"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”.

Comments

Speaking as a linguist

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Avram. The word "language" caught my eye so I read your post & then followed the link to the article...

Unless Leap is being misquoted *a lot*, he is misusing basic linguistics terms (i.e. language, dialect, slang). Something that is a "language" cannot be defined as "essentially a homosexual 'code,' with double meanings".

Tiger (the "more reasonable" professor you mention) isn't much better if he "could not understand why a prominent producer of instructional audio cassettes specializing in foreign languages has not come out with its own line of homosexual-language products."

If it weren't for the detailed conference website (www.american.edu/cas/anthro/lavenderlanguages), I'd be very tempted to think that this was a joke.

I think you're right that "jargon" is a good term for what they are discussing, given that it seems to match English syntax and semantics aside from a small set of lexical items. (Btw, there's much more evidence for "ebonics" being a separate language (syntactic differences, some mutual unintelligibility), and most linguists still classify that as a dialect or set of dialects of English.)

-Sa(ra), MA & abd PhD in Linguistics