Homolexis Glossary
From Homolexis Glossary
Copyright (c) 2008 by Wayne R. Dynes. All Rights Reserved
Introduction
The Glossary returns to the theme of my 1985 book Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality. Some of the entries appeared in revised form in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality of 1990 (available on line at www.williamapercy.com). Since those days there have been many new semantic developments, as well as enhancements in our understanding of older words. A curious example of a new meaning attached to an old word is the current use of the word gay among young people to mean “boring, geeky.” To be sure, this is an unfortunate development, but it has happened.
Glossaries of this kind commonly observe a distinction between the learned, ostensibly scientific vocabulary, on the one hand, and argot or street terms, on the other. Since there are many crossovers it is not feasible to maintain this distinction, limiting the glossary to the one or the other category. Accordingly, the entries embrace both the formal and the informal vocabulary.
No effort has been made to compile a “complete” list of terms of the homolexicon. As these are constantly proliferating, that would be an impossible task. Instead, I have concentrated on the expressions that are the most revealing in terms of historical semantics and the underlying ideological connections.
Since beginning work in this area in the mid-1980s, I have become aware of the organic relationship between the “atomic” items in the glossary proper, and their place within the larger, “molecular” world of tropes. For example, the term swish belongs to the trope of Gesture and Movement, while proclivity finds its place in the trope of Directionality. The individual items, or homolexemes, constitute a first-order taxonomy. The overarching structure of the tropes represents a second-order arrangement. In my view, the identification of the tropes constitutes the most original feature of Homolexis.
There are other connections at several levels. I invite the reader to browse at leisure.
In the Glossary entries bold is used for the main term and others closely related to it. Italic is employed for other terms. Of course, italic also serves to distinguish the titles of books and periodicals.
[At this point I omit a general discussion of the methodology employed in this collection. An extensive treatment of methodological issues occurs at the end of the letter Z. Click on Z below, to access it.]
A
Abjection
We normally think of homophobic tropes as ones generated by the host society, while resisted by the victims. In some cases, though, the subjects internalize the negativity, manifesting various distorted and abject attitudes and modes of behavior as a consequence. As a form of self-inferiorization abjection is the reverse of the medal of disparagement by others.
Gays have internalized these hostile themes in various ways. In extreme cases the embrace of negativity may amount to self-hatred, what is sometimes termed internalized homophobia. In other instances the reception may be more playful, even constituting (according to some) a form of resistance. Some say that in adopting such epithets as queer, gay users are “taking back” the terms. There are limits to the applicability of this principle. During the sexual revolution of the 1970s a few radical gay men insisted on labeling themselves cocksuckers, recommending that others do the same. While most gay men have engaged in fellatio from time to time, it seems inappropriate to make this our defining concept. The argument would be similar if women, say, were joyously to call themselves sluts. Of course most don’t.
Expressed verbally, the phenomenon of abjection normally plays out on a much less theoretical and more mundane plane. In the appropriate context, embrace of a whole range of terms, from degenerate and anomaly to faggot and homo, can constitute abjection. But what is the appropriate context?
One useful distinction is between the inner and outer situations. That is to say, use of such a term in a closed setting in which only other gay people are present does not amount to abjection. That is the “inner” situation. The outer one occurs when the speaker presents himself to a heterosexual audience as an exemplar of inferiorization. A similar phenomenon occurs with African Americans, who feel authorized to use the n- word among themselves in certain contexts, but abject when it becomes overt in largely white contexts.
Some terms become detoxified over time. For example, in Britain one might refer to someone as “you old bugger!” without implying any real disparagement. That is because the word bugger, which possessed a powerful negative charge in the middle ages and the early modern period, has since lost it in the British Isles—-even though buggery was a statutory offense until 1967.
There are many gray areas. For example, at Gay Pride events one sometimes sees young people wearing tee-shirts bearing the motto: “I can’t even think straight!” The intent is ironic. Nonetheless, the motto feeds into the idea of the dizzy queen who can’t get it together.
There are exceptions to this general principle. The pink triangle reflects a color patch the Nazis required homosexual inmates of their concentration camp to wear. It might be thought the adoption of this symbol by gay-rights advocates in recent decades reflects the abjection principle. This does not seem to be so, and here we may have a successful instance of detoxification. S/M, camp flamboyance, and other dramatizing activities are probably not examples of abjection.
In addition to verbal embrace of the abjection principle, such behavior exists on the plane of action. This is the matter of so-called self-destructive conduct. Here again one must be careful. The accusation of self-destruction appeals to heterosexuals who view the “homosexual lifestyle” as itself self-destructive.
Still, most would agree that the bug chasers who deliberately seek to contract HIV are self-damaging; this is a form of abjection.
Clearly the concept of abjection has value, but it is hard to establish clear boundaries.
Abnormality
Nowadays the link has frayed, but at one time educated opinion firmly held that homosexuality was abnormal. In fact it was a prime example of that state. The conventional division of psychology into “normal” and “abnormal” has nourished this perception. It was generally accepted that abnormal psychology addressed itself to various types of pathology. This assumption opened the way for psychiatrists to attempt all sorts of phony “cures” of homosexuality.
To be sure, if one uses the term abnormal in the statistical sense of “diverging from the middle range; unusual in terms of frequency,” there is no doubt that homosexuals are abnormal in our society. But then so are opera divas, arbitrageurs, and United States Senators.
When it is said that homosexuality is abnormal, a negative value judgment ensues. For this reason the term abnormal is particularly insidious, as it enables the user to glide (usually unconsciously) from a statement of fact to a statement of value. It is precisely this impermissible slide that the philosopher David Hume warned us about. But the misguided effort of trying to derive an “ought” from an “is” persists.
Two historical curiosities may be noted. In a harangue against sodomites, the French thirteenth-century poem Le Roman de la Rose (ll. 19619-20) refers to those who practice such exceptions anormales. In 1869 the Hungarian homosexual theorist K.M. Kertbeny coined a word normalsexual (corresponding to our “heterosexual”) to contrast with homosexual (which by inference is not normal). Kertbeny’s first compound, in striking contrast to his second, did not catch on. Even so, today one sometimes finds the term “normals” casually deployed to designate straights, as if the assertion presented no problems.
In the recent debate over gay marriage some participants keep insisting the marriage is “the norm,” seeking once again to bridge the gap between is and ought. Some fallacies never die.
A close cousin of abnormal is anomaly. In modern times this term seems to have been first used in a sexual sense in the German form Anomalie by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1877. Etymologically, the noun represents the opposite of the Greek “omalos,” meaning “even, level.” (It is not derived from “anomos,” “unlawful,” though a link is often perceived.)
In 1927 a guilt-ridden British homosexual chose the pseudonym “Anomaly” for his book The Invert.(The writer’s real name is not known.)
Other related terms are aberration, perversion (with pervert), and degenerate.
In ordinary language queer probably comes the closest to the core idea of abnormality. (For some reason freak and weirdo, the latter now a quaint survival, are not commonly applied to gay people.) In the case of the word queer the most relevant predecessor sense is probably the eighteenth-century usage regarding money. Queer money is counterfeit. (The term counterfeit sex has sometimes been applied to homosexuality.)
Recently, the word queer has been the object of a concerted reclamation project; hence queer studies and queer theory. Generally restricted to academic circles, the popularity of these terms seems to be declining even there.
AC/DC
In the early days of electricity a hundred years ago many buildings were wired for both alternating (AC) and direct (DC) current. Analogizing from the two electrical capabilities, AC/DC became a slang term for bisexuality. This sense has enjoyed some currency in the US since the 1940s.
This trope of Binarism and Dichotomy finds parallels in a number of other realms. Compare “swings both ways” and “double-gaited” (originally referring to a horse that could race well on either a muddy or a dry track).
There is some seepage into popular culture, not necessarily with a sexual connotation. “AC/DC” is the name of a successful Australian rock band.
Action
In the expression “piece of the action,” the term refers to monetary gain, sometimes illicit. A more general sense is “excitement.” The word may also suggest impatience, as in the character nicknamed “Action” in the musical “Westside Story” (1957).
In the sexual realm the term originally referred to movement of the buttocks, as in “the guys knew he only went for girls with action.” From this sense it morphed into a general term for sexual activity, as in the question “Where’s the action around here?” As a sexual invitation, one may say “How about some action?”
Remote from these mundane haunts is a lofty philosophical development. The French Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel achieved renown with his 1893 book L'Action. In keeping with the vitalist currents of the day, Blondel held that philosophy must take its start not from abstract thought alone but from the whole of our life--thinking, feeling, willing. Late twentieth-century philosophy has taken up what is called “action theory,” concerned among other matters with the question of agency. These inquiries have only a distant connection with Blondel’s concerns.
Active
In contemporary parlance “sexually active” means that one has sexual relations on a statistically regular basis, as distinct from an individual who rarely or never does. A physician may ask “Are you sexually active?” This discrete question obviates the need for details about performance, which may be viewed as an intrusion on privacy. Moreover, the question allows the doctor discretely to sidestep the matter of whether one is gay, straight, or bi. Everyone is the same as regards diagnosis and personal health.
Until recently, though, the term active designated the male who plays the penetrator role, as distinct from the passive, the penetratee. The latter concept may be misleading, as the so-called passive may take the initiative in designating sex, and during the performance may squeeze and gyrate, so that he is just as involved as his partner. Still, the incorrect view persists that only the penetrator, the active partner, enjoys pleasure in the act.
This contrast was common in ancient Greece, medieval Scandinavia, and in modern Latin America. In the Spanish-speaking Americas the dichotomy is designated activo/pasivo. Sexual hierarchies in modern American prisons also adhere to the contrast. Those who do the penetrating are commonly termed pitchers, while those who accept the penetration are the catchers.
The difference persists in the lingo of ads in English-speaking countries, where one encounters “Greek active” (one who likes to penetrate) and “French active” (a fellator).
Contemporary S/M culture recognizes tops and bottoms. This difference has some acceptance in everyday culture, where top males are generally perceived as macho and “straight appearing.” What they do in bed may be another matter.
From immemorial times, the state of being active has been privileged over passivity, which is equated with laziness and cowardice. Going against this general tendency, Christian theology has tended to invert this hierarchy, enshrining another contrast in which the active life is not disdained, but nonetheless ranks as inferior to the contemplative life. In its turn the exaltation of the latter goes back to classical Greek philosophy, where reflection (theoria) is preferred to commercialism and other active pursuits.
Activist, Gay
Familiar in the 1970s, the expression gay activist has become less common owing to the ebbing of the strenuous and utopian aspects of the gay liberation movement, which attained a pinnacle in those years. The label served to denote someone choosing to devote a major share of his or her energies to the accomplishment of social change that will afford a better life for all GLBT people.
In Europe the term variations of gay militant tended to be preferred, but in North America the word militant is generally eschewed because of its dated Old Left flavor (“Communist Party militant”).
The history of the activist meme displays a complicated pedigree. Rudolph Eucken, who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1906, developed a philosophy of Aktivismus. At this time many figures of Germany's political and literary-artistic avant-garde were drawn to Franz Pfemfert's periodical Die Aktion (1911-32). Further permutations occurred with the Flemish nationalists in Belgium and the Hungarian artistic movement, Aktivismus, that arose in the aftermath of World War I. As early as 1915, however, Kurt Hiller, a political theorist and journalist, as well as an advocate of homosexual rights, drew several strands together in his broader concept of Aktivismus, urging the intelligentsia to abandon ivory tower isolation and participate fully in political life.
The Gay Activists Alliance appeared in New York City in December 1969 in the wake of the Stonewall Riots. Exiles from the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), its organizers sought to form a nonviolent "politically neutral, militant organization." Their goal was to "secure basic human rights, dignity and freedom for all gay people." As the energies of gay liberation converged, the group provided a model for the single-issue approach. This stood in contrast with GLF’s umbrella concept, which sought alliances with all “progressive” groups. Tactically GAA members innovated by performing zaps, surprise acts of confrontation with unresponsive media, hostile business firms, and public officials deemed homophobic.
New York’s Gay Activists published the Gay Activist newspaper until 1980. In 1974 arsonists had burned down their New York City headquarters, the Firehouse on Wooster Street in Greenwich Village. In October 1981 GAA disbanded, signaling the end of the gay-liberation era and a new one dominated by AIDS/HIV. Appropriately, gay health issues generated their own form of activism.
Recently, the controversial terms legal activism and judicial activism have come to the fore with regard to the movement to secure gay-marriage rights. Some gay spokespeople and their allies oppose the very concept of activist judges. They hold that the concept is inappropriate because in our legal system judges are accorded the power of review over all laws to determine whether they conform to the Constitution (whether state or federal). The law is what they agree it is. In that sense, either all judges are "activists" or none are. Conservatives take a very different view. When they castigate judicial activism, they are highlighting the discovery of new rights previously not detected in the Constitution—or at most resident there only in terms of “emanations and penumbras.” Conservatives typically presume that stipulating something of that kind—that is, granting a right that has always largely prohibited or to taking away a right that has been widely enjoyed--ought to be done by the legislature. Not by judges.
And here we come to the constitutional right, recognized by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in November 2003, for persons of the same sex to marry each other. Subsequently, many gay-marriage advocates have come to understand that such court intervention may be counterproductive in that it tends to provoke a backlash. At most, the courts should decree civil unions or the equivalent. In this view, gay marriage proper should be instituted by a vote of the state legislature or by an initiative subject to the vote of the people.
ACT UP
The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was effectively formed on March 10, 1987, at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York. Larry Kramer was asked to speak as part of a rotating speaker series, and his well-attended presentation focused on action to fight AIDS. Kramer criticized the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), which he perceived as insufficiently activist and political. Kramer had co-founded the GMHC but had resigned from its board of directors in 1983.
The group was suffused with an urgent sense of the need to intervene decisively in the AIDS crisis—to light a fire under the government and its agencies and to educate the gay and general public. It created the terse slogan “Silence = Death,” generating graphic logos to complete the message. The tactic of vigorous intervention recalled the zaps and other actions taken by the Gay Activists Alliance and other groups that sprang up in the wake of the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969.
The acronym seems deliberately to evoke the common expression “acting out,” often used in pop psychology circles to stigmatize rebellious youth.
In the early twenty-first century ACT UP declined in prominence. However, there are still chapters in a number of American cities, as well as in France and Belgium. The group is still very much needed, and it may have an important future in blogging.
Ageism
This term for discrimination towards or dislike of the elderly was first documented in 1969. Gay men are very much subject to this tendency; lesbians far less so. Another effect of the phenomenon appears in the attraction gay men show to males who are not necessarily young chronologically, but who have boyish features.
Sociobiologists hypothesize that most men, gay or straight, have a preference for younger sexual partners. This tendency, they believe, is rooted in longstanding heterosexual mating patterns, whereby men seek younger female partners who will bear and tend for their offspring. By contrast, women will tend to prefer older, more settled partners who can be relied upon to support them and their children.
The term consorts with a number of others, such as racism, sexism, and looksism.
Agenda, Gay
The backlash expression gay agenda gained popularity in the 1980s among rightwing opponents of gay rights, who claimed to detect a unified plan among gays and lesbians to achieve their aims. The concept trenches with the trope of Conspiracy. This perception ignores the contention and divisiveness that have repeatedly bedeviled gay and lesbian groups, hindering the formation of a single list of desiderata.
Some differences are caused by politics, as some have sought to achieve their aims by demonstrations, zaps, and other overt interventions, while others prefer to work quietly behind the scenes. Outsiders often perceive US gays and lesbians as liberal Democrats one and all. However, between a quarter and a third are Republicans, represented by the Log Cabin group. Furthermore, it is often difficult to inscribe a new item on this putative agenda. For example, when the gay-marriage movement arose in the mid-1990s, the mainstream gay rights groups pointedly ignored it. Only later did they rally round it.
As a matter of principle gay advocates would agree that having a single agenda would be a good idea, but found it hard to achieve this unity in practice.
A-list Gays
The term A-list (common from 1980 onwards) refers to members of the elite, who recognize one another and congregate together to the exclusion of commoners. Unlike the old Social Register, their prominence is usually achieved rather than inherited. The concept of the A-list recalls the Nomenklatura of the old Soviet Union.
A-list gays consist of wealthy businesspersons, together with successful professionals, entertainers, media eminentoes, and other “movers and shakers.” Women enjoying this status are sometimes termed power lesbians.
These privileged individuals may think that they are operating democratically, but their eminence and exclusivity are widely resented by those whose names do not figure in the putative list. Despite this simmering discontent, those who have been excluded will sometimes seek to inveigle themselves into such circles. Unless they are young and good looking, they are likely to be disappointed in their quest.
Curiously, it seems that no one has sought to compile lists of B-list gays, C-list gays and so forth.
Androgyny
An androgynous individual is one who has the characteristics of both sexes. In the interests of conceptual clarity, this quality should be distinguished from hermaphroditism in the strict sense, whereby the fusion of male and female is anatomically expressed through the presence, or partial presence, of both sets of genital organs. There is a tendency to consider androgyny primarily psychic and constitutional, while hermaphroditism is anatomical. In this perspective most (psychic) androgynes are not strictly hermaphrodites in that anatomically they are no different from other men and women; some hermaphrodites may not be androgynous, that is to say, despite their surplus organ endowment, they behave in an essentially masculine or feminine way. Androgyny belongs to the general trope of Intermediacy.
The term androgyne stems from the Greek androgynos, "man-woman." The famous myth recounted in Plato's Symposium presents three primordial double beings: the man-man, the woman-woman, and the man-woman. The first two are the archetypes of the male homosexual and lesbian respectively; the third, the androgynos, is--paradoxically from the modem point of view--the source of what we would now call the heterosexual. Other ancient writers use the term to refer to an anatomical intermediate between the two genders, synonymous with hermaphroditos. From this practice stems the modern conflation of the meaning of the two terms, which is unlikely to disappear.
Cross-cultural material bearing on androgyny is very extensive, especially in the religious sphere. Hinduism and some African religions acknowledge male gods who have female manifestations or avatars. A strand of Jewish medieval interpretation of Genesis holds that Adam and Eve were androgynous before the Fall. If this be the case, God himself must be androgynous since he made man "in his own image." Working from different premises, medieval Christian mystics found that the compassion of Christ required that he be conceived of as a mother. Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), the German seer, held that all perfect beings, Christ as well as the angels, were androgynous. He foresaw that ultimately Christ's sacrifice would make possible restoration of the primal androgyny. Contemporaneously, the occult discipline of alchemy presented androgyny as a basic cosmic feature. After a period of neglect, interest in the theme resurfaced among the German romantics. Franz von Baader (1765-1841), who interpreted the sacrament of marriage as a symbolic restitution of angelic bisexuality, believed that primordial androgyny would return as the world neared its end. In France the eccentric Evades (Eve & Adam) thinkers advocated the equality of man and woman; one of their leaders, Ganneau, styled himself Mapah. The occultist and decadent writer Josephin Péladan (1858-1918) was a tireless propagandist for androgyny; through his Rose + Croix society he had a consider- able influence on Symbolism in the visual arts. In the twentieth century the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was preoccupied with androgyny, which he illustrated through his ingenious, but eccentric interpretations of alchemical imagery. Some of his followers have suggested that androgyny is a way of overcoming dualism and regaining a primal unity; the half-beings of man and woman as we know them must yield to the complete man-woman. Thus androgyny points the way to a return to the Golden Age, an era of harmony unmarred by the conflict and dissension of today which are rooted in an unnatural polarization.
In the field of academic psychology, the research of Sandra L. Bem and others have sought to present empirical evidence that the androgynous individual enjoys better mental health and can function better socially. Significantly, it is usually "androgynous" women who score higher on such psychological tests than men. Thus these findings may be an artifact of the strategic situation in which a career- minded women finds herself: to succeed in a male-defined professional world an ambitious woman will find it expedient to incorporate some male qualities. The androgynous ideal had considerable appeal for feminist and gay/lesbian thinkers in the 1970s. It was pointed out, no doubt correctly, that the straitjacket of the masculine role tended to keep men from expressing their feelings, as through kissing or crying. Men can practice a wider range of expressiveness, and therefore lead more satisfying lives, if they will discard the extreme polarization inherent in the traditional masculine role. Science fiction writings, notably the Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula LeGuin, explored what complete androgyny might mean. In popular culture there was a kind of "androgyne chic," as exemplified by such rock stars as David Bowie and Boy George.
In current usage an androgyne is a person who does not fit neatly into the typical masculine and feminine gender roles sanctioned by their society. Many androgynes identify as being mentally between male and female, or as entirely genderless. The former may also use the term bigender or pangender, or ambigender; the latter non-gendered or agender. In the course of their lives they may experience mental swings between genders, a state sometimes characterized as gender-fluid. Intergender is another word that androgynes may use to describe being between or beyond genders. As neologisms all these terms remain relatively rare in general usage.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, a new focus on transpersons developed. This concept elided the previously distinct categories of cross-dressing and transsexuality. In everyday parlance persons who fit this category are termed trannies.
Lesbians who do not define themselves as butch or femme may identify with various other labels including androgynous or androg for short.
A recently coined word, often used to refer to androgynes, is genderqueer. Yet this term can be used to refer to anyone who identifies as transgender, or even someone who identifies as cisgender, but whose behavior falls outside the parameters of standard gender norms. An androgyne may be attracted to people of any gender, though many identify as pansexual or asexual.
Androphilia
The rarely used term androphilia serves to focus attention on those homosexuals who are exclusively interested in adult partners rather than adolescents and children. In our society such an object choice would seem self-explanatory, a feature inherent in the definition of homosexuality itself. Yet other societies (such as ancient Greece, China, and Islam, as well as many tribal groups) viewed age-graded differences as the norm in same-sex conduct. For these cultures androphilia ranked as a minority preference, one that was often disparaged. Because of the prevalence of androphilia in modem Western culture, its assumptions are sometimes unwittingly or deliberately imported into other settings; some discussions of homosexual behavior in Greece, for example, tend to gloss over the fact that it was predominantly pederastic (though not pedophile in the narrow sense of attraction to prepubertal boys). The relevant trope is Youth and Age.
In the early years of the present century, the great German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld offered a three-fold classification of homosexuals: (1) ephebophiles, who prefer partners from puberty to the early twenties (in current usage, from about 17 to about 20); (2) androphiles, who love men from that age into the fifties; and (3) gerontophiles, who seek out old men. Contemplating this scheme from the standpoint of an individual of, say, thirty years of age, it is evident that the first and third categories of sex object constitute differentiation, the second relative similarity.
The shift to dominance of androphilia, in which the two partners are of comparable age, occurred only with the rise of industrial society in Europe and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Mediterranean countries the shift remains incomplete, and in much of the world it has barely begun or has not happened at all. Some scholars who have sought to explain the new pattern (sometimes termed the “modern homosexual”) key it to a change in heterosexual marriage, which led the way by becoming more companionate and less asymmetrical. Others note the rise of the democratic ideal; demographic changes such as increased life expectancies; and changes in the social treatment of youth which made youngsters less available as sexual partners. Nevertheless, the dynamics behind this fundamental transition remain historically mysterious, constituting a major challenge to any attempt to draw up a reasonably comprehensive history of homosexuality.
Animals
From early times same-sex proclivities have been attributed to certain species of animals. The ancient Greeks held that male partridges are so highly sexed that in the absence of females they readily assault one another. Ganymede, often shown being abducted by Zeus’ eagle, sometimes appears riding a rooster (a traditional symbol of youthful virility) instead.
Early Christian writers associated the hare with pederasty because of the fantastic belief that it grows a new anus every year. More radically the hyena symbolized gender ambiguity because it changed its sex each year, switching back and forth from male to female. Finally the weasel, which was supposed to conceive through the mouth, stood for fellatio. To be on the safe side, the author of the noncanonical “Epistle of Barnabas” forbade eating the flesh of any of these creatures.
In the seventh century Insider of Seville thought that the Latin name of the kite (a bird), mulvus, was derived from mollis, soft. Since mollis was a synonym for passive homosexuality, this activity was attributed to this particular bird. Interestingly, Leonardo da Vinci in a childhood recollection made famous by Sigmund Freud, imagined that a kite flew into his mouth and flapped its wings there: evidently a disguised form of fellatio
In modern languages various animal terms are used metaphorically to designate homosexual persons, without any necessary connotation that the animals themselves are given to such behavior. Contemporary Spanish features several terms derived from the names of animals, commonly small, defenseless creatures, conveying the effeminate gay man’s vulnerability—-mariposa (butterfly), pájaro (bird) and pato (duck). In other instances they are coarse, offensive creatures–cabrón, goat: culebro, snake; and cangrejo, crab. A group of gay men may be referred to as alas de una otra pluma, birds of a different feather. Ironic are león and leopardo: gay men are notable by not being lionlike.
Butterfly Man is the title of a 1934 gay novel by Jay Levenson. The term has a limited circulation in English-speaking North America, but one should note Red Butterfly, a small gay Marxist group active in New York City in the early seventies.
The chicken, an attractive boy, is the object of the attentions of the chickenhawk—a word that has a Latin forerunner in pullarius. From hobo talk comes gunsel, a young acolyte (derived from German or Yiddish for “little goose). Because of the sound it is sometimes used to designate a young hoodlum who carries a gun. Occasionally, one hears the expression “gay as a goose,” but that probably persists because of the alliteration. American Yiddish has produced faygeleh, little bird, as a term for a gay man.
An undesirable sexual partner accepted for the purposes of convenience is called a dog, toad or moose (the latter usage is applied only to women). The term bitch (a female dog) is used in slang as a disparaging term for a woman. As such it sometimes adopted by gay men, as in the expression “I’ll be your bitch” (probably originally prison slang). Also common is the word troll, generally an older man considered unattractive, is derived from a mythical Scandinavian semihuman group. Some bathhouses have a troll patrol, to exclude such individuals. In the gay slang of contemporary Spain a víbora or viperina, viper, is a queen with a vicious tongue who has a reputation for “putting down” others. Misogynous gays may refer to women as fish, a reference to vaginal odors; in Spain bacalao, cod. In US prison lingo a fishis a new inmate, young, attractive, and naive, who is viewed as ready prey by the more experienced sexual predators.
The bear subculture is a community of men who are husky and/or hairy and who appreciate such qualities. This subculture has generated a number of terms. The bear proper is a man with a beard or van Dyke, typically with a hairy chest and body and a stocky or heavyset build. The bear is often older (or older looking) and displaying a masculine appearance and mannerisms. The word chaser refers to someone who is not a bear, cub, or otter, but is sexually or romantically attracted to them (this term is often used to describe an outsider who has sexual attraction to people within that community). Ursophile and arctophile are somewhat arch terms to designate someone who seeks out bears.
A cub is a younger (or younger looking) version of a bear, typically but not always with a smaller frame. The term is sometimes used to imply the passive partner in a relationship. A daddy bear or papa bear is an older husky guy sometimes looking for a daddy-son relationship. A panda bear is an Asian guy. The terms muscle bear and muscle cub are obvious. An otter is a man who is hairy, but is not large or stocky; he is typically thinner, or with lean muscle. A polar bear is an older man with white or gray fur or beard. A pocket bear is a shorter bear, while a pocket protector is taller. A manatee is a heavy-set, hairless bear (usually derogatory). A sugar bear is a “sugar daddy” bear; a bear who seeks the company of a younger or more traditionally attractive male or “chaser” in exchange for favors and gifts. A fluffy is a camp or effeminate bear. Woof! is a greeting sometimes used when a bear spots another bear in public and wants to express physical attraction. He will make a growling noise (”Grrrr!”) or say “Woof!”
An Edwardian admonition to gay discretion is “don’t frighten the horses.”
The hare is involved in disco bunny and gym bunny (evidently gym bunnies do not take the trouble to adopt a façade of masculinity).
Toe sucking is termed shrimping.
Except for the bear family, animals referenced for male homosexuality tend to be small, defenseless creatures. Not so with lesbians. The aggressive lesbian may be termed a bull or bulldyke.
Italian offers several animal terms, including beccafico (garden warbler), and capretto (a little goat).
Bambi sexuality (UK) is gentle “vanilla” sex, stemming from the Felix Salten character made well known through the Disney film.
Sea pussy plays on the identification of the female genitals with the cat. Traditionally the crews of seagoing vessels included no females, hence the substitute outlet offered by gay sailors, also known as seafood.
Animals are of course consumed for food. One may encounter the term meat for the male genitals; a well-endowed person may be called “meat for days.” Perhaps hunky belongs in this area. Note also butch (from butcher).
If microbes are considered animals, then bug-chasers, those who seek to contract HIV, belong in this section.
In a number of modern European languages, the word “bird” also means penis (polla, uccello, Vogel), though without a specific homosexual sense.
Such terms do not seem to bear much relationship to empirical reality in the animal kingdom. Indeed it has long been a commonplace that animals, living in a state of nature, do not engage in “unnatural” sexual behavior. Darwinian theory would seem to deny this possibility.
Yet observation has now disposed of this claim. Over the last few decades scientists have been accumulating data for same-sex courtship among animals, including genital contact. These carefully controlled studies report animal behavior in the wild, not in captivity where adverse conditions might affect conduct. A recent tome of 751 pages, Bruce Bagemihl’s Sexual Exhuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (1999) sums up this body of evidence, citing some three-hundred species of vertebrates. Among the animals in which same-sex behavior has been observed are sheep, squirrels, lizards, whales, dolphins, swans, gulls, and swallows. Birds, with ninety-four different species, represent the strongest cohort. Some have raised quibbles regarding this research, claiming, for example, that in some species males turn to other males only in the absence of females. However, animal behavior, like that of human beings, is governed by various factors, including scarcity. The point is that such behavior exists.
The upshot of this research is that the folk intuition that animals can be gay has a certain truth. However, science has determined more accurately which species are susceptible to same-sex behavior and which (in the present state of research) are not. Given the tenacity of linguistic habits and folklore, one should not expect that this research would have much effect on slang that pertains to human homosexuality.
As we have seen, the labeling of human sexual behavior in terms of animals is long-standing. Why did this practice start and why did it continue? The notion that such comparisons relegate homosexuals to the inferior realm of animality is inescapable. To be sure, to call someone the endearment “dovey” and the epithet “lion” (without irony) are complementary. However, such complements are rarely, if ever, implied in the beastly sobriquets that have evolved for gay people.
Anomaly
In ordinary usage an
anomaly is an irregularity that deviates from the common rule.
It is something unusual, abnormal, peculiar, or not easily
classified. Etymologically, the noun represents the opposite of the
Greek omalos, meaning “even, level.” (It is not derived
from anomos, “unlawful,” though a link is often
perceived.) The relevant trope is abnormality.
In
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe the category of anomaly
was invoked to account for the so-called monstrous births, such as
two-headed calves and hermaphrodites. Eventually this interest
declined, but the concept remained, a precursor to the naming of
psychic anomalies.
In 1877 the pioneering German sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing applied the notion to inverts, whom he also termed “step-children of nature.” Then, in 1927, a guilt-ridden British homosexual chose the pseudonym “Anomaly” for his book, The Invert. .(The writer's real name is not known.)
The term took its place in a baleful gallery with abnormal (which it formally resembles) and unnatural. Indeed, it may be said to combine the two, for an anomaly is an abnormality that challenges the rule of nature. In the sexual context, the word anomaly is now rare. The concept has not disappeared, though, for in demotic contexts it equates with weirdo, freak, and perhaps queer.
Curiously enough, the revival of the term in the sexual sense might be of some use. In his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn posited an initial phase of the proposal of a new theory where the innovation seems to sweep all before it. Once this revolutionary phase is over, however, a period of consolidation, called “normal science,” sets in. During this second phase, glitches or anomalies may be discovered. As these become numerous and salient it becomes necessary to scrap the theory for another.
If one views nature as a normative system designed to produce only heterosexual behavior the continuation of homosexuality must seem an anomaly. The first reaction is to suppress the anomaly. But this has not been possible; hence it should be obligatory to scrap the theory of nature as a universal producer of heterosexuality.
Recent developments in sociobiology have addressed the apparent anomaly of homosexuality from a Darwinian point of view. Through the hypothesis of kinship selection and other theories these thinkers have sought to eliminate the seeming contradiction that exclusive homosexuality presents to evolutionary adaptationism.
Arcadia
Arcadia was a rustic district in ancient Greece celebrated by poets for the simplicity and innocence of its life. Gradually, the name became detached from a specific reference, to become “a place in the mind.” As such, Arcadia became the basis for the European tradition of pastoral poetry. The ideal is evoked in the Forest of Arden of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” and in two famous paintings by Nicolas Poussin bearing the title “Et in Arcadia Ego.” The relevant trope is Localization.
Some Victorians, including A.J. Symonds, used Arcadia as a coded reference to homosexuality. In this context the word expresses the hope that “somewhere there is a place for us.”
In postwar Europe, French gays created a monthly entitled Arcadie (published from 1954 to 1982), twinning with an organization bearing the same name. The journal sometimes appeared with the subtitle "Mouvement homophile de France." In keeping with the general tone of the “homophile” era, members were enjoined to remain respectable and discrete. The appeal of the word Arcadie, like that of its American counterpart Mattachine, lay partly in the fact that it did not include the word gay. One could always ask someone “Vous est Arcadien?” without giving oneself away. In addition the word probably embodied a vague utopian aspiration for a better life for the community.
Without using the word, the American Radical Faery movement of the closing decades of the twentieth century came close to observing the Arcadian ideal. The Faeries purchased blocks of rural land, which served as sites for their rituals. These “sanctuaries,” as they are called, also provide home sites for those who seek a rural lifestyle untainted by heterosexual norms and expectations.
Architecture
Architecture represents a major accomplishment of human ingenuity. The results can be studied from various points of view, including historical styles, constructional techniques, and the matter of function—-the way the buildings and spaces are used. A quasi-Freudian symbolism claims to detect the phallic origin of steeples and columns, while church interiors are thought to be womblike. These fanciful associations lack specific gay content.
The closet is the smallest category of spaces found in the modern house. The door to this chamber is normally kept closed, and the stored objects may be there because they need to be discretely hidden away. Accordingly, this cramped domestic space provides a useful metaphor for the situation of gay people who feel they must hide their sexual orientation. In Spanish residences where such chambers are less common the term is armario (a piece of furniture to hold clothes).
In England a toilet frequented for sexual purposes is called a cottage, based on the small rustic structures serving this purpose in parks. To frequent such places is called cottaging. In America these spaces are called tearooms (reflecting the link tea + urine).
Orientation stems from a standard practice in church architecture, in which the apse and altar are located at the eastern end of the building (from Latin, oriens, east).
Fornication, mainly a heterosexual or neutral term, derives from the Latin fornix, or arch in which couples would meet for illicit sexual encounters. Even today, gays meet at night in the obscurity of the shadowy arches of the Colosseum in Rome.
Gay churches, synagogues, and other religious structures require buildings, usually adapted from some previous use, but increasingly purpose-built, sometimes according to the design of a distinguished architect. Today we also see the growing importance of gay and lesbian community centers and archives.
The term built refers to both structures and bodies. The word erection has a similar duality.
Beginning in the 1970s, some bars began to feature back rooms or dark rooms, separate spaces behind the main part of the bar to facilitate anonymous sex. A bar catering to older patrons is called a wrinkle room. A feature found in old-fashioned saloons (not usually gay), is the swinging door, a minor architectural feature that seems to have given rise to the expression swings both ways for bisexuality.
Gay saunas are usually just called the baths. They tend to be located in obscure sections of town, with discretely marked signs so as to attract little attention from outsiders.
Hustlers are sometimes available in male brothels. One in Amsterdam is equipped with a balcony where the inmates may be viewed by passers by. This is uncommon, and the appearance of such establishments tends to be modest.
S/M adepts may have a specially equipped room at home called a dungeon, or more euphemistically, a playroom.
The familiar term for a lesbian dyke probably stems from a type of dress whereby the person was “dyked out.” Some, however, perceive a secondary association with the Dutch equivalent of levees.
An urban district with businesses catering to largely or wholly homosexuals is termed the gay ghetto or gayborhood. Certain whole cities have the reputation of being gay. The archetype is Sodom, destroyed long ago, if it ever existed. But nowadays we have Amsterdam, San Francisco. and various resorts from Fire Island and Key West to Laguna Beach and Russian River. These are the gay meccas: see LOCALIZATION, below.
Assimilationist
In terms of sociology an assimilationist is one who advocates that ethnic and cultural groups blend with the larger society. This sense goes back to 1899.
In their opposition to merger with the dominant society, Queer Nation and other radical activist factions have sought to endow assimilationist with an aura of negativity. Among other things, the term serves to stigmatize gays and lesbians who shun flamboyant, “in-your-face” lifestyles, and who seem willing to compromise with the political establishment. The prescriptivist assumption behind this condemnation is that gays must remain perpetually queer, that is to say, nonconformist and rejecting of society’s mainstream. The term is exclusionist rather than inclusive.
The sociologist Stephen O. Murray has recently coined the term deassimilation to designate the larger process of resistance to fusion. Deassimilation has been fostered by the so-called “roots movement” in which members of ethnic minorities are encouraged to seek out and cultivate distinctive features of their heritage.
The assimilation process has not always been regarded as unfortunate. The British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill introduced the term melting pot in 1908, to designate the process of ethnic fusion he detected in America. Theodore Roosevelt, an avowed opponent of “hyphenated Americans,” welcomed the new term. One should also recall the word integration, favored by civil rights leaders in the 1960s. Whatever one thinks of the process it is probably inevitable, as formerly despised minorities shed their stigma and seek the place that is their due in the larger world.
Astronomy
From earliest recorded history human beings have construed the patterns of the night sky in terms of human interests, persons, and passions. Occasionally, these projections have a homosexual implication.
In classical antiquity the constellation Aquarius was interpreted as representing Ganymede, the cupbearer and lover of Zeus. Gradually this identification became forgotten. In 1609 the German astronomer Simon Marius named one of the four satellites of Jupiter (in the Roman pantheon, the equivalent of Zeus) after Ganymede. The name is still used.
In the lore of astrology the conjunction of Mercury (male) and Venus (female) presided over same-sex attraction. Michelangelo is one who believed in this determination of his nature.
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895), the pioneering German advocate of gay rights, adapted Plato’s invocation of Aphrodite Urania, the Heavenly Venus, to produce a new term for gay men: Urnings. In English this term became uranian. While there is no direct etymological connection with the planet Uranus, a connotative link exists.
In 2005 it was learned that a new asteroid is to be named after a transvestite gypsy folk singer from Bulgaria. The asteroid, also bearing the designation 2005 UT12, was spotted in the Taurus constellation by Bulgarian astronomers, with the help of scientists from Spain and Britain,. A spokesperson for the Bulgarian team said: “We want to name the asteroid after the folk singer Azis, who is quite famous here.” Azis is a controversial figure in the conservative country as he is openly homosexual, and a political campaigner for the rights of the minority Roma population.
Some science-fiction writers, including Samuel R. Delany, Ursula LeGuin, and Theodore Sturgeon, have used fictional societies on other planets as vehicles for exploring alternative same-sex arrangements.
In the nineteenth century the eccentric socialist thinker Charles Fourier (1772-1837) imagined that the planets in their orbits were interacting sexually. Although Fourier was interested in same-sex love, it is not clear if he applied the concept in this interest. Presumably as Mercury and Venus passed each other the connection would be heterosexual. For Jupiter and Saturn, both males, it would be homosexual.
The term attraction refers both to astronomical bodies and to human bodies.
Auntie
According to slang research, the word “aunt” originally served to designate a bawd (procuress) or madam. In gay terminology, the word auntie refers to a prissy older gay man.
The adoption of this term may have been influenced by French usage. In French tante has the primary meaning of aunt, and the secondary sense of an older gay man. (There is also a diminutive, tatie).
The relevant trope is Families and Similar Groups.
B
Backroom
Common features of gay bars and clubs in the 1960s and 1970s, backrooms can still occasionally be found. Typically, a backroom in a gay bar is a small dark or dimly lit room at the back of the club where customers can go to have sex, usually without undressing. In their heyday, the sex that took place in backrooms was usually unprotected and anonymous. The advent of HIVAIDS, and increasing awareness of risk spelled the closing of many backrooms in gay bars.
Darkrooms remain a feature of some sex clubs and bathhouses, where they may be advertised as an amenity or attraction. (The AIDS crisis, however, led to the closing of many bathhouses.) In a sex club a darkroom may be as simple as a small darkened area large enough for two or three people. Conversely, it may comprise a large portion of the club's floor area, with mazelike corridors, glory holes, private nooks, steel grilles resembling the enclosures of prison cells, and varying floor levels.
Today, with many locating sexual partners on the Internet, backrooms and darkrooms—together with gay bars and bathhouses themselves—attract a diminishing clientele. Many prefer to bypass them altogether.
Baedling
The word baedling, a diminutive of baeddel, occurs in an Old English glossary as the equivalent of the Latin terms effeminatus and mollis, designating the effeminate homosexual. A synonym is the word waepenwifstere (approximately, "male wife"]. Evidently, these words reflect an Anglo-Saxon stereotype of the homosexual as an unwarlike, womanish type. In all likelihood, this negative concept derives in part from a common Germanic archetype, attested by a passage in Germania (12) by the Roman historian Tacitus--where death by drowning is stipulated for such individuals--but probably modified in the early Middle Ages by Mediterranean-Christian influences. Similar in form to baedling is deorling, the source of the modern English darling.
While the Old English word had a general sense of a beloved person or thing, it was also used more specifically to label a minion, a youth favored because of his sexual attractiveness. At the present stage of research further data about homosexual behavior in Anglo-Saxon times (that is, from ca. 500 to 1066) remains elusive. For its part, however, the word baeddel survived, turning eventually--through a process of semantic expansion--into the general English adjective of pejoration, "bad." The word also forms part of two place names in England: Baddlesmere ("baeddells lake") in Kent and Baddlinghame ("the home of the baedlings") in Cambridgeshire.
The broadening of the meaning of the word baeddel in the direction of general disparagement ["bad"] has several historical parallels. The first, from another Germanic sphere, is the shift from old Scandinavian argr, cowardly, effeminate, to modem German arg, bad, wicked. Then early medieval France seems to have witnessed the creation of felo/felonis, evil person (the etymon of our legal term felon) from Latin fellare, to fellate. It is also possible that Russian plokhoi, bad, is cognate with Greek malakos (with change of the initial labial from m to p), as the Polish plochy has the meaning of "timid, fearful," another of the nuances of argr.
Barebacking
Prior to the appearance of HIV/AIDS early in 1981, homosexual and bisexual men generally did not distinguish verbally between anal sex with a condom and without. While there were health campaigns that encouraged condom use, most gay men saw a trip to the clinic for antibiotics as an easy solution to any negative consequences (usually gonorrhea or syphilis). However, as the understanding of pathways for the transmission of HIV/AIDS became better understood, researchers and public-health officers encouraged condom usage as an effective way to reduce HIV transmission.
The gay male community, having been affected the most by this pandemic, mobilized quickly and the practice of unprotected anal sex quickly became unpopular within the community. At this point the need for a term to describe the difference between "protected" and "unprotected" sexual acts arose.
Despite these problems, the practice of barebacking seems to have become increasingly common again among men. There are several reasons for this belief, including correlations based on: an upswing in the level of new HIV infections among gay men in younger age groups, a more public presence of "bareback" literature, personal ads, and publicity that may have unintentionally glamorized the practice.
During the late 1990s and into the new millennium, gay columnists have offered several explanations for the recrudescence of barebacking in the 1990s in advanced Western nations. Among these are the following. 1) The advent and ensuing success of protease inhibitors and other drugs for HIV infections has changed the perception of HIV infection from an untreatable terminal illness to a treatable chronic malady. 2) Decreasing effectiveness of health education messages in the gay community failed to promote condom use (this factor is sometimes termed condom fatigue). 3) Methamphetamines have become a kind of "drug of choice" within gay male (and other) populations; individuals under the influence of meth are less likely to be concerned over potential hazards of their behavior. 4) Gay men with opposing beliefs about the practice of barebacking get more publicity about their feelings than in the past. 5) Bareback pornography is readily available, serving to romanticize the practice.
Anonymous or casual heterosexual sex without a condom has not created the moral panic that gay barebacking has. This difference has several explanations, notably the fact that gay men have become more organized in confronting STDs.
In the sex trade, the willingness to bareback tends to be a selling point for sex workers to their clients. Some consumers of gay pornography seek out older films where unprotected sex appears as a matter of course.
Bashing
A gay basher is someone who physically or verbally assaults homosexuals (it is not a gay who bashes). These thugs usually operate in groups. Typically, they linger around cruising areas or outside gay bars, waiting for an opportunity to attack an isolated gay man. In some instances, the attackers may even be acquainted with their victim, as in the Matthew Shepard case.
Since gay assignations have largely shifted from public venues to the Internet, the incidence of these assaults should be declining. Yet that is not necessarily so, as bashers may attack individuals, some of them even heterosexuals, merely on the basis of appearance.
In former times, and occasionally even today, a hostile individual would opportunistically agree to be sexually “serviced” by a gay man, and then beat him up. These scoundrels were known colloquially as dirt.
There are documented cases where bashers have themselves been found to be gay. For this apparent contradiction several reasons have been advanced. One is that by acting together with a pack they can hide their own inclinations. Some may hold that in attacking another gay person they are somehow expelling the temptation from their own psyche.
Basket
This slang term refers to the outline of the male genital area as viewed through trousers, briefs, or trunks. Synonyms are package and meat. Gay men use these terms in assessing the endowment of a potential suitor
Wearing tight clothing—or even the insertion of a sock—may enhance the effect.
Bear
The bear subculture is a community of gay men who are husky and/or hairy and who appreciate such qualities. The bear community originated in San Francisco in the 1980s as an outgrowth of the gay biker and then later the leather and “girth and mirth” communities. Those who felt that the gay mainstream was unwelcoming to men who did not fit a particular bodily norm (smooth-bodied and young) created it. Sadly, body wasting among men living with AIDS may have been another reason for the popularity of the robust bear look. While there is no direct connection, their acceptance of chubbiness recalls some aspects of East Asian societies, with their enthusiasm for “fat Buddhas” and other well-padded types.
At the onset of the bear movement, some bears separated from the gay community at large, forming clubs to create social and sexual opportunities for their own. Many clubs are loosely organized social groups; others are modeled on leather back-patch clubs, with a strict set of bylaws, membership requirements, and charities. Bear clubs often sponsor large yearly events--"bear runs" or "bear gatherings" like the annual Lazybear event--drawing regional, national, and international visitors.
Unlike the earlier clone phenomenon, the bear identity has proved to be robust. In fact the bear community has spread all over the world, with bear clubs in North America, Europe, Australia, Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
Scholars have noted some interesting historical precedents. In his 1994 book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, the University of Chicago historian George Chauncey surveyed turn-of-the-century working-class men who adopted a highly masculine personal style. These New York men rejected what they regarded as effete middle-class gay-male behavior. In those days the proto-bears sometimes called themselves "wolves.” Walt Whitman is the best-known example of this type.
In his 1992 book, The Bear Cult, the British art historian Edward Lucie-Smith traced the big-muscled imagery of today's bears to 1950s gladiator movies. The minutes of a now-defunct Los Angeles gay organization, the Satyrs, include a 1966 reference to a Bear Club, perhaps the first known instance of the term being used in the sense it is employed today.
A common criticism of the bear community is that some bear-identified men tend to exclude individuals who do not meet their expectation of what a "real bear" is. Going against the grain, some bears see obesity as a political issue, as some regard their overweight condition as a form of self-acceptance. Some also flag a lack of racial diversity in the bear community, believing this to reflect adherence to a Caucasian standard of beauty.
In fact the bear subculture has a number of appealing features. Generally devoid of queenly bitchiness, its members show genuine concern for each other. They are little troubled by ageism or looksism, so rife elsewhere in the gay-male community. To be sure, not all bears are exempt from these predilections.
Bear Studies
Recent years have seen the tentative emergence of a fledgling academic discipline called Bear Studies. A number of scholars are exploring the increasingly visible subculture of ursine gay guys and their admirers. These scholars point to the fact that self-identified bears have created a kind of counterculture, with its own language, values and rituals.
The Papa Bear of the field is Les K. Wright, a retired professor and San Francisco-based founder of the Bear History Project. In 1997 Wright edited The Bear Book Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay Male Subculture. That volume was such a success among students of bear culture that it was followed by The Bear Book II (2001). Wright and his fellow scholars draw on such theoretical academic disciplines as masculinity studies, cultural studies, gender and queer theory and eco-criticism.
In an essay titled "Theoretical Bears," Wright argues that bears can be "both masculine and feminine, strong and sensitive, gruff and affectionate, independent-minded and nurturing." Such views strike a utopian note.
John Edward Campbell is the author of "Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality and Embodied Identity," an ethnographic study of social scenes in the Internet. "When I began my work in media studies, all the research on the Web concerned straight white guys," Campbell said. "But my own experience of this world was radically different. My research looked at communities of masculine-identified-bears, a group that has exploded on the Internet, a phenomenon that no one had really looked at before."
Some bear theorists compare their scholarship to that of insurgent feminists twenty years ago, who in such polemics as "Fat Is a Feminist Issue" and "The Beauty Myth" assessed the toll that society’s premium on physical perfection takes on the individual. The same standards oppress gay men, bear scholars claim.
The tentative emergence of Bear Studies is a sign of the success of the “branding” of the bear label. Ever since the days of Walt Whitman America had known gay men of this kind, but the label and Wright’s books served as invaluable recruiting devices. Men who had been bears, in effect, for most of their lives found that they were members of a community.
There is an analogy with the label beatnik. During mid-twentieth century America, the inner cities contained pockets of “bohemians,” low-income dropouts who prefer to pursue personal lifestyle issues instead of conforming to the norms of corporate America. It took the invention of the word beatnik in 1958 turned this backwater phenomenon into a mass movement. As with the Bear phenomenon, the label and the population worked synergetically. “Rebranding” alone would not do the job
Beard
The term beard to reflect the disguise of a person’s true identity seems to stem from the world of gambling, when gamers would use surrogates as go-betweens to place their bets.
Since the early seventies the word beard has had currency to designate a woman who agrees to date or appear with a gay man, in order to imply that he is heterosexual. In this sense the term is amusingly ironic, since, as a rule only men grow beards. However, a man may serve as a beard for a lesbian.
Beloved Disciple
The phrase the disciple whom Jesus loved or Beloved Disciple occurs several times in the Gospel of John, but in none of the other accounts of Jesus. In John's gospel, it is the Beloved Disciple who asks Jesus during the Last Supper who it is that will betray him. Traditionally, the Apostle John himself has been assumed to be the Beloved Disciple, and he is often shown as such in medieval and Renaissance art, where he appears as a beardless youth. However, this identification has no certainty. And indeed some scholars question whether John the Apostle is the same as John the Evangelist.
In fact the word “disciple” may be used generically, so that our quest for the identity of this figure need not be limited to the Twelve Apostles.
Some writers, including Dan Brown in his wildly popular fiction The Da Vinci Code, even suggest that the Beloved Disciple is Mary Magdalene. A gay Biblical scholar, the late Morton Smith, claimed to have discovered a Secret Gospel of Mark, existing only in fragments. As the account in Secret Mark describes a raising from the dead very similar to Jesus' raising of Lazarus in John 11:38-44, the young man is identified as Lazarus and fixed as the Beloved Disciple. The authenticity of Smith’s discovery has been questioned.
At all events, the figure of the Beloved Disciple, whoever he may have been, has been embraced by many gay Christians as evidence that Jesus could love another man, though not necessarily in the carnal sense.
Bent
From the beginning of the twentieth century British slang has used this adjective to mean criminal, illegal, crooked. The underlying trope is deviation. By the middle decades of the century it was given a more specific application to homosexuals, prostitutes, and flagellants. The implication that one is “straight” until “bent” suggests an element of corruption.
The American Martin Shearman’s 1979 play “Bent” was subsequently adapted as a film by director Sean Matthias. The drama revolves around the persecution of gay men in Nazi Germany. The title suggests that there is a German equivalent of the word that comprises the title. Apparently, there is not.
Berdache
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, travelers and anthropologists have employed the term berdache to denote a type of cross-dressing male frequently found maong the Amerindians of North America. The berdache often assumed the full female role by entering into marriage with a brave. Sometimes he was endowed with priestly or magical powers recalling those of the shamans of Northeastern Asia, the region whence the American Indians came. The Jesuit Joseph François Lafitau, who first analyzed the concept in 1724, though without using the word in its present restricted sense. Lafitau pointed out that one must be careful not to assume from the evidence of cross-dressing alone that homosexual behavior is necessarily present, as was so frequently done by the outraged Spanish conquistadores.
The origins of the term itself, properly bardache or bardashe (with an a in the first syllable), are complex. It began with the Persian bardağ, a young slave, in which sense it was borrowed by vulgar Arabic, making its way therefrom to Mediterranean Christian countries. In Renaissance Italian, with its forms bardassa and bardascia, the sexual sense of catamite became fixed. From Italian (with perhaps some collateral influence from Spanish bardaxe) it migrated into French in the middle of the sixteenth century in the form bardache (though Rabelais uses the variant bredache). In French texts the term bardache was often contrasted with the older bougre, as the pathic (or receptor) vs. the agent (or penetrator). The French term is the source of the older English bardache, or bardashe, a catamite. It is not certain how the currently dominant form berdache arose, but, but it is useful to retain the –e- form to distinguish it from bardache with the older meaning of catamite. In proto-Polynesian the equivalent of the berdache was the mahu, a term given to homosexuals in Hawaii and Tahiti today.
Anthropological research has documented male berdaches in some 155 tribes. In about a third of these groups, a formal status also existed for females who undertook a man’s lifestyle, becoming hunters, warriors, and chiefs. They were sometimes characterized with the same term for male berdaches and sometimes with a distinct term—making them, in effect, a fourth gender. This conceptual scheme employs “third gender” to designate male berdaches and sometimes male and female berdaches, reserving “fourth gender” for female berdaches.
Each tribe had its own terms for these roles, such as boté in Crow, nádleehí in Navajo, winkte in Lakota, and alyha: and hwame: in Mohave. Because so many native North American cultures were disrupted (or had disappeared) before they could be studied by anthropologists, there is no way of assessing the absolute frequency of these roles.
Washington Matthews first used the term berdache in an anthropological publication in 1877. In describing Hidatsa miáti he wrote, “[s]uch are called by the French Canadians ‘berdaches.’” The next anthropological use occurred in J. Owen Dorsey’s 1890 study of Siouan cults. Like Matthews, he characterized “berdache” as a French Canadian frontier term. Following Alfred Kroeber’s adoption of the word in his 1902 ethnography of the Arapaho, it became part of standard anthropological terminology.
In recent years, efforts have been made to replace berdache with “two-spirit.” In 1993, a group of anthropologists and natives issued guidelines that formalized these preferences. “Berdache,” they argued, is a term “that has its origins in Western thought and languages.” Scholars were urged to discard it, inserting “[sic]” following its appearance in quoted texts. In its place they were encouraged to use tribally specific terms for multiple genders or the term “two-spirit.” This attempt at rebranding recalls the shifts from homosexual to gay to queer to GLBT.
As the noted scholar Will Roscoe observed, “[u]nfortunately, these guidelines create as many problems as they solve, beginning with a mischaracterization of the history and meaning of the word ‘berdache.’ As a Persian term, its origins are Eastern not Western. Nor is it a derogatory term, except to the extent that all terms for nonmarital sexuality in European societies carried a measure of condemnation. It was rarely used with the force of ‘faggot,’ but more often as a euphemism with the sense of ‘lover’ or ‘boyfriend.’ Its history, in this regard, is akin to that of ‘gay,’ ‘black,’ and ‘Chicano’—terms that also lost negative connotations over time.”
Bilitis
"Bilitis" is the name given to a fictional lesbian poet, a contemporary of Sappho by the French poet Pierre Louÿs in his 1894 work Les chansons de Bilitis..
The Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), which ranks as the first lesbian rights organization, was formed in San Francisco in 1955. The group was conceived as a social alternative to lesbian bars, which were considered illegal and thus subject to raids and police harassment. The founders claim that they had no knowledge of the male-oriented homophile groups, such as the Mattachine Society, when they first established the organization in 1955.
Influential throughout the 1950s and 1960s, DOB but was riven by factionalism in the 1970s. Its members split over whether to give primary support to the gay-rights movement or to feminism.
"Daughters" was meant to evoke association with other American sororal associations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution. The organization began publishing a weekly, The Ladder in 1956. This was, however, not the first lesbian magazine. That honor belongs to Lisa Ben’s Los Angeles effort Vice-Versa of 1947.
Binarism and dichotomy
Thinking in terms of basic contrasts-—hot and cold, day and night, male and female-—seems to be a feature encountered in every human language. It might be termed the antonym method. To be sure in many instances such dichotomies are not absolute. For example, we recognize an intermediary, warm, between hot and cold. Indeed the thermometer provides us with an almost infinite series of gradations. Still there is an undeniable polarity between the hottest temperature, on the one hand, and absolute zero, on the other.
Even allowing for the gradations, the antonym principle, one thing being opposed by its polar opposite, does not enjoy universal favor, for it is challenged by the principle of unity—-the idea that at many levels, from the universe itself to the human consciousness, there is no division. The latter view is sometimes known as holism. In short, dichotomy is ever-present—and ever-contested
In the realm of sex it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the conceptual system began to be organized in terms of such bipolar contrasts. In fact the discipline of sex research or sexology emerged during that period. Its first “star” was the psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), whose 1886 treatise Psychopathia Sexualis was once a household word. Examining the phenomenon of S/M (as we would now describe it), Krafft-Ebing first noted the term Sadismus [in fact this was a borrowing from the French sadisme (1829), coined after the most famous exponent of the practice, the Marquis de Sade]. The German scholar decided to reserve the first term for the active role, creating a new antonym, Masochismus. The latter term derived from the fictional writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895). In the new binary system, one term expresses a predilection for inflicting pain as part of a pattern of sexual excitement and gratification, the other a desire to experience such pain. Of course the combination can be expressed in the compound term sadomasochism, nowadays commonly abbreviated as S/M. In a more informal way the concepts of frigidity (aversion from sexual activity) became paired with the idea of nymphomania. And so forth.
For our purposes the central binary contrast was between homosexuality and heterosexuality. The former term was introduced in 1869, the latter a little later—-both originally in their German dress. In common parlance the gay/straight contrast expresses this perception. While this dichotomy has lasted until the present-day, there is also an intermediate state, bisexuality. This example shows that thinking in terms of polar contrasts does not preclude positing intermediaries.
The general category of homosexuality has two subcategories: lesbianism and male homosexuality. Terminologically, there is some confusion, as some see lesbianism as entirely different phenomenon, reserving the word homosexuality for male-male relations. (This assumption is buttressed by the misleading etymology, which takes the homo- part as the Latin for man. In reality it is the Greek prefix for same.)
Historically and cross-culturally many societies have stressed the active/passive contrast of sex roles, which generally applies to males only. Passives are thought to be effeminate and exclusively oriented to other males—-if possible to macho men, the actives. The actives may swing both ways, functioning with both women and men, but always taking the insertor role.
The ancient Greeks recognized the polarity of the erastes, the dominant, older lover, and the eromenos, the younger partner.
French texts of the early modern period attest a major cleavage between the bougre, the aggressive, masculine appearing homosexual, and the bardache, slighter and more effeminate, usually younger.
The contrast vigorously survives in Latin America, where the dominant conception of same sex relations assigns the majority practicing same-sex relations to the pasivo class. Activos are assumed to be bisexual. In some circles this venerable contrast is yielding to a more unified concept, which is termed gay. There are other terms for those who are versatile enough to play both roles. An example is disco, a phonograph record, because individuals so designated can be played on both sides.
In American culture the active/passive contrast is less common. However, the same-sex subculture of our jails and prisons recognized the pitcher/catcher polarity, the former being the insertor, the latter the insertee. Many pitchers do not regard themselves as homosexual, and will commonly resume a heterosexual life style after release.
Pedophiles distinguish between the boy lover or chicken hawk and his youthful partner, the boy or chicken.
Some postmodern critics of the bipolar approach to segmenting human phenomena, have decried it, because it presents a recurring temptation to assign an inferior status to one of the two poles. In this context mention of the contrast tends to reinforce the inequality. Historically, historians of the status of women have shown how this has operated in the male/female binarism. The remedy is to insist on the equality of the two—-and perhaps that the contrast has been exaggerated. We see this process in the development of the heterosexual/homosexual pairing. For many decades those who invoked it, some of them themselves gay, had taken it for granted that heterosexuals are superior. With the rise of the gay liberation movement in 1969 this subordinate status was no longer acceptable. Thus we see slogans like “gay is good” and the like, affirming the inherent dignity of gayness. Increasingly, the matter of heterosexual and homosexual was viewed in terms of symmetry, two options of equal status, rather than subordination.
As has been noted, an intermediate category, bisexuality stands between the two poles of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Some observers, who believe in the absolute polarity of straight and gay, dispute the reality of this phenomenon. However, there is no doubt that individuals who regard themselves as bisexual exist in significant number, and this status is recognized. In youth some people may identify as bi as they are in transition to one of the poles. There is also the rare term ambisexual, employing the Latin prefix ambi-, “both.”
There are a number of picturesque terms for bisexuality. Bimetalism reflects an antiquated dispute in the discipline of economics, where a bimetal system is based on both gold and silver. AC/DC stems from electrical arrangements. The term double-gaited derives from racing, where a double-gated horse can run on both a dry and a muddy track. The switch-hitter, who “swings both ways,” is a sports metaphor, from baseball.
The prefix bi- should mean simply both or twice, as in “bimonthly.” However, in the neologism biphobia it stands for irrational opposition to bisexuality; the term is modeled on homophobia. The term heterophobia is rare, because the condition is rare.
Bisexual
The term bisexual seems first to have come into prominence through its use by nineteenth-century botanists, who applied it to hermaphroditic plants, that is, those endowed with both male and female sexual organs. More recently, the sense “capable of attraction to both sexes or genders,” without any suggestion of distinctive physiology, has become prevalent with regard to human beings.
On the theoretical level confusion has been caused by the propagation of Sigmund Freud’s theory of universal bisexuality (Three Essays in the Theory of Sexuality, 1905). It is generally agreed that Freud derived his theory of bisexuality as a developmental stage in the formation of character from his eccentric Berlin adviser, Wilhelm Fliess (who also championed a strange theory of 23- and 28-day cycles). However, the idea was evidently in the air, witness Otto Weininger’s sweeping version postulating a continuum from heterosexual to homosexuality (Sex and Character, originally published in 1903).
Given these perspectives, one might think that bisexuals are the only truly “normal” persons, since they permit the full range of their psychosexual endowment to be expressed. But not so. The concept is used by some psychoanalysts (e.g. Albert Ellis and Charles Socarides) to castigate exclusive (or in their terminology “obligatory”) homosexuals for neglecting an essential component of their makeup, namely heterosexuality. By contrast, these experts have declined to admonish exclusive heterosexuals to seek to broaden their range of experience. Gays must change, if not completely, by adding a straight side to their behavior, but straights need feel no such imperative.
Still, the view persists in popular circles that “we’re all a bit bisexual.” Oddly, this view has been attributed to Alfred Kinsey. However, Kinsey found that at least 50% of the men he studied experienced no homosexual feelings at all.
Another mistake is to assume that the definition of bisexuality requires absolutely equal attraction to both genders. This may be termed the Woody Allen theory. That comedian maintained that the advantage of bisexuality is that it doubles your chances of getting a date on Saturday night.
Moreover, now that the distinction between sex and gender is better understood, it is may be recognized that it is possible for a bisexual person to be attracted to all genders but only one sex, or to all sexes but only one gender. This point assumes that one recognize gender as an autonomous social and psychological category, distinct from biological sex. Apart from sexual preference, some bisexual people describe attribute their attraction to personality or other characteristics rather than gender.
Another view is that homosexuality and heterosexuality are two monosexual orientations, whereas bisexuality encompasses them both. However, many assume a triadic typology, with bisexuality ranking as a distinct sexual orientation on a par with heterosexuality or homosexuality. In this view there are three orientations, not two as the older convention assumes.
Oddly enough, bisexuality is sometimes misunderstood as a form of adultery or polyamory, for a popular misconception holds that bisexuals must always be in relationships with men and women simultaneously. The reality is that individuals attracted to both males and females, like people of any other orientation, may live a variety of sexual lifestyles. These options include lifelong monogamy, serial monogamy, polyamory, polyfidelity casual sexual activity with individual partners, casual group sex, and celibacy.
Some individuals others might classify as bisexual on the basis of their sexual behavior self-identify as gay, lesbian, or straight. For example, a bisexual woman who considers herself a lesbian may do so on the basis she defines a lesbian as any woman who is attracted to women (even one who is also attracted to men), or a woman who is primarily attracted to other women. Likewise some men may identify as heterosexual because the only activities they engage in with other men do not involve anal sex (or more commonly, do not involve being the receptor in anal sex). This kind of ambiguity is problematic for several reasons. First, because some people maintain that exclusivity is part of the definitions for monosexual orientations. Others feel that only one's current situation is what matters (if one is in a heterosexual marriage, they are straight). Still other groups insist that true bisexuality does not exist—the “bisexual” person’s heterosexual feelings are merely a manifestation of internalized homophobia.
Some bisexuals regard themselves as distinct from homosexuals but nonetheless accept membership in the larger LGBT community. Some people who engage in bisexual behavior may be supportive of lesbian and gay people, but still self-identify as straight, while still others consider any labels irrelevant to their consciousness and situations
As if these complications were not enough, some young people who are just coming out adopt bisexuality as a kind of transitional identity. This label serves as a kind of protective coating as they get used to their homosexual orientation. Sometimes such persons simply term themselves “questioning.” At all events, this transitional identity should not be confused with the settled, mature forms of bisexuality.
Some bisexuals and sex researchers are dissatisfied with the term bisexual, and have developed a variety of alternative or supplementary terms to encompass significant aspects and forms of bisexuality. Many are neologisms that are not widely known.
Pansexual, omnisexual, anthrosexual, and pomosexual (postmodern sexuality) are substitute terms that rather than referring to both or "bi" gender attraction, refer to all or "omni" gender attraction. These descriptors appeal to those who wish to express openness to all gender possibilities including transgender and intersex people, not just two. Pansexuality sometimes includes an affinity for less mainstream sexual activities, such as S/M. Some people who might qualify as pansexual or omnisexual choose to self-identify as bisexual because the term bisexual is more widely known, and because they regard it as an asset in identity politics.
Bi-permissive describes someone who does not actively seek out sexual relations with a given gender, but is open to them. Such a person may self-identify as heterosexual or homosexual, and engage predominantly in sexual acts with individuals of the corresponding gender, and might be rated 1 or 5 on Kinsey's scale. Near-synonyms include heteroflexible and homoflexible.
Ambisexuality has been defined as an indiscriminate attraction to either sex (corresponding to the Woody Allen concept noted above). A person who self-identifies as ambisexual might be attracted with equal intensity on physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual levels to partner(s) regardless of sex or gender presentation, while maintaining selectivity standards in other areas. Some might experience equally intense attractions that could be triggered by sex- or gender-specific traits in given partner(s). A person with this orientation might fall in the 3 category on Kinsey's scale, as would some who qualify for the 2 or 4 rating (though some individuals in these latter categories consider themselves bi-permissive).
The term bi-curious has several distinct and sometimes contradictory meanings. It is commonly found in personal ads placed by those who identify as heterosexual but are interested in same-sex "experimentation," Such people are commonly suspected--not necessarily correctly--of being homosexuals or bisexuals in denial of their homosexuality. The expression can also be used to describe someone as being passively-bi, bi-permissive, or open to indirect bisexual contact.
Biphobia, a term modeled on homophobia, is a fear or condemnation of bisexuality, reflecting the belief that only heterosexuality and homosexuality are genuine orientations and appropriate lifestyles. Bisexual persons may also be the target of homophobia from those who consider only heterosexuality appropriate. The reverse can also occur, in that bisexual persons may be the objects of heterophobia or discrimination by some gays/homosexuals.
Much of this material pertains to the trope of Intermediacy.
Bitch
Deriving from the Old English bicce, a female dog, the word was employed as a derogatory term for a woman, especially a prostitute, as early as 1400 CE. The application to male homosexuals is documented from the 1920s. While the use of this epithet is widely condemned by feminists and others, it is unlikely to disappear. It figures in the trope of Animals.
With regard to gay men, bitch designates one of the varieties of the queen type. Cynicism, vindictiveness, malicious gossip and putdowns, together with extravagant displays of “attitude” characterize bitchiness. It is related to camp, except that the latter phenomenon is generally good humored and self-deprecating.
In prison slang a bitch is the regular sexual partner of an aggressive jock.
Blow
“To blow” is one of several slang uses of this verb, in this case for the act of fellation. The primary reference is to the mouth, the organ of blowing, but there may be a secondary association with “blowing it.” When one “blows one’s wad,” all the money is spent. (To spend is an old term for ejaculation).
English terminology does not generally observe the distinction Latin makes between fellatio, where the receptor produces the stimulation, and irrumatio, aggressive thrusting on the part of the penetrator. Thus Catullus’ “ego te irrumabo,” would be the equivalent of “I’m going to mouth-rape you.” Conventionally, the fellator is regarded as passive; however, he may be termed French active.
In the compound blow job, the latter part probably derives from the printing trade, where a job a specific piece of work. There are amusing parallels with nose job, lube job, and snow job.
The abbreviation BJ is common.
Since Greco-Roman time the act has been a common adjunct to the repertoire of prostitutes. During the middle decades of the twentieth century it was more commonly associated with gay men. Recently, there have been reports of growing popularity among teenagers, in part for convenience but also as a form of contraception.
Body part focus
Alfred Kinsey held that male sexuality typically focuses on one part of the body, while female sexuality addresses the whole body. However this may be, gay men do seem to have particular body-part concerns.
Gay men are stereotypically thought to be size queens who prefer large male members. Their sex objects are termed well-hung. (Cf. the Latin term mentulatus.) Note also, endowment.
Naturally, orality (involving the mouth) is important. As a role or a preference, cocksucker designates someone who adopts the receptor role in fellatio. The fluffer, an employee in the porno industry, is a special (paid) form of this role. A preference for this behavior is sometimes euphemistically termed the French culture.
In designating the penis or genitals in general, a food term, meat, has some currency. Hence the expression, now uncommon: “meat for days.” The ensemble of male sexual parts is termed a basket, especially if there is a noticeable bulge. Circumcision, or its absence, is important as an erotic marker to many gay men; hence the terms cut and uncut.
Some eroticize the buttocks, a quality already evident in the erotic vase paintings of ancient Greece. In early modern France a culiste, buttocks man, was a term for a male same-sexer. In modern American gay slang that region of the body may be termed the buns. Sex ads sometimes note a bubble butt.
A predilection for anal activity is sometimes termed Greek culture. Practicing anal sex without the protection of a condom is now termed barebacking. Application of the mouth to the anus (or anilinctus) is called rimming in street parlance. Fisting occurs when the fist, or sometimes the whole arm is inserted in the partner’s rectum. Toe sucking is called shrimping.
The face queen (UK) is someone who judges the attraction of another by the face. A face artist, however, is someone who offers fellatio, who gives head.
Eye-lock is a key move in making contact during cruising. Good-looking, but inacessible young men are sometimes termed eye candy. Dating on a more-or-less steady basis is termed seeing someone.
An informal earring code indicates that wearing one earring is acceptable for a heterosexual man (bestowing that pirate look). Two earrings on a man usually indicate that he is gay.
A more generalized body development of the muscles is called built. In recent years, gyms have grown greatly in popularity with gay men, attracting body builders and gym bunnies.
Heterosexuals tend to stereotype the male homosexual body as willowy and pliable, a quality localized at the hand-arm juncture, the limp wrist. In Spanish this is mano quebrada.
Beard is an ironic term for a woman who consents to appear with a gay man, so as to hide his homosexuality.
Boi
This spelling of the word originated in a gay magazine called XY in the early to mid 1990s. XY targeted gay male teenagers. The new spelling describes a youthful, hip, and attractive male. Widely accepted in the gay community to mean any young, sexually attractive male, this spelling also appears in heterosexual contexts to mean similarly, a young, handsome guy.
In the S/M community a boi is a male who presents himself in a young boyish way, usually taking the role of a bottom (submissive).
Somewhat paradoxically, in the lesbian community the word boi may designate young transgendered/androgynous /masculine persons who are biologically female and present themselves in a young, boyish way; a boidyke; such persons are also sometimes known as genderqueer.
Boston Marriage
This nineteenth-century term describes a household shared by two women, independent of male support. It is debated whether such arrangements had a sexual component—probably some did, others did not.
The term came to be used, apparently, after Henry James' 1885 novel The Bostonians, which limned a marriage-like relationship between two women. These were "New Women" in the language of the time, women who were independent, not married, and self-supporting. Imbued with a definite class content, Boston marriages often meant living off inherited wealth or making a living through some professional career. The recent play Boston Marriage by David Mamet depicts such a marriage as having an explicitly sexual component. Less common was the term "Wellesley marriage."
On May 27, 2004 Massachusetts became the first state in the United States to sanction legal same-sex marriages. This advance makes Boston the only major city in the U.S. where a "Boston Marriage" can be a legal marriage as well. The development has given the term a fresh slant, as some people, hearing it for the first time, think it is a new term coined to refer to legal same-sex marriages.
Bottom
From the anatomical meaning relating to the buttocks, this term has been adapted to describe those who adopt a submissive role in S/M conduct. It is applied more generally by those who tend to divide gay men into two contrasting types: bottoms and tops.
The relevant trope is Binarism and Dichotomy.
Boy Love
In pederasty and pedophilia, boys are the object of an adult man’s love. (Note that the term is not commonly used for adult women who form relationships with teenage boys). The advocacy group NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) has made the term notorious. An “in” abbreviation is BL. Intergenerational sex, though widely used as a synonym is not accurate. A relationship between a 30 year old and a 60 year old involves two different generations, but this is not what is usually meant.
See the trope of Intergenerational Sex.
Browning
This term for anal sex was common in the middle of the twentieth century. Men who specialized in the receptor role were termed brownie queens or browning queens. Perhaps as a result of improvements in hygiene, these expressions died out. Yet those who engage in bareback sex in the porn industry sometimes complain of the experience of a “chocolate fuck.”
The relevant trope is Color Symbolism.
Bug Chasing
This is the practice adopted by a few gay men in the 1990s deliberately to seek infection with the “bug” (virus) of HIV. Some men would place a minus (-) tattoo on their upper arm, crossing it into a plus (+) when they had attained their goal of contracting the disease. Some chasers would attend "Bug Parties," sometimes called "conversion parties," in hopes of acquiring "The Gift". Participants who were already HIV+ were designated "gift givers." These parties constitute a kind of sexual “Russian roulette.”
Risk taking has always characterized some aspects of gay-male life, but this behavior raised it to an unprecedented extreme. Interviews have disclosed some ostensible reasons for the behavior. Among them are the following. Some participants believe that infecting their sexual partner will mark an advance to the deepest level of intimacy. Some men report that the element of danger in sexual encounters of this kind adds to the "rush" of arousal. There are men who, once infected, feel like they finally belong to a "fraternity" of infected men. Similarly, there are men who feel that acquiring HIV will cement a relationship with their positive partner. Many men bug chase because they feel that once they have HIV they will finally be free: they can sleep with whomever they want, party endlessly, and live their life without worrying about any consequences.
Not surprisingly, responsible individuals in the gay community view bug chasing with disdain as a self-destructive activity. Leaders of the gay community at large are concerned that the behaviors of bug chasers may contribute to a public perception that the practice is common or encouraged by all gay people.
Although bug chasing had been occurring for some years, the phenomenon became notorious after Rolling Stone magazine printed an article in 2003 by a freelance journalist, Gregory Freeman, entitled "Bug Chasers: The Men Who Long to Be HIV+." The article provoked a storm of controversy, primarily because it concluded that the practice might be relatively common. This seems to be untrue, and in fact the frequency of the behavior was already declining when the article appeared.
Bugger
Bugger and faggot are the two most affect-laden terms in the English vocabulary of homosexuality. Bugger is the characteristically British form of abuse, faggot the American. The former word ultimately derives from Old Bulgarian bularinŭ, the ethnic name of the Slavic people inhabiting the Southeastern part of the Balkan peninsula (as shown by the work of Borislav Primov and Ivan Petkanov). Although the Bogumil and Paulician (dualist) heresies emerged in Bulgaria, on the periphery of the Byzantine Empire, as early as the tenth century, it was only in the wake of the Fourth Crusade (1204) that Medieval Latin bulgarus (with vernacular offshoots) came to be associated with these heresies. In the West the principal reflex of this dualistic system was the Cathar or Albigensian heresy in the south of France.
And so in the thirteenth century bougre appeared in Old French with two meanings: 1) Albigensian heretic; 2) sodomite. Sexual depravity had, in fact, been charged with certain Gnostic sects as early as Irenaeus of Lyon (late second century). During the Middle Ages heresy and “unnatural” sexual activity were both attributed to the instigation of the devil, since neither could presumably have occurred to anyone spontaneously. At all events the ascription of homosexuality to the Albigensians seems wholly unfounded, albeit the higher orders of the perfecti did abstain from heterosexual—and any other—intercourse.
An additional factor is the Old French use of bougre to mean “userer.” This association (heretic = sodomite = usurer) derives from the ancient notion that interest in “unnatural” because money, unlike land, is intrinsically sterile, just as homosexual activity is doomed to sterility. There may be some echo of the accusation advanced by Philo of Alexandria that the pederast “debases the coin of nature.” In eighteenth-century England “queer money” was counterfeit.
The English derivative of bougre is bugger, which in the medieval texts has the sole meaning of “heretic.” The first instance of the word buggery in the legal sense of sodomy is Henry VIII’s Act 1533 (25 Hen. VIII c. 6). This law ranks as the first civil legislation applicable against male homosexuals in the country, such offences having previously been dealt with by ecclesiastical courts, The law defined buggery as an unnatural sexual act against the will of God and man. In practice, this provision has almost always been applied to anal sex between men, or its attempt. Unlike Continental jurisdictions and that of Scotland (in both of which burning was stipulated), the Act made buggery (with man or beast) punishable by hanging, a capital penalty not finally lifted until 1861. Although it has sometimes been suggested that the Act was introduced as a measure against the clergy during the separation of the Church of England from Rome, there is no firm evidence for this claim, and indeed the Act preceded the separation.
In his commentaries on the law of England, Sir Edward Coke (1552-1635) defined buggery as “a detestable and abominable sin amongst Christians not to be named, committed by carnal knowledge against the ordinance of the Creator and order of nature by mankind with mankind or with brute beast, or by womankind with brute beast.” (Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, pp. 58-59). (A seventeenth-century text mentions buggerone italicus, thus imputing the vice to Italy and revealing that by this time all memory of the putative Bulgarian origin had been lost.)
Following the final confirmation of the Act by Queen Elizabeth I, it was firmly ensconced as the charter for all subsequent criminalization of homosexual behavior in England. Nonetheless, only a few executions are known during the two centuries that followed.
The Act itself was supplanted by the 1828 Offenses Against the Person (England) Act and the Criminal Law (India) Act of the same year, though the crime persisted on the statute books under other rubrics. Buggery remained a capital offence in England until 1861; and the last execution for the crime took place in 1836. England and Wales repealed the buggery laws in 1967, a step subsequently extended to other parts of the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, legal statutes in many former colonies, such as those in the Anglophone Caribbean, have retained the crime. These laws are among the lingering banes afflicted by colonialism.
Why American jurisdictions substituted the European expression sodomy as a legal term has not been clarified.
That the term has lost much of its sting in some English countries is shown by the humorous Australian television show Club Buggery.
Bunny
Folk perception singles out rabbits both for their "cuteness" and for their lubricity, which makes them prolific breeders. In early modern English the term bunny was commonly given to young women or children as an affectionate diminutive. Eventually, and especially in America, the word came also to connote lack of brains, as in "dumb bunny" and "jungle bunny" (the latter a harsh stereotype for an African American).
According to the slang dictionary of Wentworth and Flexner, at one time bunny meant the female equivalent of a hustler, a woman who offered herself sexually to other women for money. Like the practice, this use seems never to have been very widespread.
The disco bunny (1970s early eighties) was a young man, ostensibly frivolous and hedonistic, who frequented such places of entertainment. Possibly, the implication was that his dancing was frantic and incessant, indirectly recalling the reputed copulatory habits of the hare, and perhaps more directly suggesting that the individual was sexually indiscriminate and "hot to trot." While there was some self-application, the term was generally disparaging.
A curious sidelight to the matter is a legend propagated by Early Christian writers who singled out several “unclean” animals. These writers associated the hare with pederasty because of the myth that the creature grew a new anus each year.
The relevant trope is Animals.
Butch
This American slang term may derive from “butcher.” Originally butch designated a tough youth or man, often strongly built and sporting an “attitude” (cf. the outlaw Butch [George] Cassidy at the beginning of the twentieth century). In the argot of the gay-male coteries of the 1940s and 50s, butch could be used for an overtly masculine homosexual. Such individuals were often prized as “straight-appearing,” as opposed to the stereotypical nancy boy or swish.
Although the older term was not much used, the 1970 clone types adopted a butch look, sporting work shirts and facial hair. Among the subcultures composed of butch gay men today is the bear community.
C
Calamite
Walt Whitman entitled the most overtly homoerotic section of Leaves of Grass “Calamus” after a plant, the sweet flag, which he adopted as an emblem of male-male affection. The word calamus probably had a secondary attraction for Whitman since it also means “reed pen,” the traditional instrument of the scribe. In Greek mythology Calamus, the son of a river god, was united in tender love with another youth, Carpus. When Carpus was accidentally drowned, Calamus was changed into a reed.
The English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose attitudes to homosexuality were conflicted, dubbed John Addington Symonds and his associates “Calamites,” with a mocking echo of the older word catamite. J. Z. Eglinton (1964) employed the term to designate the broader school of minor English and American poets who flourished during the period ca. 1890-1930, under the aegis of Whitman, Carpenter, and Symonds. Timothy d’Arch Smith, the author of Love in Earnest (London, 1970), the standard monograph on the subject, prefers to call the English poets—somewhat ambiguously—Uranians. More appropriately (though still confusingly) Donald Mader, in his learned introduction to the 1978 edition of the Men and Boys anthology, speaks of the American poets as “calamites.”
Just as Whitman had used the calamus plant to symbolize male homoeroticism, some of the English “calamite” (= Uranian) poets singled out the plant ladslove (Artemisia abrotanum), ostensibly because the odor of its sap resembled that of semen, but more likely simply because of the name.
Camp
Camp is a type of wit common to, but by no means exclusive to male homosexuals. A definition of the concept is elusive, but it may be tentatively circumscribed by saying that camps consists of taking serious things frivolously and frivolous things seriously. Camp is not grounded in speech or writing as much as it is in gesture, performance, and public display. When it is verbal, it finds expression less through the discursive means of direct statement than through implication, innuendo, and intonation. As an art of indirection and suggestion, it was suited to the purposes of a group that found it imprudent to confront culturally approved values directly, preferring to undermine them through send-ups and sly mockery. Because it is viewed, perhaps mistakenly, as relatively unthreatening, camp gains entrance into the upscale worlds of chic and swank.
The word camp may ultimately derive from the French slang term camper, a verb meaning “to pose in an exaggerated fashion.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1909 as the first citation of "camp" in print, with the sense of "ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to or characteristic of homosexuals. So as n., ‘camp’ behaviour, mannerisms, etc….; a man exhibiting such behaviour." According to the OED, this sense of the word is "etymologically obscure."
Two key components of camp were stem from mimicry of feminine traits: swish and drag. With swish featuring flamboyant gestures and liberal use of superlatives, and drag being (often outrageous) female impersonation, camp came to embrace all things "over the top", including female female impersonators, as in the exaggerated Hollywood antics of the Brazilian actress Carmen Miranda.
There is an overlap with bitchiness, as seen in the practice of dishing, a conversational style that includes retorts, vicious putdowns, and malicious gossip. However, the ironic sophistication of camp usually precludes the pettiness and vindictiveness that characterize the bitchy mode. .
In recent years postmodern theorists, who admire its defense of marginalized forms, have embraced camp. In this view, its claims to legitimacy are dependent on its opposition to the status quo. Camp has no aspiration to timelessness, but rather feeds on the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the dominant culture.
We turn now to particular uses.
The term camp is normally employed as an adjective or noun, even though earliest recorded uses treated it mainly as a verb. In the characterization of one authority it refers to the deliberate and sophisticated use of playful, mawkish, or corny themes and styles in art, clothing, or conversation. In addition to its specifically gay component, camp has been appropriated by theorists of popular culture and postmodernistm to refer to various trends in entertainment and writing. Sometimes these inquiries detect unintentional camp, but it is usually a carefully chosen strategy.
The bisexual American intellectual Susan Sontag was the first to attempt a theoretical explanation. In her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’,” Sontag emph