"Lavender language"

[avram]

So I found this article about a university conference on “gay language” (via Gawker), and I’m amazed at the flat-out ignorance on parade. I mean, I’m neither a professor of linguistics not a homosexual, but I know better than this guy, Bill Leap, the coordinator of the conference:

Leap said "top" is one example of a term that homosexuals commonly use in placing personal ads. "To talk about a person as a 'top' immediately would label the speaker as lesbian or gay for anyone who knows lesbian or gay culture," he explained.

Um, no. “Top” and “bottom” are terms people in the BDSM (bondage/dominance/sado-masochism) scene use nowadays. As I understand it, these terms more or less replace the terms “sadist” and “masochist”, mostly because the old terms had connotations that were offensive or just plain inaccurate. The top plays the dominant role, and bottom the submissive one, though sometimes it’s the bottom who’s really controlling the sex play. (“Beat me harder! Do it faster! Now do my feet!”) Anyway, the important point is that these aren’t exclusively gay terms — hetero folks into BDSM use them too. I suppose that from a sufficiently naïve and vanilla perspective anything kinky looks a bit gay, but I expect professors to take more care in their language and claims.

I have an even harder time taking Leap, or the article, seriously when I see this:

But Leap cautioned that the so-called lavender language should not be mistaken for "gaybonics," a twist on "ebonics," which refers to slang used by some black Americans.

The lavender language is exactly what it is portrayed to be, Leap said. "We're not talking 'dialect' here. We are talking language."

Surely what we’re actually taking is something more like jargon, the “technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group” as Merriam-Webster defines it. Another professor is a bit more reasonable, describing gay jargon as being like “sports lingo”.