Is There a “Gay Voice”? | The New Yorker

Contents:

• GAYDAR—SENDG MIXED SIGNALS
• WHAT GAY SOUNDS LIKE: THE LGUISTICS OF LGBTQ MUNI
• IS THERE A “GAY VOICE”?
• THE GAY VOICE
• SPEECH ATIC FEATUR: A COMPARISON OF GAY MEN, HETEROSEXUAL MEN, AND HETEROSEXUAL WOMEN
• A GAY PAPER: WHY SHOULD SOCLGUISTICS BOTHER WH SEMANTICS?
• 4 - SEXUALY AS INTY: GAY AND LBIAN LANGUAGE
• CALIFORNIA SCHOOL BOARD ADOPTS SOCIAL STUDI TEXTBOOKS THAT CLU GAY RIGHTS AFTER WARNGS OM ERNOR

GAYDAR—SENDG MIXED SIGNALS

Polari (or Parlary, Palarie, as ’s also known, om the Italian “to talk”) is one lost language om Bra that beme primarily associated wh gay men (and to a lser extent wh lbians).

Acrdg to Pl Baker, foremost lguistic expert Polari, this secret language, far om beg a lorful fad that jt fell out of fashn (before beg cryptilly revived by Bowie) was val to the many gay men who ed to munite wh each other unr the radar—at least until homosexualy stopped beg a crime the late sixti, renrg the secret language somewhat obsolete.

WHAT GAY SOUNDS LIKE: THE LGUISTICS OF LGBTQ MUNI

It’s a phenomenon that seems to replite across different cultur, such as Bahasa Gay, a gay speech style of Indonia, which has ma s way to mastream Indonian life whout the public beg particularly aware that gay people even exist.

IS THERE A “GAY VOICE”?

The above clip for example, om 1938’s screwball edy Brgg Up Baby, shows what is probably the first appearance of the word “gay” wh a cidly queer, cross-drsg meang a mastream movie.

THE GAY VOICE

Ad libbed by the reputedly bisexual Cary Grant, mastream dienc would not have unrstood the slang term, and passed right unr the nose of the Hays Office, which strictly enforced the censorship of such unspeakable thgs as homosexual referenc film. It wasn’t until the Stonewall Rts of 1969 ( which drag queens played a proment role) that this slang meang of “gay” really took hold mastream English.

San’s Sontag’s much celebrated 1964 say “Not on ‘Camp'” brought awarens to this hard-to-scribe emergg athetic of over-the-top yet ironic theatrily, attributg to gay culture. In 1950s Bra, men were still beg imprisoned for nsensual homosexual acts, numberg over a thoand by mid-, trapped by unrver ps posg as gay men. Thoands of gay men and lbians were purged om ernment agenci and the ary, spied on, arrted, and severely penalized, their reers and futur stroyed.

This genr-nformg group, known as the homophile movement, directed their genr anxieti and anger toward more flamboyant members of the queer subculture who were out there the open, givg the rt of them a fabuloly bad name. Different typ of gayspeak across cultur and untri often e “she-g”, femizg people or objects by g feme pronouns for example, sometim as another way to hi taboo relatnships om public view. At any rate, this near-universal lguistic practice of gay cultur everywhere, along wh other “swish” stereotyp, was strenuoly rejected by the mascule-intified homophile movement of the 50s and 60s as a perversn of language as well as social norms.

SPEECH ATIC FEATUR: A COMPARISON OF GAY MEN, HETEROSEXUAL MEN, AND HETEROSEXUAL WOMEN

One of the few proment homophile magaz of the day, ONE, equently featured anti-swish sentiments om their gay rears, which largely ternalized public anxieti and prejudic about overt homosexual stereotyp: “The flamg faggot who swish up Lexgton Avenue New York Cy screamg and llg attentn to his eccentrici sets back homosexualy, ” “I thk that the people who ll each other ‘she, ’ etc., are sick, ” and fally “STAMP OUT QUEENS! "Back the '20s and '30s, there was this massive e some social sets gay Ameri of French as the qutsential gay language, and that ntu to the '70s, " he says.

In his current rearch, Leap is lookg at Harleme, the language of the Harlem Renaissance, where he c a rich and dynamic queer prence and a manner of speakg that, while beg not exclively queer, has fluenced both gay and mastream language to this day. Around the same time, Bra, Polari, what scholars ll an anti-language, was at s peak among gay men, but the jargon would be pletely unregnizable to most English speakers today.

A GAY PAPER: WHY SHOULD SOCLGUISTICS BOTHER WH SEMANTICS?

In the early 1990s, Baker stumbled upon Polari while lookg for a this topic and soon found himself a gay-n hotel Brighton where the nkeepers relled some phraseology. She-g appears almost universally and across centuri gay language, om Pe to the Philipp to South Ai (where gay slang is lled Gayle), to Israel (lled oxtch, rived om an Arabic word meang "my sister"), to Soviet-era Rsia. But Put's Rsia, where the environment remas extremely hostile for LGBT people, the webse, acrdg to a paper by rearcher Stephan Nance, lists a urse on how to speak prent-day Rsian gay, a slang lled goluboy -- om a word related to the bluish lor of a dove -- prumably to help gay Rsians intify one another.

") Denis Provencher, partment head of French and Italian at the Universy of Arizona, has yet to intify a siar argot as Polari or rearch to gay-specific slang French, where disurse, typil French fashn, operat as more waltz than stri.

" While vobulary might be the most fun part of lavenr lguistics for the layperson, scholars are ncerned wh aspects such as tone, flectn, and gturg, as well as the polil and cultural implitns of language -- how the prs wre about LGBT issu, for example, or how queer people munite wh each other privately and at work, or how gay language is learned.

4 - SEXUALY AS INTY: GAY AND LBIAN LANGUAGE

" That r gay tongue of yore persever most strongly Amerin drag culture, and, for word lovers today, might be the only bright spot of novatn. However, as a gay man, I thk of gaydar not so much as a tool for intifyg one’s orientatn, but as a meang and discrimatory weapon ed to ntrast sexual and social differenc.

CALIFORNIA SCHOOL BOARD ADOPTS SOCIAL STUDI TEXTBOOKS THAT CLU GAY RIGHTS AFTER WARNGS OM ERNOR

For my class project Language US Society, I wanted to qutn the nature of gaydar and trace s origs beyond jt the perceptn of the speaker. The key to unrstandg gaydar is the telemunitn ncept of “radar, ” which is fed as “a radtermatn system based on the parison of reference signals wh rad signals reflected or retransmted, om the posn to be termed” (ITU Rad Regulatns, 2013). Hence, the technil fn of gaydar is a “system based on the parison of reference signals wh language reflected or retransmted, om the posn to be termed, ” where the posn to be termed ultimately translat to inty.

A historil example of this is what lguists ll the onted “s” sound that is typilly characterized as a lisp, also known as the “gay lisp” (Mack and Munson 2012).

Instead of intifyg the onted “s” as a lguistic variable, listeners equently thk of as an x of non-normative behavr such as a speech fect or homosexualy. This associatn between language and behavr puts speakers g this variable a double bd: they are perceived eher to have a speech fect or to be gay—wh both perceptns rryg negative nnotatns.