How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [14]
Before he came out as a gay man, actor Nathan Lane was frequently asked about his sexual orientation. At several interviews, he said, “Look, I’m forty, I’m single, and I work in musical theater—you do the math!” That bitchy, clever answer is the gayest thing he’s ever said, although after he officially came out, he followed it with nearly as clever a quip during a television interview: “Even now, I don’t greet people by saying, ‘I’m Nathan Lane, and I’ll be your homosexual.’ ”
The straight streak of witty gay talk began with Oscar Wilde: “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” Today Wilde’s mantel has been inherited by David Sedaris, one of the wittiest writers in America, who is gay but has a huge straight following on National Public Radio. His radio bits and published essays are gems of sardonic wisdom that display the full range of gay-language sensibility.
Says Sedaris, “ ‘College is the best thing that can ever happen to you,’ my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking.”
In a brilliant essay about his lisp, Sedaris talks about being forced to spend hours in therapy with other little gay boys. The sign on the door of the speech lab “might as well have read Future Homosexuals of America,” he writes. He also has the gay gift of poignant coinage—his beautiful essay “The Youth in Asia” is all about how his family had to put their dog down.
With an audience of both educated gay and straight people on NPR and exposure in mainstream publications such as Esquire and The New York Times, Sedaris is improving the vocabulary of heterosexuals just as surely as Cole Porter provided witty romantic lines for straight couples in his songs.
Dirty Talk: The Future of Gayspeak’s Influence on the Straight World
Linguists and speech therapists study an aspect of language called “code switching,” the ability of a person from a closed group to change diction, inflection, and vocabulary when talking to someone from another group. The best, and simplest, example of code switching occurs when adults talk to babies or small children. Our voices become higher and more melodic, and we use nonsense words or very simple sentences. Foreign-language speakers also code-switch as they go from language to language.
Gay men have code-switched for years, keeping their style of speaking and their vocabularies out of their conversations with straight people. Yet as acceptance of homosexuality heightens, there is less code switching going on. The straight world has already benefited from the influx of gay terms and locutions. And now we are on the cusp of the final linguistic frontier: dirty talk!
Terms such as “fuck buddy,” “trick,” and “boy toy,” which describe a more casual attitude toward sexual relationships, are already making their way into straight parlance. (Sex and the City devoted a whole episode to the fuck-buddy concept: a casual friend to whom you turn for sex on a fairly regular basis.) The gay term for checking out potential sexual partners, “to cruise,” has also been appearing in the heterosexual lexicon.
Several decades ago, to say “You suck!” or “This sucks” in public was forbidden. Now it’s a regular mode of discourse heard on nightly talk shows, and many people have forgotten that the object of the verb “suck” was once “cock” or “dick,” and that the phrase once had distinctly homosexual connotations.
The verb “to butt-fuck” is now an established heterosexual phrase. It’s rampant in bad heterosexual teen movies, where it always gets a laugh. The phrase “blow job” is harder to pin down as a homo-to-hetero term. It’s been around for a long while—since 1942—and was an American phrase that eventually traveled to Britain. Etymologists