Why Didn't Palones Palare Polari? [^1]

A slight detour this week to talk about the slang that never got shared--or maybe the slang that never got used. Let me explain!

The gay world--by which I mean the gay man's world--is full of coded language. Just search for "gay lingo" on YouTube, and you'll find an undergraduate degree's worth of tutorials and 101s. Drag Race created a dictionary to decode the show's slang, gay Filiipinos have "swardspeak," and for more than 100 years British gay men spoke Polari, some of which has now entered the lexicon. (The sentence "Vada the naff strides on the omee ajax,” ² which means "look at the awful trousers on the man nearby," contains a couple of words that are now in general usage.)

But search for lesbian lingo, and you get a list of offerings so skimpy it would've embarrassed Ask Jeeves in 1998. Sure, there are a few terms that people actually use--UHauling, gold-star, hasbian, LUG--but those very short lists always get padded out with a few obvious variations on butch/femme and top/bottom that stretch the definition of code.

Then one day I happened upon a really fascinating blog post on this topic by an eminent linguist who blogs as debuk. I recommend reading the whole thing, as the bloggers used to say.

She begins with an important point that made me feel guilty for having wondered why lesbians have so little of a thing that gay men are loaded down with. As she points out, asking that question "treats gay male culture as prototypical, assuming that lesbian culture must be a copy or a mirror image, rather than something that needs to be considered on its own terms." Lesbians and gay men have some shared experiences, but they do not have identical histories--and language is dependent on history.

Apparently, the lack of lezzie lingo was noted back in 1941, when Gershorn Legman published "The Language of Homosexuality: An American Glossary." Legman had some very strange--if, let's be honest, maybe not totally wrong--ideas. He reckoned, "The tradition of gentlemanly restraint among Lesbians stifles the flamboyance and conversational cynicism in sexual matters that slang coinage requires; and what little direct mention of sexual practice there is among female homosexuals is usually either gruffly brusque and vague, or else romantically euphemistic."

Then debuk gets to the heart of it: Lesbians didn't develop a ton of slang, because they didn't need it, since they rarely interacted with strangers they were interested in having sex with moments later. For their physical safety, gay men needed ways to signal their membership in an exclusive club--so that they wouldn't get beaten up or arrested when they initiated connections in public places.

Debuk notes, however, that there are certain locations where women did develop their own argot:

Slang typically flourishes in what the sociologist Erving Goffman called ‘total institutions’ (e.g. prisons, asylums, boarding schools, religious orders, the armed forces), and many institutions of this type have historically been sex-segregated. All-female total institutions (like girls’ boarding schools, women’s colleges and the women’s armed services, as well as prisons and reformatories) would have been good places to look for lesbian slang.

At that time, however, there were no female researchers who could "infiltrate" such places, and by the time there were, secret queer languages weren't really used much anymore.

Of course, that doesn't mean that there was no linguistic dissimulation by lesbians. One of my favorite novels, Marijane Meaker's Shockproof Sydney Skate, first published in 1972, tells the story of a teenage boy whose lesbian mother always uses code to disguise the names of her gal pals when gossiping on the phone. Sydney broke the code when he was 8, though nine years later he still hasn't let his mother know. This is Sydney's earliest explanation of his mother's misdirection:

Carl was Corita of Judy and Corita, if the discussion was about Judy and Corita. But if the discussion was about Judy and Judy's drinking, Judy could become Judd, as in the sentence, "I had a hell of a time getting Judd out of the Running Footman last night."

George was Gloria of Gloria and Liz, but Liz could easily become Lew if they weren't talking about Gloria and were discussing Liz's old affair with the wife of a famous politician.

Conversely:

Edie was Eddie of Eddie and Leonard.

Vicki was Victor of Victor and Paul.

But if it were Eddie, Martin, or Victor talking, Leonard, Ralph, and Paul could quickly become Laura, Ruth, and Pauline.

On and on.

On and on indeed!

RECOMMENDATIONS: For an episode of the Outward podcast that will go live next week, I watched a fantastic movie: Swan Song, directed by Todd Stephens and starring Udo Kier. Kier plays Pat Pitsenbarger, a formerly fabulous hairdresser now staring at the walls of his drab room in a drab nursing home. Before long he's sashaying down memory lane, aka the streets of Sandusky, Ohio, and maybe even enjoying one last aesthetic triumph. I know it sounds overly familiar, but swear it's really fresh, thanks to Kier's astonishing performance. It's available for rent on lots of streaming platforms, including Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, and Vudu, and it's well worth the $7.

LISTEN TO ME: I spoke with Shayne Bushfield, better known as Thorsten A. Integrity, commissioner of LearnedLeague, an online trivia contest, about his philosophy of question-writing, for Working.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is https://buttondown.email/WhereAre. When my book is ready to be preordered, this is where I will tell you about that, but that won’t happen until 2024. Reply to this email to share any thoughts or ideas.