How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [12]
“When I was in my twenties, someone said to me, ‘Your mother is a real diva, isn’t she?’ ” says Luke Yankee, son of actress Eileen Heckart, who starred in the films Butterflies Are Free and the gay cult classic The Bad Seed, among many other movies and Broadway plays.
“I was confused,” says Yankee. “How could my mother be a diva? She was an actress, not a singer.” Yankee, who became a stage director and playwright, went on to work with many divas himself in the twenty years after he first learned that his mother was one. Now he says that the word means “someone who is outstanding in his or her field, and someone who can sometimes be stubborn and a perfectionist.” After twenty years in the theater, he created a one-man show called Diva Dish, about his mother and her friends. In the process, he found that divas were everywhere.
“The term has definitely crossed over to the straight world. Just Google the word and you’ll see it everywhere.”
I did just that, and found thousands of entries. There are diet divas, wine divas, horror divas, feng shui divas, rubber-stamp divas, makeup divas, and scrapbook divas. My favorite was “dorm diva,” meaning the alpha girl who has the looks and power on a college dormitory floor. But the word, after it was borrowed from the opera world, was used by gay men for years to indicate a high-maintenance person or a spectacular personality. The surest sign of its straight appeal nowadays is the array of diva specials on VH1. Cher, Tina Turner, Brandy, Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, Céline Dion, Gloria Estefan, Shania Twain, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Queen Latifah, and Faith Hill have all been designated “divas” on these programs, the most popular in VH1 history.
I asked Luke Yankee about the title of his own show, Diva Dish. Was that particularly gay? Did he name it that because he’s a gay actor/director?
“I first heard the word ‘dish’ in gay circles around 1984,” he said. “But now I’ve found that the term is very familiar to straight audiences. ‘Dish’ is now just a term for gossip, straight or gay. I didn’t give it a second thought. Most of my audiences are straight people, on cruise boats, college campuses, and in theaters. They understand what ‘Diva Dish’ means immediately.”
The gay community has also borrowed greatly from African-American slang, and has served as a conduit to the straight world for certain terms. I first heard “diss,” now a common phrase in all circles, from my gay male friends. Yet it started in the black community as a verbal form culled from “disrespect.” The term “bitch-slap” also crossed over from black speakers to the gay male world, where it has become mostly a vague threat and a colorful way to express aggression, a kind of bark without a bite. Straight folks use it, too, and they also use “slut” and “whore” in ironic ways—these two terms have lost their sting since filtered through the gayspeak context. “Girlfriend” and “You go, girl!” also made their way to the gay male world via the black urban slang lexicon, as well as everyone’s new favorite put-down, “skanky ho.”
Silver-Screen Speak
Gay men taught America how to become infatuated with pithy movie dialogue. Long before all of us went around saying “Show me the money!” or “Go ahead, make my day,” gay men were communicating by uttering famous lines from campy cult movies. Many of these phrases have now passed into hetero-speak. “People come and go so quickly here,” says Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. The Oz phrase is also uttered by Prior as he lies dying of AIDS in Angels in America, and repeated by gay and straight people in real life when they are feeling confused or anxious. (It’s interesting that from the sixties well into the eighties, gay men would ask one another “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” a parody of the Alcoholics Anonymous question “Are you a friend of Bill?”)
Big-eyed Bette Davis, in various roles, was a fount of campy lines embraced by gay men and then later by heterosexuals.