How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [11]
“I had this one female director on a film who would rush over to me on the set and kiss me and say, ‘Honey, you look fabulous! How are you, girlfriend?’ Or she’d say, ‘You go, girl.’ None of my circle says these things. That’s old stuff that only straight people would think of saying. We don’t do ‘she’ for he. We don’t call each other girlfriends. I guess she thought she was putting me at ease, or showing off her gay vocabulary. To me it’s as insulting as if I were black and she sauntered over and said, ‘Hey, bro, wassup?’ ” But the worst thing, said Pancake, was the “damned word ‘fabulous.’ ”
“We were improvising some dialogue and she wanted me to say ‘fabulous’ this and ‘fabulous’ that. Finally I stopped and looked at her and said, ‘Perhaps you’ve noticed that I don’t say “fabulous.” At all. Ever.’ She backed down, and I had a modest victory. I think I ended up saying ‘fantastic,’ which is more of a relief than you can imagine.”
Pancake was a guest star on the famous “c-word” episode of the HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm. In the episode, Pancake plays a seemingly straight studio executive who makes a bad call at a poker game. Larry David calls him a “cunt,” and all hell breaks loose. Larry loses his chance to do a show with the network, and Pancake’s character has a nervous breakdown and comes out of the closet as a gay man.
“We were trying to find a signal, supposedly a subtle one, that my character was gay before the ‘cunt calling’ incident happens,” says Pancake. “Curb Your Enthusiasm is improvised from an outline, so all of us were throwing around what words would make me seem gay. A couple of the actors suggested that I compliment someone on an article of clothing made by Prada or Armani. I thought that was too stereotyped. Instead, we hit upon having me call myself a ‘ditz’ when I dropped some cards. All of us agreed that a straight man would never use the word ‘ditz’ to describe himself.”
Are there words that a truly straight man would never utter? Probably. There is a funny spelling-bee episode on Will & Grace in which Jack is asked to spell “taffeta.” Yet I like to think that straight men, and women, are pressured to use words they might just ignore when they are presented with them on gay-inflected restaurant menus and in Pottery Barn catalogs.
The Gay Co-opting of Multicultural Vocabulary, and God Save the Queen
Let’s talk about the word “queen.” Until the seventies or so, it merely meant a female ruler of a country or a particularly effeminate homosexual. The term “drag queen,” indicating a homosexual man who dresses as a woman, has been around since at least the 1920s. Yet in the last decade, “queen” has developed a new meaning that has crossed over to the straight community. To be a “queen” means you are particularly intense about something.
The term that has crossed over best to heterosexual-land is “drama queen,” meaning someone who adores his or her own personal drama a bit too much. A drama queen is a whiner. All teenagers make good drama queens.
In casual straight slang, a “queen” suffix can be attached to any predilection; hence Courtney Cox Arquette, who likes to drive fast, can be dubbed a “speed queen.” A person who loves films can be a “movie queen.” I’ve seen avid Internet types described as “computer queens.” Yet lurking in the wings in the gay verbal community are far more sexually descriptive uses of the queen construction. Rice queen: a guy who likes Asian men. Size queen: a man who prefers large penises. Curry queen: a lover of Indian men. The term “queen” is just a great platform for instantly categorizing a person’s obsessions and desires. It is endlessly versatile and ripe with future possibilities for the straight vocabulary. I predict that heterosexuals will someday refer to men who like big breasts as “boob queens.”
Whereas “queen” originated in England, another popular gay term, “diva,” comes from Italy. It’s an opera term that gay men have made their own. They’ve expanded the definition,