LANGUAGE

Over the course of U.S. history, the language used to describe, criticize, and affirm same-sex sexuality and gender variance has exhibited great complexity. The terms used have varied greatly across time, space, and social and cultural groups (defined, for example, by class, race, gender, and sexuality). Scholars have generally concluded that rather than representing different names for the same phenomena, these terms are associated with the existence of multiple systems of sexual and gendered meanings.

Key Terms in Early America

In Changing Ones, Will Roscoe presents documentation for 157 Native American groups ("tribes") with male gendermixing or gender-crossing roles and fifty with female ones. In some instances there were distinct terms for the male and female transgender roles; in others a generic term was used. Europeans and Euro-Americans applied the word berdache (originally an Arabic and Iranian word meaning "slave" and lacking any sex or gender meaning) to Native Americans who would now be categorized as transgender but not to their sexual partners, who were conventional in appearance and sexual role.

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, Euro-Americans most frequently used terms derived from Judeo-Christian religious traditions when referring to same-sex sexuality and gender variance. "The abominable sin not to be named among Christians" was the long label; sodomy and buggery were the short ones for what were considered crimes against nature. Sodomites, according to interpretations of the Judeo-Christian Bible, were men of the city of Sodom who sought to violate a seemingly male angel; buggerers were heretics (the original heresy was Albigensian, but the term was generalized and in 1533 began to be used in English law in the sense of illicit sexual acts). Sodomy and buggery referred to different sexual practices in different contexts (including, at times, oral sex, anal sex, and bestiality), but generally encompassed a variety of nonreproductive sexual acts. The terms were generally used to refer not to distinct types of people but rather to sinful behaviors that anyone might commit.

New Language

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a variety of English-language terms came into use, many of which conflated sexual and gender meanings, drew on ancient historical references, and were associated with identities as well as behaviors. Scientific experts invented and used a variety of terms, including inverts and inversion, to refer to what many conceptualized as psychological hermaphroditism (combining elements of the male and female in one person) and transvestism. Some believe that dyke derived from the dite in hermaphrodite. The verto root in inversion, perversion, invert, and pervert means "turning," which conveyed the sense of turning away from sexual and gender norms.

As far as can be determined, the term homosexuality was first used in the United States in James Kiernan's 1892 translation of work by European sexologists. The initial diffusion of the word homosexual (applicable to those born female or male) remained linked to conceptions of gender deviance, though some scholars argue that over time the term lost those associations and came to refer exclusively to same-sex sexual orientation. Similarly, while bisexual was initially used to refer to what would later be called androgyny (combining masculine and feminine elements), some scholars argue that over time it lost those associations and came to refer to a sexual orientation to both males and females. In contrast to the heavy weight of religious and legal opprobrium carried by inversion and perversion in medical discourse, homosexual was a more neutral descriptive term.

Lesbian had a vaguely positive etymology, linked as it was to the pre-Christian "cradle of western culture," ancient Greece, and more specifically to the island (Lesbos) where the great female poet Sappho lived. (The French word lesbienne was used for females sexually engaged with females in the seventeenth century, but not in English until the late nineteenth century.) A similar grasping for an ancient Greek analog for males wasDorian. Oscar Wilde's unnatural character, Dorian Gray, may have been an allusion to the Dorians as supposed inventors of pederasty; Wilde's highly visible trial in the 1890s made the label insufficiently covert for those who saw themselves as continuing the tradition of "Greek love" but not wishing to share Wilde's fate. Karl Ulrich's mid-nineteenth-century contrast of Urning (from Aphrodite Urania in Plato's Symposium) for homosexuals and Dioning for heterosexuals was partially carried from German into English as Uranian, but—with the common pronunciation of the distant planet as a homonym for "your anus"—did not provide adequate camouflage.

According to George Chauncey, in New York City by the 1910s and 1920s the men who identified themselves as part of a distinct category of men primarily on the basis of their homosexual interest rather than their womanlike gender identity and self-presentation usually called themselves queer. They rejected the terms fairy and pansy (commonly used for feminine men). Both queer and fairy referred to the sexually receptive partner and stood in contrast to normal, a category that included trade, males who, though available as insertors to be serviced, preferred sex with women or told their male sexual partners that they did. Chauncey asserts that gay began to be used in the 1920s and began to catch on in the late 1930s: "By the late 1940s, younger gay men were chastising older men who still used queer, which the younger men regarded as demeaning" (Gay New York, p. 19). Typically, the earlier history was unknown to a new generation: "Younger men rejected queer as a pejorative name that others had given them," rather than having been advanced to distinguish masculine men from fairies. Even for those involved in male-male sex, the gender-variant sense of fairy had seeped into what had been the contrasting term queer. The then-young generation wanted to narrow their contrast with normal and to downplay effeminacy as an inextricable part of homosexuality: "In calling themselves gay, a new generation of men insisted on the right to name themselves, to claim their status as men, and to reject the 'effeminate' styles of the older generation" (p. 19).

Similarly, the hero of the gay-affirmative 1933 novel Better Angel specified his objection to the term homosexual:

"I don't like that word."

"It's highly scientific."

"Oh, I know that, but it makes me sound like a biological
freak of some sort—to be classed with
morons and cretins and paranoiacs"

(cited in Meeker, p. 174).

Movement Language

After World War II, gay and homosexual continued to be used for both men and women, but when the homophile movement developed in the 1950s, new terms came into use. Under an ancient Greek aegis, the Daughters of Bilitis served as a euphemism for (the already euphemistic) "lesbian" in the name of the first American female homophile group. Bilitis was appropriated from nineteenth-century lesbian-themed French poetry (written by a man, Pierre Louys, in the poem "Chansons de Bilitis").The first sustained male homophile group used the similarly obscure label mattachine, a kind of European masked dancer, when it named itself the Mattachine Society. Daughters of Bilitis and Mattachine were used within and for the homophile movement; gay continued to be the favored popular term. Meanwhile, in the late 1940s David O. Cauldwell was the first American to use the term transsexual to refer to a person who wanted to change their sex surgically.

In the early 1970s, gay liberationists more forcefully rejected the term homosexual, breaking with what they perceived as the abjection-embracing reformers of the earlier homophile movement and the medical experts who had coined homosexuality. Some elders, however, sneered at the desexualization of gay and others decried erasing differences between outlaw/rebel queers and straights (persons conventional in all ways, including heterosexual partnering). One letter-writer to Fag Rag complained in 1977 that "movement gays want to persuade people that gay is a 'homosexual whose heterosexuality is expressed through homosexuality'." In this same period, lesbian feminists criticized the use of gay and homosexual for women and pressed for the use of terms (such as lesbian) that distinguished women from men.

Valorizing general nonconformity beyond identification with homosexuality was central to the challenge by a younger generation who attempted to reclaim and revalue queer during the 1990s. Although fashionable in academia, where claims about inclusively and transformations of negative meanings are common, on the streets and playgrounds of America queer continues to be a slur, in particular a slur on apparent departures from gender orthodoxy. The venerable conflation of gender unorthodoxy and same-sex sexual desire has also seeped into the use of gay by children and adolescents as a general-purpose insult. Similarly, in its international diffusion, the word gay, borrowed to differentiate "modern"/egalitarian homosexuality from traditional hetero-gender homosexuality, often devolves into being a new synonym for the gender-variant participant in same-sex relations.

Hostile Terms

The labels so far mentioned range from pejorative ones deployed primarily by those hostile to homosexual relations (abomination, sodomite) through originally hostile terms taken up by those involved in homosexual relations (homosexual, lesbian, queer, dyke) to those proposed by those involved in homosexual relations (gay, Uranian, Dorian).

There are many more derogations, including ethnically specific ones such as the African American punk (for weak, dominated males sexually used by more aggressive and masculine males called jockers/wolves in prison argot) and bull-dagger (for a bulky and masculine woman impaling others with dildos or with a protruding clitoris). Derogatory Hispanic terms include maricón (for weak, dominated, and sexually used males), marimacho (a macho María, for a mannish lesbian), and cachapera (for a female who splits open female sex partners). In Spanish, the gender-conventional sexual partner often goes unlabeled, though labels do exist and include mayate and vampirio, for masculine males who are "serviced" by males, and tortillera (making tortillas is a metaphor for rubbing together, a widely shared view of what two lesbians must do together in bed perpetuated in a culture that has difficulty conceiving of "sex" that does not involve a penis).

Within postwar homosexual networks and subcultures, particularly gay bars, a large lexicon of disparagements for the specialized tastes of gay men developed. The x + queen construction was and is particularly generative, with x being a metaphor for the kind of male the queen seeks. For example, the "chicken" queen desires the young, the "rice" queen desires Asians and Pacific Islanders, the "dinge" queen desires black-skinned partners, the "potato" queen desires white-skinned partners, and the "size" queen desires men with large penises. That construction also extended to passions other than a particular "type" of sex partner, for example, drama queen for those who makes every event and relationship in "her" life a major dramatic production, fire queen for activists (metaphorically on fire to bring about better regard and treatment for homosexuals), and opera queen for those with an inordinate fascination (in the view of the labeler) for opera (and usually for diva sopranos). Many terms disparaging particular ethnicities have been attested, including boogaloo for eager-to-dance blacks, Nubian for subservient blacks, Samurai Sue for gay Japanese males, flip for Filipinos (with the connotation of being easily flipped into a sexually receptive position), and so forth. Breeder is a contemptuous term for heterosexuals (including those who have not procreated); pussy-pusher is a more graphic sneer at heterosexual males that may have been inspired by fudge-packer, a straight (and prototypically black) sneer at an anal penetrator (fudge being slang for feces).

Although many of the pejorative labels that were flung about by queens of the preliberation era have fallen into disuse, most of the somewhat or very contemptuous labels still in use date back to that time. As the foreword to The Queens' Vernacular put it, the flamboyant and often hostile lexicon was "the street poetry of queens,… invented, coined, dished, and shrieked by the gay stereo-types," those who could not or would not pass (for straight). Those who were out (of the closet) were very aware of and resentful toward others regularly engaging in same-sex sex who passed and avoided the high price of harassment and most of the public stigma borne by the obvious queens and dykes. Pretensions—especially pretensions to superiority by males who sought male sexual partners and who looked and acted straight—were vigorously shredded in sneering comments from queens.

Wit and verbal agility were highly valued in queenly circles and were turned on straight harassers as well as on those who sought to pass as straight. In contrast, dykes got into fistfights with those verbally disrespecting them and their partnerships with femme females. Dyke verbal agility was not distinctively valued (either by femmes or by other butches). The normative model of a dyke was strong, silent, and able to prevail in physical fights. (Already in 1941 Legman attributed the relative paucity of lesbian slang to a "tradition of gentlemanly restraint among lesbians [that] stifles the flamboyance and conversational cynicism in sexual matters that slang coinage requires" [p. 1156].) Protected by their butches, the femmes did not need to fire back disparagements. Wit and verbal agility was similarly not a part of the role of the "real man" who was desired and sometimes snared by queens (but who often disappointed the queens when they were physically attacked). Seeming to be slow in comprehension and not skilled at verbal retorts was part of the trade role. Such catches were desired for unspoiled/"natural" masculinity and scoffed at as "unevolved" by those with highly developed repartee skills who sometimes wanted their mouths stuffed with more tangible objects than witty barbs.

Dichotomies of Sexual Behavior

The dichotomization fem[me]/butch for the gendered appearance of lesbian pairs seems to have originated among participants in lesbian bar culture. That sexual conduct does not necessarily follow heterosexual analogs, however, is clear from the characterization "butch in the streets, femme in the sheets." Gay men similarly seem to have made the distinction between dominating/penetrating tops and submissive/penetrated bottoms. Contrary to the fantasies of some seeking to be penetrated by hyper-masculine thugs, however, those who look masculine are not necessarily tops, and those in drag frequently report topping males who are masculine in appearance and heterosexual in self-identification. The term versatile has long been adopted by those who are not committed to being either tops or bottoms (activos or pasivos in Spanish, with gay having the meaning of sexual versatility).

Changing Terms for Lesbians

At least for a time during the late 1970s and early 1980s apogee of lesbian feminism, it was widely considered archaic to present oneself as butch or femme or to seek a partner who was butch or femme. The word dyke temporarily fell out of use in politically correct circles (joking about "political correctness" seems to have begun among lesbians laughing at themselves or their slightly more zealous sisters). Changing terms (history to herstory, women to wimmin) was also embraced as a political project (or in place of political projects) by believers in linguistic determinism. In this period there were also feminist women who called themselves lesbian and woman-identified but who did not have sex with other women. Such women were classified by women who had sex with other women as political lesbians, and the large rank of women who later renounced college-age lesbian identification have been dubbed hasbyterians (abbreviating "has been lesbian" plus the suffix -ian for a class of persons).

Ways of Speaking

Research on language and homosexuality published before 1970 was almost entirely vocabulary lists without consideration of who used or understood the argot of the underworld/subculture. Research slowly turned toward use of a specialized lexicon and eventually to how homosexual identity and desire were performed by whom and to whom. In a path-breaking 1970 article, Julia Stanley argued that "homosexual slang" beyond a few basic terms was unknown to many of those heavily or even exclusively involved in same-sex sexual relations. Women who had sexual relationships with women but did not go to gay bars were especially unlikely to know most of the terms. From this, Stanley concluded that there was not a distinct speech community of all homosexuals. Stanley also stressed that there were particular terms used by some (especially queens) in ways that were unintelligible to most straights, and that there were standard ways to generate new terms. Noun + noun combinations are particularly common with rhyming components regarded as especially felicitous (e.g., fag hag, frou-frou); truncation is recurrent (e.g., DiFi for San Francisco politician Dianne Feinstein, bi for "bisexuals"); and the diminutive-ette (e.g., in dykette) is applied to nouns beyond the loan-words from French that arrived already having the suffix.

LGBT Ways of Speaking

It is widely supposed (and not just by straight people) that gay males speak at a higher pitch than straight males, that lesbians speak at a lower pitch than straight women, and that the range of pitches (intonational contour) is similarly greater among gay men than among straight men and lesser among lesbians than among straight women. Although research has failed to sustain such hypotheses, some intonational patterns are heard as "gay" or "lesbian" by hostile others and are produced to make characters in mass media representations register as gay or lesbian, especially the stereotypical screaming queen (the "scream" referring more to pitch than to volume). Lisping is also culturally coded as effeminate (and homosexual) to the extent that native speakers of Spanish from Mexico hear native speakers of Spanish from Spain as faggy because of Spanish speech patterns that sound like lisping to Mexicans. A more generalized "sounding mannish" stereotypes some females as dykes.

During the 1970s, some feminist scholars such as Robin Lakoff posited the existence of "woman's language," which she argued was characterized by various features such as using tag questions (transforming a statement into a request for confirmation by appending "right?" or something similar to the end). Examination of the speech of men and women found some men using the features more than some women. The propounders of the "woman's language" thesis failed to address the way sexuality is read into what is regarded as crossing from conventionally gendered speech patterns, so that a man using what is stereotypically feminine language is assumed to be gay and a woman who "talks like a man" is perceived as lesbian. Most proponents retreated from claiming distinctive features to tabulating higher frequencies for these features among women than among men; in other words, they retreated from making categorical claims and made statistical ones instead.

Lesbian and gay language scholars similarly sought to find and categorize lesbian ways of speaking and "gayspeak," especially any that seemed to promote group solidarity rather than castigate fellow sufferers of society's denigration of homosexuals. The project was daunting for lesbian separatists trying to identify a distinct "mother tongue." Dorothy Painter concluded that "lesbians do not possess a repertory of verbal and nonverbal cues they can explicate or knowingly use to interpret lesbianism" (p. 73).

Though she pioneered in questioning the universality and uniqueness of "homosexual slang," Stanley sought to celebrate women bonding through a shared and distinguishable way of speaking ("mother wit") even while acknowledging that its distinctness was not conceived by most lesbians, that many did not participate in it, and that intentions were frequently misunderstood (not just jokes failing): "Some of those lesbians who fail to recognize lesbian humor as such fail to do so because they lack awareness of themselves as a community with shared experiences" (p. 305). (Understanding this statement required the background knowledge of the lesbian feminist project to change the social world rather than to describe the existing one, and to raise the consciousness of the mass of lesbians who lacked the vanguard's sense of how social relations should be arranged.)

Objections to Joseph Hayes's 1976 positing of "gay-speak" were less utopian. Hayes tried to incorporate both the politically hypercorrect ways gay liberationists influenced by lesbian feminism spoke and the wildly politically incorrect (or parodistic) ways traditional queens spoke into a singular "gayspeak." This made describing and analyzing a distinctive way of speaking particularly difficult, though the two could be considered two separate registers in which some gay men spoke with each other. The more fundamental problem, as James Darsey pointed out, was that none of the ways of speaking identified as "gayspeak" was "exclusively a product of the gay subculture, or universal within that subculture….Hayesfails to provide us with any words or word patterns that have a constant function and usage across settings which might illuminate something uniquely and universally gay" (p. 63). Those who command the queenly register do not always talk that way; many openly gay men (and almost all lesbians) never do; and some straight men and women do. Even within the ranks of gay rights advocates, there is a divide between assimilationists who argue that "we're just like straight people, except for what we do in bed" and romantics who see gay specialness, a distinctive "gay sensibility," or even a special mission to challenge conventions of all sort (not just sexual and gender ones).

Language to Promote Community

As for challenges to using the term community, the standard for a gay or a lesbian way of speaking seems to be unfairly elevated. Not all of the words in what is labeled "the English language" are known to all speakers. Moreover, much of the lexicon and the particular sounds used in English are also used in other languages. Nor is the prototypical subject-verb-object order unique to English. Still the range of sound, knowledge of specialized lexicon, and syntactic and pragmatic devices (ways of constructing sentences and of communicating) among gay or lesbian speakers of English do not differ substantially from the range among straight speakers of English. The same is true for speakers of other languages. Lesbians and gays use the same language devices to signal solidarity and to cooperate in building coherence in conversation as straights do. A distinctive "gay English" is dubious and there is probably more similarity in the ways of speaking of American Masons (to take a somewhat secret organization historically famous for covert signals of member-ship) than among those who consider themselves gay or those who consider themselves lesbian. Claims about ways of speaking that are recognized by participants continue, despite the lack of objective features.

During the 1970s, many supposed that queen-speak would disappear, that it was a self-hating response to external oppression, so that both were destined for oblivion as oppression ended. LGB movement activists criticized the perceived misogyny of using "she" in reference by queens to gay males (especially ridiculing those striving not to appear feminine). Such denigrations were also abhorrent to clones, whose simulation (or parody) of hypermasculinity devalued verbal display and who developed elaborate nonverbal codes (placement of key rings, placement and colors of handkerchiefs in back pockets) for communicating specific kinds of desire (and, coincidentally, gay identity) on the streets and in discos where the music was too loud for conversation. Clones under-took much of the style, including the nonarticulateness of trade, without pretending to be uninterested in having sex with men and sought homogender (butch-butch) relations and relationships. The "bitchy" speech style did not, however, disappear, and the general exhortation to "accept being who you are" eventually extended to those who enjoyed and excelled at camp humor. Those men with exaggerated feminine features were reconceptualized as fearless social critics of the naturalness of gender (performing the glamour and toughness of women who excelled in "a man's world" rather than stereotypically feminine demureness and domesticity) rather than as perpetuators of denigration of women.

The Celebration of Queenspeak

"Queenspeak" has not died out and it is now celebrated as part of the academic fascination with gender as the key to most everything, including homosexuality and "gay language." Similarly, a revival and rationalization of femme/butch lesbian relationships emerged after some years of insisting on abandoning or transcending role dichotomization among (homogender) woman-loving/woman-identified women. Like the once demonized queens, the lesbian butches and femmes (present and past) were reconceptualized at playing with and parodying gender rather than being victims of false consciousness.

Linguistics

The science of linguistics that differentiated itself from the study of literature during the decades between the World War I and the launching of Sputnik focused primarily on the patternings of sound contrasts in particular languages (for example, the contrast between "vat" and "bat" that does not register with monolingual speakers of Spanish). No one has ever maintained that LGBT speakers differ from non-LGBT speakers in the significant sound contrasts (phonology) of their language. Similarly, although as already noted, some ways of (re) forming words are more used by gay or by transgender persons, most of the words they use are performed, that is, already in use (albeit a few with somewhat different meanings).There is not a distinctive morphology unique to transgender, lesbian, or gay persons.

American linguistics, funded as never before by the National Defense Act following the Soviet satellite Sputnik's launch, turned from phonology and morphology to syntax, the study of sentence-formation. Gay English is as much an SOV (subject-object-verb) order language as the English of straight people. There are no syntactical patterns unique to LGBT speakers or any serious claims of syntactical specialties by any category of the nonheterosexual. Insofar as there is an LGBT linguistics, it is concerned with specialist vocabulary and with performing identity in speech, especially with performing in covert ways recognized by the like-minded. Performativity is a concept developed by British speech-act philosopher John Austin and deployed particularly to ways of doing gender (with a special focus on those performing a gender discordant with their natal sex) in the theorizing of Judith Butler and others. The most influential American linguist, Noam Chomsky, has always cast the variabilites of "performance" by individuals or by those included in any social categories as outside linguistics, the latter being the study of underlying syntactic principles (and phonological and morphological principles, though these are not separate levels in Chomskian linguistics). Thus, there is no LGBT linguistics within the dominant tradition of what is "linguistics." In the Chomskian view, what LGBT linguists analyze is "only performance" and thus not worth consideration.

Intra-language variability by social categories has been central to sociolinguistics and some linguists have dubbed their study of language use "pragmatics" (a "level" above syntax). The results of inquiry by sociolinguists and scholars of communication are drawn on in discussions of LGBT "ways of speaking." Although bisexual ways of speaking would seem an interesting topic for those asserting distinctive or recognizable gay/lesbian ways of speaking, little research has examined three categories of sexual identity/orientation.

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