The history of lesbian slang--or the absence thereof
December 15, 2015 11:21 AM   Subscribe

Last week, the BBC radio programme Woman’s Hour ran an item on the American documentary film "Do I Sound Gay?" The film explores what’s popularly known as ‘the gay voice’, a way of speaking that identifies a man as gay (though not all gay men have it, and some men who do sound gay are actually straight). The Woman’s Hour feature ranged more widely over the subject of gay language, including a lengthy discussion of Polari (previously: 1, 2). But it was all about the boys–-until, towards the end of the item, the presenter broached the inevitable question: do lesbians also have a language of their own? Nothing comparable to Polari--but we do have some historical evidence of in-group lesbian slang.
posted by sciatrix (15 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
(Do I Sound Gay? is currently available on Netflix in the U.S., for the curious.)
posted by psoas at 11:26 AM on December 15, 2015 [4 favorites]


Recently I read this amazing zine with lots of lesbian slang and hilarious descriptions, Lesbian Lexicon.
posted by TheGoodBlood at 11:40 AM on December 15, 2015 [4 favorites]


I'm actually re-reading Tipping the Velvet right now.
posted by kamikazegopher at 12:08 PM on December 15, 2015


I helped fund Do I Sound Gay? on Kickstarter and got the DVD a couple of weeks ago. It is really excellent.
posted by xingcat at 12:41 PM on December 15, 2015


Seconding Do I Sound Gay as a fascinating, personal journey into what it means to "sound gay."
posted by filthy light thief at 1:06 PM on December 15, 2015


I heard a scientist who studies "gaydar" and other phenomenon talk about "gay voice" - and he talked about how it isn't that gay men change their voices when they come out, but that all boys will change their voices in adolescence to be more "manly", and gay men drop that style after they come out.

/details may be muddled - it was a while ago. But I remember that lesbians do have a distinct gait, and that gaydar does work even on partial facial features, but really it's not gaydar, it's not-straight-dar, and bi women twig it as often as gay women.
posted by jb at 1:33 PM on December 15, 2015 [4 favorites]


Interesting parrallel is the "donut hole"- the lesbian answer to the infamous non stop male orgy called the "meat rack" area between Cherry Grove and the Pines in Fire Island. No one I met was sure it did or ever existed, but it was named.
posted by TenaciousB at 1:34 PM on December 15, 2015


"but that all boys will change their voices in adolescence to be more "manly", and gay men drop that style after they come out."

That's a weird theory. Doesn't seem to make sense to me. I mean, is he talking about the pitch of the voice or the style of speaking? Because I'm pretty sure we don't change the pitch of our voice on purpose when we hit puberty as our voice deepens because of hormonal changes in the body. And if it's talking about the manner of speaking then does "drop that style" imply that the "gay voice" style is the "default" style of speaking? But most kids don't speak in that style even before adolescence. So I'm not sure what the scientist meant.
posted by I-baLL at 1:38 PM on December 15, 2015 [4 favorites]


I heard a scientist who studies "gaydar" and other phenomenon talk about "gay voice" - and he talked about how it isn't that gay men change their voices when they come out, but that all boys will change their voices in adolescence to be more "manly", and gay men drop that style after they come out.

This seems profoundly untrue to me when I think about boys I grew up with who turned out to be gay, who had "gay voice" and also gay mannerisms before they had any idea they were gay, and also a friend of my 14-year-old son's who is absolutely flaming, though he hasn't told us what he thinks of his sexuality. I know that my many many anecdotes aren't the same as a research study, but it is precisely these vocal and other mannerisms that lead a certain subset of gay men to observe that they got harassed for being queer before they even understood what that meant.

The two blog posts about lesbian language were focused on pre-Stonewall lesbians, which is a fascinating time. Working class butch-fem communities have always been especially interesting to me. But it doesn't address the post-Stonewall time, when lesbians did have a very active and cohesive community. My experience as part of that community does match up with one observation made in the article, that lesbians didn't tend to have slang terms that related to sexual preferences. But we did have a whole array of terms to parse the varieties of butch and femme: stone butch, soft butch, high femme, boho femme, lipstick lesbian, baby dyke. Lithuanian and lebanese were both used as pseudo code words—Ellen Degeneres did a famous talk show interview pre-coming out about the rumors that she was lebanese, for instance.

Alix Dobkin, one of the first out lesbian women's music performers, did a song called "Lesbian Code" about the terms for lesbians she picked up in her travels while performing all over the US, in the UK, and in Australia. "She's got Dutch boy fingers" was always one of my favorites, especially because it usually takes people a beat to get it. And I lived in Dyke Heights for a long time.
posted by not that girl at 2:34 PM on December 15, 2015 [5 favorites]


Mel Gordon's book "Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin" has a section devoted to Berlin Lesbian Culture which includes a rundown of the various titles applied to the groups. (Also the clubs that they went to. If you're interested in Weimar Berlin, it's a great read.) One thing that's noted by Gordon in his book is that the subcultures, clubs and scenes come and go so quickly sometimes that recording all of the slang and even the details can be an extremely difficult task.

BUBIS—Masculine, or butch women
DODOS—Tuxedoed, sophisticated power women.
GAMINES—Pert, saucy femmes. Usually attired in exaggerated French street urchin clothing when clubbing.
GARÇONNES—Young women with Bubikopf haircuts and shaved, penciled-in eyebrows. [Also known as BACHELORETTES or HANSIS.]
GIRL-FRIENDS—Generic name for homosexual women. [Variants: HOT SISTERS.]
GOUGNETTES—[From French underworld argot] Expensive lesbian callgirls, who appealed to both genders.
HOT WHORES—Heavily made-up professional prostitutes who serviced only female clients. [Variant name: SALVATION ARMY GIRLS.]
MÄDIS—Ultrafemmes. [Variants: LADIES, LITTLE MEN, or SWEET MOMMIES.]
SHARPERS—Sexually aggressive but refined and socially well-positioned Bubis. [Known as SCORPIONS in the Wilhelmian and Inflation periods.]
TADPOLES—Unattractive, career Bubis.

Note that there's no *specific* notation that all of the terms were by lesbians for lesbians, but Gordon notes that "The German penchant for classification and uniforms further differentiated the Berlin lesbian milieu. Bubis, Dodos, Gamines..." [etc.] "...were the expressive orders that one was supposed to inhabit by reason of sexual outlook and sexual affect. And even those types contained distinctive categories based on class status, political affiliation, perceived affluence, romantic interest, and appearance."
As most groups of people have their own slang and ways of talking, it's also possible that there is a lot more that has been lost as the groups and sub-groups changed and were broken up when the National Socialists really started to put their foot down in 1933. And that's only Germany!
posted by Zack_Replica at 2:45 PM on December 15, 2015 [14 favorites]


Because I'm pretty sure we don't change the pitch of our voice on purpose when we hit puberty as our voice deepens because of hormonal changes in the body.
I think we can, at least. I was just noticing yesterday that if you listen to women on the radio in, say, the 50s, you hear a lot of high, girly voices. If you listen now, you hear what sounds more like a natural range. Joni Mitchell has a lot to say on that subject, for what it's worth:
Yeah, the soprano is a girly tone, just by the nature of it. You will notice American women -- because this is such a youth culture - speak unnecessarily high compared to women around the world. Women in Europe frequently talk with low voices, but here somebody is ready to call you a lesbian at the drop of a hat. You know, they want to check for hair on your chest or something. America is weird that way. I remember in one of my early reviews, a guy ripped up my music as "effeminate." I thought that was pretty funny. I think if you will look at my early work, it is much more female. Art needs to be a balance between masculine and feminine. I'm just a spirit with a mouth.
posted by klanawa at 4:08 PM on December 15, 2015 [5 favorites]


That's a weird theory. Doesn't seem to make sense to me. I mean, is he talking about the pitch of the voice or the style of speaking?

It actually isn't a weird theory, although I don't think the details were clear from just the comment you're responding to.

The idea is that all of us use a speaking style that is reflective of our social identities - this isn't contested whatsoever within linguistics, although details may be. Instead of thinking of our voices and the details of our pronunciation as being entirely determined by our physiology, think of our physiology as giving us a natural "range" of possibilities, which we control consciously and subconsciously.

(For example, we know that the average pitch of a speaker differs between cultures, even when you control for relevant physiological differences like size. This is because culture can influence us within our natural range. This includes things like American men having lower voices on average than same-sized men in many other countries.)

So, it all boils down to straight male masculinity not being the neutral, unaffected by culture, natural state of a man's voice. The argument goes further to say that masculinity is in some ways constructed as distance or difference from femininity, and this includes some details of "masculine" speech.

As a side note, the documentary may be good - but take anything it says about the phonetic details of "gay speech" with a grain of salt. I haven't seen it yet, but secondhand recounting is that it's not too accurate and that even the speech therapist (?) says some weird stuff.

One researcher doing really interesting work in this area is Rob Podesva.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 4:28 PM on December 15, 2015 [9 favorites]


I wonder how much of this is also down to the comparative invisibility of lesbians. First you have women just generally being disregarded, particularly by male historians (as the columns point out). Then you have a Western society that treats intimate female friendships as something that is more natural and expected, so that historically women who are in sexual and romantic relationships with each other are able to pass as "just good friends". Then of course you have the murky grey area between intimate friendships and romantic friendships and romantic relationships and sexual relationships - not necessarily on that kind of spectrum, but shifting and intersecting with a great deal of complexity. I mean, people still argue over whether Sappho was just good friends with the women her romantic and erotic poetry addressed. And if people didn't conceive of themselves as lesbian, who are we to impose that label on them just because we want a sense of history?

By the way, don't make the mistake of looking up current lesbian slang. A lot of it is depressingly misogynistic. Or maybe I have finally lost my sense of humour and am a true lesbian feminist at last.
posted by Athanassiel at 6:33 PM on December 15, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm struck by the many words for gender performance. Polari has some words for whether a man is masculine or feminine, but it's pretty diverse for that.
posted by pxe2000 at 10:53 AM on December 16, 2015


It's tangential to the post, but this reminds me of the short film I saw recently consisting of two (gay) men on a park bench, sussing each other out with the cant.

It's pretty fascinating, and utterly impenetrable. (I realize now this is link "1" above, but it's worth calling out directly.)
posted by uberchet at 7:37 AM on December 17, 2015


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