I am getting ready to spend two weeks working on my book!

To be clear, I’ve been working on it for about a year now—the first conversations with my fabulous agent, Maggie Cooper, were in October 2020—and since July I’ve been spending what feels like every waking moment (when I’m not doing my extremely time-consuming day job) researching, reading, and making notes. But other than these newsletters, I really haven’t written anything. For the next two weeks, though, I am on vacation from Slate, and I’ll be taking all those notes and turning them into pages, paragraphs, and at least one chapter. That’s the plan, anyway.

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.

I came out around gay men–and quite a “classic” type of gay man at that: My earliest lessons in queer culture mostly involving learning to tell the difference between June Christy and Blossom Dearie, Barbara Cook and Ethel Merman, and distinguishing Verve-era Ella from Pablo-era Ella. Consequently, it was a bit of an adjustment when I moved to the States and had very little contact with men of any kind, including gay fans of musical theater, the golden age of Hollywood, and camp interior decor.

I suspect that’s pretty typical. Once you move beyond college friendship circles, gay men and lesbians tend to go their own ways for political organizing, activism, and socializing. (A couple of important exceptions to this tendency are AIDS activism and the fight for marriage equality. As Sarah Schulman’s great book Let the Record Show makes clear, ACT-UP New York was a broad coalition, at least in part because its meetings were held at the Gay and Lesbian Center, a known location that lots of people went to for their own reasons and that wasn’t thought of as a “men’s place” or a “women’s place.” And since marriage brings such clear financial benefits in the U.S.–I’m thinking about health-care coverage, taxes, etc.–it makes sense that everyone would be equally sick of being denied them.)

I’m still in the very early stages of writing this book–in the early stages of research, really–but I’m already wondering how to handle the specter of “interference” in lesbian projects by state entities like the FBI and sometimes by more shadowy actors. In my notes, I’ve been using terms like “FBI shenanigans” or “agents provocateurs?,” but that’s too gentle for some of the behavior I’m thinking of. Words like infiltration, deception, persecution, and are much more accurate there.

I watch way too many productivity videos on YouTube. That's a pretty broad category, of course--like "true-crime podcasts" or "TV dating shows"--but there's one piece of advice that gets echoed again and again, and it's the original nugget of shoe-box wisdom: Just do it. If you want to change a habit or take on a big project, don't wait until the weather conditions are ideal; you've picked out the perfect pen, ink, and paper combo; and your vision board is on point. Just start.

Yes, yes, stipulated. But if that big project is writing a book, and your delivery date is 18 months out, what do you do the week after you make a deal?

Fortunately, I'm not starting from scratch, since I spent about six months working on the proposal. That was a mildly grueling, hugely fun collaboration with my genius agent, Maggie Cooper. I researched and read--and did a tiny bit of reporting--in order to write the sample chapter, but by its nature that was an isolated piece. I didn't have to connect it with larger themes and other chapter topics--other than in the "promise language" of the proposal.

But now I do--and before I start digging six separate Buneary boreholes, I decided to try to get into a 1970s frame of mind. It's not that all the places I'll be writing about originated in the '70s--though several did--but even the locations that pre-dated that glorious decade were transformed in those years. So I need a good grip on the period. I started by reading Rick Perlstein's amazing series of histories of the period, which may well fall in the "too good to read in the early stages of a writing project" category!

Now that I am officially writing a book, every interaction with media and humans is potential subject matter. A birthday trip to Provincetown is an opportunity for field research. And as at least seven people have told me, this vacation is now deductible.

Friends P and C, who I have known for many decades--so long, obviously, that we are of an age where I have to take care to avoid calling them "very old friends"--kindly offered to drive us to Provincetown. Instead of taking the train from New York to Boston and hoping that delays wouldn't keep us from catching the only Provincetown ferry that was even theoretically possible with the Sunday train schedule, we would take a leisurely train to Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday afternoon, enjoy a Restaurant Week meal out in that city of gustatory delights, then head to Ptown by car on Sunday morning.

It worked wonderfully--certainly for us. We had a fabulous meal in a restaurant with valet parking--which, like a walk around any supermarket bigger than a Brooklyn bodega, always seems like an exotic treat--and got to stare at C and P's books. (They're academics, so there are walls and walls of them on every floor.) And in the morning, we got to eat breakfast on the screened-in back porch before heading out to the Cape.

P and C take the hard-copy New York Times on weekends. I'm a digital subscriber, but I hadn't touched an actual copy of the paper in years. Over the time we've lived in New York, newspapers have become much harder to get hold of. In 2005, there were at least two vendors selling papers on my four- or five-block morning walk to the subway, as well as several bodegas with papers out front. Now the vendors are long gone, and only one of the bodegas still offers newspapers (and, perhaps reflecting the vastly increased cost, they're now inside the store rather than sitting unguarded on the curb). I probably spend more time with the Times now than I did in those days--it's a lot easier to navigate from section to section on the phone app, and I never did perfect the broadsheet origami that made it possible to page through the paper on a crowded train--but sharing one paper between four breakfasters exposes the slow-grabber to sections she might not usually peruse, like Vows.