fan.
10
Cyclops, Panty Puppet, Bald-Headed Bastard
(And 100+ Other Things to Call Your Genitalia)
Jonathon Green has led a team of researchers on what is surely one of the most NSFW linguistic projects ever. After meticulously combing through several thousand books, newspapers, scripts, dictionaries, and other written documents dating back to the thirteenth century, Green, a British slang lexicographer, has amassed one of the most thorough and extensive catalogs of genitalia words in recorded history. Completed in 2013, the archive contains a total of 2,600 terms, both modern and antiquated, all meaning penis, vagina, balls, or some other unit of the human nether region. To put it in perspective, that’s more entries than there were in the entire first English dictionary, total.
Green has created two separate time lines, divided by sex: his time line of penis and testicle nicknames includes those as famous as salami and nutsack, and those as exotic as diddlywhacker, butcher knife, and one-eyed trouser snake (the latter three, by the way, come from the mid-1960s, and I challenge you to picture your father saying them without triggering your gag reflex). Green’s vagina terms range from the well-known beaver and snatch box to the more colorful carnal mantrap, cauldron, quim whiskers, and sweet potato pie.
Twenty-six hundred genitalia terms is a lot—can you imagine if we had as many nicknames for your elbow? But in the centuries-old chronicle of English slang, genitalia words have always been one of its most resilient categories. Considering the innate taboo of these body parts, it makes sense that we’d come up with so many nicknames, metaphors, and euphemisms for them, and presumably people have been doing so since long before there was a record for Green to discover.
Even the very first “private part” words we learn as kids are a form of euphemistic slang: pee pee, hoo hoo, thingy . . . whether it’s out of shame, humor, sexiness, or a combination of the three, we just can’t seem to stick to the classic penis and vagina.
Green did not accrue this data simply for fun—he was looking for patterns. Perhaps the most conspicuous one he found was how consistent, and how unsettling, the themes of our genitalia words have remained over time. As Green told reporters shortly after his study was published, “The penis is often going to be some kind of weapon, the vagina some kind of narrow passage, intercourse some way of saying ‘man hits woman.’” The fact that these troubling metaphors have stuck around for so long is no accident. Linguists who specialize in the English vocabulary of “dirty talk” have determined that if you want to know something about our culture’s mainstream attitudes toward sex—that it is penetrative by definition, that it’s over as soon as the guy ejaculates, that men are horny pursuers while women are docile, undesiring objects—just look at the words we’ve come up with to describe it. The wince-worthy language we use to speak about sex is often a crystal-clear illustration of the disturbing ways we approach it in real life.
Among these decorated dirty-talk scholars is our Santa Barbara linguist Lal Zimman, who has spent years analyzing how folks of different genders use genitalia words to identify their own bodies and sexual experiences. “Overall it’s really clear that the way we talk about genitals is a super concentrated representation of how we think about sex and gender,” he tells me. “The research that people have done on heteronormative gender naming really shows that our worst cultural values are reflected in the ways we talk about genitals. Like penises are always weapons that exist for penetrating, sex is always violence, and women and vaginas are passive and absence, just a place to put a penis.”
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