Language and sexual orientation -
gay language

by

 Daniel Spuhn

Gay Men ... 2

Research on gay language from the past up to now ... 4

Male language - female language: some obvious differences ... 5

Gay Men ... 8

Characteristics of gay talk ... 10

"Degrees of Gayness" ... 11

Performance ... 13

Sounding Gay ... 15

Literature ... 17

In this paper I want to discuss some issues of gay men′s language. Before I focus on some details I′ll give an introduction about society′s development concerning acceptance and consideration of gay - straight people′s relationship. After that I want to point out some differences of gays and gays - male gay men and female gay men, fags, queens and drags - gays in gay community or gay scene or outside of it and at last gays in a test situation, being observed while speaking / reading. Nevertheless I′ll mention prejudices about gay men′s conspicuousnesses and some truths in today′s society, which are also represented by the media, and finally differences of gay men′s behaviour and kind of speaking in comparison to straight men (and women).

Gay Men

Talking about gays one has to define what gay is. Gay men are boys or men who are attracted to the same sex - which means men - and get sexual satisfaction by having intercourse with men. Talking about gays, these persons also have to "be out", which means that most of family, friends and colleagues know that this person is gay. Furthermore gay people can be divided into at least two groups: persons who are "just gay" and mostly frequent in heterosexual surroundings, and gays most of whose friends also are gay and who usually meet up with gay men and therefore belong to a kind of gay scene or community. There are people who say that one is born into gay community, but I do not necessarily share this opinion, at least not in those terms mentioned above. 

Rusty Barrett says: “The gay community cannot be thought of as an artifice like, say, a stamp collectors’ club or Alcoholics Anonymous. In such social groupings, as a condition of membership, one agrees to abide by club’s bylaws, and if one does not like the club’s rules, one can set up one’s own competing club. Rather the gay community is a natural community in the way English is a natural language but the computer languages Fortran and Cobot are not. If one is born in England of English parents, it is not an option to decide not to speak English as one’s mother tongue but to set up linguistic shop instead of some artificial language, in the way one can, if one does not like one computer language, simply make up one’s own. Gays simply find themselves immersed in the presumption of protecting each other’s closets. Individual consent has nothing to do with that.“¹ Of course there are some truths in this statement, but it also gives reasons for discussion. The comparison of being born by English parents in England and the subsequent necessity of learning English as mother tongue raises two questions to me. First: for speaking gay do I need gay parents? Second: when somebody recognizes that he is gay, did he sound gay from the beginnings of learning to speak? Probably the answer to both questions is “no“. Gay men cannot become pregnant and get babies, and at the age children learn to speak they try to imitate their mother’s and father’s pronunciation and parents take care that the children learn to speak properly. Furthermore gay language’s development has some similarities to creating new computer languages.

[...]

1 Barrett, Rusty, The “Homo-genius“ Speech Community in: Livia, Anna, Hall, Kira, Queerly phrased, Oxford, New York 1997, p.188