How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [10]
To “out” someone became a verbal construction in the eighties, when endless debates raged about whether it was fair to reveal someone’s same-sex orientation without consultation. Now to be “outed” has a wider connotation and is often part of hetero-speak. “Please don’t out me as a hamburger-lover,” a male heterosexual coworker once said to me. A person can be outed for smoking or liking bad TV shows—all fairly trivial offenses compared to having to explain a sexual lifestyle in the midst of a homophobic environment.
Divine Adjectives and Modifiers
Everything is sooooooo something these days, isn’t it? This formerly homosexual modifier pops up everywhere, and it’s as useful as “umm” and “like” in conversations. Sometimes the “soooooo” doesn’t have to modify anything—it can be accompanied by eye rolling or a fingered “loco crazy circle sign” just as effectively. Graham Norton, the sooooo gay host of a popular BBC talk program, became “So Graham Norton” for the title of his show. One use of “so” has particularly captivated straight talkers: the combination of “so” and a year, as in “so 1987” or “so 1999.” Another popular phrase, “so last year,” comes directly from gay fashion designers and pundits. “I am so over that” is another great put-down and all-purpose transition phrase for straight talkers, followed closely by “all that.” She’s all that, he’s all that, we’re all that.
“Totally” is another omnipresent gay modifier. One hears it everywhere now, and it was put to good effect in the title of VH1’s clever documentary Totally Gay.
The way homosexual men use adjectives has transformed American speech. In the fourth grade, I wrote a story about two astronauts in a space capsule. My teacher criticized me for having one of the male astronauts say that Earth looked “gorgeous” from up above. Real men don’t talk like that, she said. Girls talk like that. Now, forty years later, straight male lingo has been heavily inflected by swishy, over-the-top adjectives, and on demographically young stations such as MTV and in Gen-Y guys’ magazines, formerly effeminate adjectives such as marvelous, fabulous, yummy, breathtaking, and glorious are crossing over to a straight audience.
The word “fabulous,” especially, is making a huge comeback and is used by straights almost as often as gays. Of course, there’s always the question of whether “fabulous” is being used seriously or in an elaborate show of irony. Since even among straight people, fabulous is often said with an elaborate drawl—Dahling, you look faaaaabuuuuulous—my guess is that the word has drifted to the land of irony, never to be redeemed. In my book, gay men invented irony, and straight Americans embraced it. Irony, especially the mainstream-culture-irony brand hawked by faux talk shows such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, has emerged as a peculiar American art form. It’s different than satire, originally a purely British product.
But back to “fabulous.” The British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous (AbFab) is about two sodden middle-aged straight women who talk like gay men. The delightful Patsy and Edina dialogues, written by the show’s creator, Jennifer Saunders, complete a pop-culture cycle that has been ongoing since the 1960s, a sort of intellectual ecosystem. The two women have borrowed their locutions from gay culture (Edina’s second husband actually was gay, and so is her son). Sweetie, darling, fabulous, fantastic—these are regular AbFab terms. “I simply adore it,” Edina will say. And who are the biggest fans of these straight women spouting gayspeak? Gay men. And so the speech cycle from gay to straight back to gay again is completed, as it often is.
I spoke to Los Angeles actor Sam Pancake, who’s often cast as a gay male assistant or waiter in films (Legally Blonde 2) and on TV shows (Friends, Will & Grace). Pancake is annoyed by straight