From: ae606@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Victoria Edwards)
Gay & Lesbian Language Bibliography
http://www.ling.nwu.edu/Individuals/Ward/gaybib.html
Studies on Gay & Lesbian Language: A Partial Bibliography
Compiled by:
Gregory Ward Department of Linguistics Northwestern University gw@nwu.edu
Ashley, Leonard R. N. 1980. Lovely, Blooming, Fresh, and Gay: The Onomastics
of Camp. Maledicta 4:2.223-248.
Ashley, Leonard R.N. 1982. Dyke Diction: The Language of Lesbians. Maledicta
VI: pp. 123-62. Also in Studies in Homosexuality, Dynes, W. and S.
Donaldsen, eds. 1994. Hamden, CT: Garland.
Ashley, Leonard R.N. 1979. Kinks and Queens: Linguistic and Cultural Aspects
of the Terminology for Gays. Maledicta III: pp. 215-56.
Bardis, Panos A. 1980. A Glossary of Homosexuality. Maledicta IV.1: pp.
59-64.
Barton, Richard W. 1985. Language and Theorizing about the Sexual Subject: A
Semiotic Approach. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 6, pp. 351-375.
Boswell, John. 1980. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality.
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. This book deserves inclusion because of its
lengthy, and philologically sound, discussion of the words which supposedly
refer to homosexuality in the Bible. Not about gay speech per se, but it
represents an intersection of gay and linguistic interests. [Gene Buckley]
Chauncy, George. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making
of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. Basic Books. People who are interested in
the history of gay, fairy, queer, etc. would probably want to have a look at
this. Chauncy is a historian, not a linguist, but he devotes a good bit of
attention to this terminology, is fairly careful, and has gobs and gobs of
citations, from the 1890's on (police records, personal letters and
recollections, minutes of organizations, novels, etc.) See especially the
introductory section on these terms pp. 14-23. According to him, gay was
used (as a `code term', i.e. argot) starting in the 1920's and 1930's; he
has written citations from several novels of the 1930's, plus of course
`Bringing up baby' in 1938. On the other hand, fairy seems to have been the
common slang term for gay men, used by straight and gay alike, as early as
1900 or before, at least in NYC; see the many citations in his Chapter 1.
Faggott, queer and trade [sic] were not far behind. [David Dowty]
Chesebro, James W., ed. 1981. Gayspeak: Gay Male and Lesbian Communication.
New York: Pilgrim Press. [contains 25 papers on lesbian and gay
communication]
Chesebro, James W. 1994. Reflections on Gay and Lesbian Rhetoric. In R.
Jeffrey Ringer, ed. Queer Words, Queer Images. New York: NYU Press. Pp.
77-90.
Connor, Randy P. 1993. Blossom of Bone: Reclaiming the Connections Between
Homoeroticism and the Sacred. San Francisco: Harper. Much of the cultural
evidence connecting gender variance (queers) in the many societies and
religions examined here is language-based and offers a compromise to both
social constructionists and so-called essentialists, but showing the merits
of both in religious and anthropological styled studies. The book is
cross-cultural and transhistorical in focus, and, while not ignoring
European-dominant culture, places it within the context of shall we say
global or archetypal gay-lesbian-bisexual studies. [David Hatfield Sparks;
email: hmab171@utxvm.cc.utexas.edu]
Conrad, James Roger. 1991. The Orientalizing of Homosexuals: Language and
Its Consequences for Identity and Community. Rutgers University, 5th Annual
Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference, November.
Cory, Donald Webster. 1965. The Langage of the Homosexual. Sexology
32:3.163-65.
Courouve, Claude. 1985. Vocabulaire de l'homosexualite masculine. Paris:
Payot. Pp. 248. [more or less a French version of Homolexis]
Darsey, James. 1994. Die Non: Gay Liberation and the Rhetoric of Pure
Tolerance. In R. Jeffrey Ringer, ed. Queer Words, Queer Images. New York:
NYU Press. Pp. 45-76.
Davidson, Alan G. 1991. Looking for Love in the Age of AIDS: The Language of
Gay Personals, 1978-1988. Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 28, No.1, pp.
125-137.
Donovan, J. 1992. Homosexual, Gay, and Lesbian: Defining the Words and
Sampling the Populations. Gay and Lesbian Studies. Haworth Press. Doesn't
really discuss lesbian, but interesting experimental-type study. [Anonymous]
Doyle, Charles Clay. 1982. Homosexual Slang Again. American Speech
52:1.74-76.
Dynes, Wayne R. 1985. Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of
Homosexuality. New York: Gay Academic Union.
Dynes, Wayne R. 1987. Homosexuality: A Research Guide. New York: Garland.
[all `language studies' are listed on pp. 355-371
Dynes, Wayne R. 1987. Homolexis. Gai Saber monograph #4. 100+ pp. Gay
Academic Union, NYC, P.O. Box 480, Lenonx Hill Station, NY, NY 10021. [This
was found on sale in A Different Light bookstore in LA; your local lgb
bookstore might have a copy or be able to order one.]
Dynes, Wayne R., ed. 1990. Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. Hamden, CT:
Garland. Pp. 1522. [770 articles in 2 volumes]
Eyre, Stephen L. 1990. Mastery by Metaphor: Emotional Conflict as a Weapon
Against AIDS. Delivered at the session on ``Narrative, Culture, and the
Transformation of Suffering,'' 89th Annual Meeting of the American
Anthropological Association, New Orleans. [A critique of Sontag's ``AIDS and
Its Metaphors'' based on a brief analysis of narrative metaphors.]
Fai, Dianne, Carlene Potter, and Steven Zepp. 1989. Ms. A preliminary
sociolinguistic (variationist) study of lesbians and gay men in Ottawa/Hull
conducted in 1989. The complete package, including the interview protocol
and several multivariate analyses, amounts to probably around 1000 pages.
Some of the material examines lesbian and/or gay men's speech wrt linguistic
structures associated to sex by other researchers, other sections examine
features of Ottawa English in general, and several narratives are analyzed
in Labovian terms. The study is the result of a methodolically-based course
at the University of Ottawa. [Steven Zepp]
Farrel, Ronald A. 1972. The Argot of the Homosexual Subculture.
Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 14, pp. 97-109.
Gaudio, Rudi. 1994. Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and
Straight Men. American Speech 69:1, pp. 30-57.
Grahn, Judy. 1984. Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds. Boston:
Beacon Press. 324 pp. This is less a discussion of language than of culture
and mythology, with a strong influence from Goddess spirituality; but
includes comments on the history of many words used to describe gay people.
I don't vouch for its etymological rigor. [Gene Buckley]
Gordon, Michael. Sexual slang and gender: Women and Language. Fall 1993.
Reports on male vs. female vocabularies for a variety of sexual topics.
[Lynne Murphy]
Hayes, Joseph J. 1976. Gayspeak. Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 62, No.
3, pp. 256-266.
Hayes, Joseph J. 1978-9. Language and Language Behavior in Lesbian Women and
Gay Men: A selected bibliography. Journal of Homosexuality 4, pp. 201-12,
299-309. [cited in the article on language and linguistics in the
Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, Wayne Dynes, ed. Garland Library of Social
Science, v. 492. New York:1990]
Holm, Hans-Christian. The Alternative Dictionaries. An experimental on-line
dictionary of slang, `dirty words' and other `bad language'. To visit the
web site, click on: The Alternative Dictionaries.
Johansson, Warren. 1981. The Etymology of the Word Faggot. Gay Books
Bulletin 6, pp. 16-18, 33. Also in Studies in Homosexuality, Dynes, W. and
S. Donaldsen, eds. 1994. Hamden, CT: Garland.
Kendall, S. 1993. Paper presented at the Lavender Languages Conference at
American University. Using the turn-taking model, Kendall compared the
discourse of heterosexual couples, lesbian couples, and female friends.
Kendall claimed that heterosexual dyads are `assymetrical' while female
friends dyads are `symmetrical'. [Sean Crist]
Labov, T. 1993. [?] Article in American Speech on high school slang in which
terms such as art fag are discussed.
Leap, William L. 1991. Gay Men, Gay English and the Negotiation of Gay
Identity. Rutgers University, 5th Annual Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference,
November.
Leap, William L. 1993. Gay men's English: Cooperative discourse in a
language of risk. In Prejudice and Pride: Lesbian and Gay Tradiions in
America. New York Folklore, 19 (1,2): 45-70.
Leap, William L. 1994. Learning gay culture in a `desert of nothing':
Language as a resource in gender socialization. High School Journal 77
(1,2): 122-131.
Leap, William L. 1995. Learning Gay English: self-managed socialization.
Paper presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics meeting.
March.
Leap, William L. To appear. Beyond the Lavender Lexicon. Gordon and Breech
Press.
Liang, Anita. 1995. Gay implicature as straight delusion. Paper presented at
the American Association for Applied Linguistics meeting. March.
Lumby, Malcolm E. 1976. Code Switching and Sexual Orientation: A Test of
Bernstein's Sociolinguistic Theory. Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 1, No.
4., pp. 383-399.
Lynch, Michael. 1986. Saying It. The Body Politic, Vol. 30, pp. 50-51.
Manalasan, Martin. 1993. Paper presented at the Lavender Languages
Conference at American University. Manalasan studied the speech of gay
Phillipino men living in New York City. His data was primarily lexical, but
he did have some interesting insights into the sociological situation.
Manalson conceived of this speech as an argot. [Sean Crist]
Max, H. 1988. Gay(s) Language - a Dic(k)tionary of Gay Slang. Texas: Banned
Books.
Mays, V.M., et al. 1992. The Language of Black Gay Men's Sexual Behavior:
Implications for AIDS Risk Reduction. The Journal of Sex Research
29:425-434.
Moonwomon, Birch. 1985. Toward an analysis (characterization?) of lesbian
speech. In proceedings of the 1985 Berkeley Conference on Women and
Language.
Moran, J. 1991. Language Use and Social Function in the Gay Community.
Georgetown University, NWAVE 20, October.
Murray, Stephen O. 1980. Lexical and Institutional Elaboration: The `Species
Homosexual' in Guatemala. Anthropological Linguistics 22. Also in Studies in
Homosexuality, Dynes, W. and S. Donaldsen, eds. 1994. Hamden, CT: Garland.
Newall, Venetia. 1986. Folklore and Male Homosexuality. Folklore 97. Also in
Studies in Homosexuality, Dynes, W. and S. Donaldsen, eds. 1994. Hamden, CT:
Garland.
Ng, Eve. 1994. Labels and Group Identity in the LGBO Community. Unpublished
ms. Department of Linguistics, 685 Baldy Hall, SUNY. Buffalo, New York
14260-1030.
Ostrom, Aaron Bruce W. 1983. A Study of Lexical Items in the Gay Subculture.
In Jerold A. Edmondson (ed.), Research Papers of the Texas SIL: Pilot
Studies in Sociolinguistics: Variation, Use, and Attitudes. Pp. 72-87.
Dallas: SIL.
Painter, Dorothy S. 1980. Lesbian Humor as a Normalization Device.
Communication, Language and Sex. Cynthia L. Berryman and Virginia A. Eman,
eds. Massachusetts: Newbury House Publishers, Inc. Pp. 132-148.
Penelope, Julia. 1986. Heteropatriarchal Semantics: `Just Two Kinds of
People in the World'. Lesbian Ethics. Fall. Pp. 58-80.
Read, Kenneth. 1980. Other Voices. The Style of a Male Homosexual Tavern.
Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharp Publishers. 212 pp. An ethnography of a gay bar
(`male homosexual tavern') which does contain a number of references to
language used by gays males and has a brief glossary at the end. [Ron
Southerland]
Remlinger, Kathryn. 1995. Keeping it Straight: The Socio-linguistic
Construction of a Heterosexual Ideology in a Campus Community. Paper
presented at the 1995 Georgetown Linguistics Society. [Kathryn's email
address is: karemlin@mtu.edu]
Roberts, J.R. 1979. In America They Call Us Dykes: Notes on the Etymology
and Usage of Dyke. Sinister Wisdom 9, pp. 2-11. Also in Studies in
Homosexuality, Dynes, W. and S. Donaldsen, eds. 1994. Hamden, CT: Garland.
Rodgers, Bruce. 1972. Gay Talk: a Dictionary of Gay Slang. New York: Putnam.
Rodgers, Bruce. 1972. The Queen's Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon. San Francisco:
Straight Arrow Books.
Rudes, Blair A. and Bernard Healy. 1979. Is She for Real?: The Concepts of
Femaleness and Maleness in the Gay World. In Madeleine Mathiot, ed.
Ethnolinguistics: Boas, Sapir and Whorf Revisited. The Hague: Mouton, pp.
49-61. This is a study of how she is used in the Buffalo gay male community.
[James Haines]
Rudner, William A. and Rochelle Butowsky. 1981. Signs Used in the Deaf Gay
Community. Sign Language Studies 30: 36-48.
Siegel, Paul. 1994. On the Owning of Words: Reflections on `San Francisco
Arts and Athletics vs. United States Olympic Committee'. In R. Jeffrey
Ringer, ed. Queer Words, Queer Images. New York: NYU Press. Pp. 30-44.
Smith, George W. 1988. Policing the Gay Community: An Inquiry into
Textually-Mediated Social Relations. International Journal of the Sociology
of Law, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 163-183.
Spears, Richard A. 1985. On the Etymology of Dike. American Speech 60, pp.
318-27.
Stanley, Alessandra. 1991. Militants Back Queer, Shoving Gay the Way of
Negro. New York Times, 6 April 1991, pp. 23-24.
Stanley, Julia Penelope. 1970. Homosexual Slang. American Speech, 45, pp.
45-59.
Stanley, Julia Penelope. 1974. When We Say `Out of the Closets!' College
English, November, pp. 385-391.
Stanley, Julia Penelope. 1974. What's In a Name: The Politics of Naming.
Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, April.
Stanley, Julia Penelope and Robbins, Susan. 1976. Sexist Slang and the Gay
Community: Are You One Too? Modern Language Association, New York, December.
Stone, Charles. 1981. The Semantics of Gay. Advocate 325:20-25.
Sweet, Michael. To appear. Talking About Feyglakh: A Queer Male
Representation in Jewish American Speech. Queerly Phrased. A. Livia and K.
Hall, eds.
Taub, Diane and Leger, Robert G. 1984. Argot and the Creation of Social
Types in a Young Gay Community. Human Relations 37, pp. 181-189.
Thiverge, Yvon. 1975. Linguistic Oppression and Liberation. The Body
Politic, Vol. 19, p. 25.
Treichler, Paula. 1988. AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An
Epidemic of Signification. In Douglas Crimp, ed. AIDS: Culture Analysis,
Cultural Activism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 31-37.
Treichler, Paula. 1988. AIDS, Gender, and Biomedical Discourse: Current
Contests for Meaning. In E. Fee and D.M. Fox, eds. AIDS: The Burden of
History. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Pp. 190-266.
Treichler, Paula. 1992. AIDS, HIV, and the Cultural Construction of Meaning.
In Gilbert Herdt and Shirley Lindenbaum, eds. The Time of AIDS: Social
Analysis, Theory, and Method. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. [Chapter 4]
Tucker, Scott. 1982. The Power of Naming. Christopher Street. 58.60-63.
Webbink, Patricia. 1981. Nonverbal Behavior and Lesbian/Gay Orientation. In
Clara Mayo & Nancy Henley (eds.), Gender and Non-Verbal Behavior. New York:
Springer. Pp. 253-9.
Wells, Joel W. 1989. Sexual Language Usage in Different Interpersonal
Contexts: A Comparison of Gender and Sexual Orientation. Archives of Sexual
Behaviour, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 127-143.
Wells, Joel W. 1990. The Sexual Vocabularies of Heterosexual and Homosexual
Males and Females for Communicating Erotically with a Sexual Partner.
Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 139-147.
Williams, W.L. 1993. Being Gay and Doing Research on Homosexuality in
Non-Western Cultures. The Journal of Sex Research 30.2.115-120. Not
specifically on language research, but has interesting comments on
(intimate) participant observation! [Anonymous]
Winder, Roger V. Placidus. 1992. The Influence of Sexual Orientation on the
Description of People. Honours Academic Exercise, Department of English,
National University of Singapore.
Wittig, Monique and Sande Zeig. 1979. Lesbian Peoples: Material for a
Dictionary. New York: Avon.
Wittmer, Jill L. 1991. Tongue Techniques: An Investigation of Lesbian
Language. Rutgers University, 5th Annual Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference,
November.
Zeve, Barry. 1993. The Queen's English: Metaphor in Gay Speech. English
Today 9.3:3-9. This article deals mainly with two areas of linguistic usage
in the gay community: the term (metaphor) closet and what the author calls
`names' (what others might term `labels'), the latter including fag, dyke,
queer, etc. Besides including references to the standard literature on
metaphor, the author also has a discussion of a few gay usages and appends a
short `gay glossary'. [Ron Southerland]
--
It is not economical to go to bed early to save the candles if the result
is twins. Chinese Proverb