One would expect an equivalent process of masculinization for lesbians. They would be real “blokes.” So what do we find? In French, the only masculine term used—and rarely at that—is
Julius
. Except for this term, even when it is to stress the supposed virile trait of the lesbian, feminine forms of words are used:
camionneuse
(meaning “female truck driver,” a reference to the largely masculine profession and the physical appearance to which she seems to be linked), and
hommase
(“man-girl”) for a lesbian of masculine appearance. In this way, women will never even attain “masculine dignity”; the feminine appears to be a deliberate characteristic of the insult.
What then are the privileged traits in lesbian insults? There is geographical origin (Lesbos, the island where Sappho lived), which is not negative in itself. However, one must note that, historically, “lesbian” was first a masculine noun to designate a dainty, the male lover of a man. It is only later that the term was used to designate homosexual women. The French terms
gouine, gougne,
and
gougnotte
come from an old Norman noun meaning “slut.” These words referred to prostitutes before being applied to lesbians, just as the verb
gougnotter
means “to have sexual relations with a woman.” As for the term
gousse
, it came from the Old French word
gouce
meaning “bitch,” then “debauched woman,” or from the verb
gausser,
“to eat like a dog, in a gross manner.” Even if synchronically these meanings are not present, it is nonetheless true that in the constitution of the vocabulary of homophobia, the lesbian is reduced to the rank of bitch or slut, that is to say, she is unworthy of being human or is less than human. The only thing, in heterosexist language, that could then save the lesbian is to submit to the norm, i.e. male domination.
Homosexuals are also designated by their activity or behavior, especially sexual practices. This is why gays hear themselves being called “sodomites,” “buggers,” “sods,” and “cocksuckers” (in German
arschficker
, “ass-fucker”); lesbians are called “grazers” and “carpet munchers.” One will note here the almost exclusive predominance of the passive character for denominations concerning gays. Along the same line, when an injunction is invoked, it is usually akin to “fuck you” or “go get”
+ passive verb
, not active (e.g., “screwed” or “buggered”; similarly, “Go screw yourself” or “Bugger off”) (in Spanish,
¡vete a tomar por culo!, ¡que te den por culo!)
.
The rarer “active” denomination for homosexuals refers to he who sexually penetrates, such as “bugger”; these terms tend to be used in
prisons
, and to designate sexual predators, including pedophiles. In this sense, the term
pederast,
“elder of the Greek gay couple” “who liked young boys,” was used in the nineteenth century to wrongly describe all homosexuals. Through the erroneous use of this word, the confusion between homosexuality and
pedophilia
was integrated into the vocabulary.
The homophobe often calls on science to justify rejection and disparagement. Until the early 90s, the World Health Organization considered homosexuality to be an illness, and for a long time,
psychoanalysis
considered—and still does, according to certain schools—homosexuality to be a deviant behavior. Given this, use of the derogatory terms “pervert” and “invert” are often based on scientific attitudes.
The association with illness or harm increased as a result of the
AIDS
epidemic. Gays are considered an “at-risk population.” There is a preference to stigmatize identifiable groups rather than risky behavior, which would also imply heterosexual men. The link between gays and AIDS persists; we find it today on Red Cross blood donor forms, which exclude gay males (a group) rather than individuals who have had multiple sexual partners (behavior). The confusion inherited from the history of vocabulary—pedophilia/pederasty—continues, and in recent cases involving pedophilia, homosexuals as a group are once again accused of being pedophiles. The search for the origins of homosexuality has made its way to genetics: a “defective” gene could be identified as the cause of this “deviance.” One can see the specter of eugenics rearing its ugly head in the event that an operation is possible to “fix” one’s homosexuality.
Finally, homosexuality appears as an aggravating circumstance in certain legal matters where sexual orientation has no relevance. Thus, we have seen certain newspaper articles about hold-ups at automatic teller machines featuring such headlines as “The Assailant Was Gay” (when have we ever seen a title along the lines of “The Assailant Was Heterosexual”?). Such statements contribute to the association of homosexuality with an illness or offence and contribute, be it unconsciously, to the general homophobic climate.
The Wear & Tear of Words
The meanings of words that we use are sometimes eroded or modified. Today, “fuck” refers more often to a form of verbal punctuation that gives rhythm to a sentence, rather than to a sexual practice. It is the same for certain insults, which sometimes lose their basic semantic content and come to mean only the insult itself. When you call someone a “fag,” it does not always refer to his sexual practices; sometimes it is only the will to reject him. In the same way, “We are not gay” does not necessarily refer to homosexuality, but sometimes only to weakness or fear. “Gay” then becomes the quintessential insult, a sad privilege.
This being said, history gives us examples that are more positive: in the old language,
bougre
(“bugger”) meant homosexual, a negative term that in the Middle Ages was used to designate the Bulgarian heresy. Today, in French, a
bon bougre
(“good bugger”) simply means “a good guy”: the stigmatization has disappeared.
Internalization & Rehabilitation
The insult depends in great part on the context. Who speaks to whom, in what circumstances, and in whose presence? One cannot, in fact, neglect the importance of whether or not the insult is witnessed, which implies that a third person can take sides. If we speak mostly of the homophobic designation outside of the group (hetero-designation), we must still consider the way homosexuals designate themselves and each other (auto-designation).
There are two distinct mechanisms at work: internalization and rehabilitation. Internalized homophobia reproduces within the group, consciously or not, the rhetoric imposed from the exterior, particularly the rhetoric of the sin that one confesses (i.e. his or her homosexuality) and the
shame
that follows. However, it also consists of the recreation of sub-classes, among which some are rejected for the same reason homosexuals are rejected by heterosexuals: we can make distinctions between “queens,” “femmes,” “butch dykes,” “leather men,” “gym bunnies,” and “the straight-acting.”
Tolerance
is not an assumed way of life among gays themselves. Bisexuals are, for their part, sometimes reduced to the rank of the “repressed.” That is, the same words can be used or perceived as being either laudatory or insulting, depending on the participants and the circumstances.
Finally, during the successive struggles for the right to both difference and indifference, gays and lesbians have rehabilitated and reinvested pejoratively used terms and transformed them into standards of protest. Insults become passports to pride. One is gay or lesbian, and proud to be as such. Nothing is confessed anymore: one comes out of the closet (without being outed). The most positively invested term is certainly the word “gay,” which certainly refers to carefree, but is also quite resistant to insult: one has difficulty saying “damned gay” (compared to “damned fag”).
Beyond the acknowledgment of gay and lesbian rights, particularly through their effect on language, it is the entire diversity of sexual behaviors that should be acknowledged and respected, and not only homo and hetero. This is partly the sense of the “queer” movement (“bizarre,” “sick,” “perverted”), which refuses the slightly normative conformism that is prevalent in the gay and lesbian community, sitting somewhere behind the affirmation of its identity.
—Dan Van Raemdonck
Delor, François.
Homosexualité, ordre symbolique, injure et discrimination
. Brussels: Labor, 2003.
Rey, Alain, ed.
Dictionnaire historique de la langue française
. Paris: Ed. Robert, 1998.
Eribon, Didier.
Réflexions sur la question gay
. Paris: Fayard, “Histoire de la pensée,” 1999. [Published in the US as
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self
. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.]
Grahn, Judy.
Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds
. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.
Larguèche, Evelyne.
L’Injure à fleur de peau
. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993.
———.
Injure et sexualité
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.
Peterkin, A. D.
Outbursts! A Queer Erotic Thesaurus
.Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003.
Rodgers, Bruce.
Gay Talk: A (Sometimes Outrageous) Dictionary of Gay Slang
. Formerly titled
The Queens Vernacular
. New York: Paragon Books, 1979.
Rosier, Laurence, and Philippe Ernotte.
Le Lexique clandestin, Français et Société 12
. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Duculot, 2000.
—Abnormal; Caricature; Heterosexism; Humor; Insult; Literature; Media; Rhetoric.
WILDE, Oscar
The 1895 trials and subsequent imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for the crime of gross indecency represented the height of Victorian-era homophobia, and a crucial turning point in the history of homosexuality in Western society. When his first trial began, Oscar Wilde was never more popular: his play,
The Importance of Being Earnest,
was a triumphant success, and as a brilliant conversationalist with a scathing wit, he was as much a celebrity by virtue of his outrageousness and flamboyant lifestyle as he was for his literary output (which included plays, novels, and poems). As a high priest of estheticism, Wilde’s eccentric style made him a preferred target of caricaturists, who delighted in his fey mannerisms. But the world was at Oscar Wilde’s feet: from London to Paris (by way of New York), aristocratic and high-society types alike fought over his droll presence at dinner parties and events. But sadly, in a few short months, the name Oscar Wilde became the most loathed and despised name in all of
England
.
Over the previous twenty years, Great Britain had known many
scandals
involving so-called “crimes
against nature.
” The trial for conspiracy to commit sodomy of two transvestites, Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, in 1871; the Dublin Castle Affair in 1884; and finally the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889– 90, which despite government efforts to cover it up, compromised a number of prominent aristocrats, all patrons of a male brothel with a penchant for telegraph messenger boys. According to the British gross indecency amendment of 1885, championed by Member of Parliament Henry Labouchère, “all acts of gross indecency” committed between men were punishable by two years’ imprisonment, which may include hard labor. The sentence may have seemed relatively moderate in comparison to previous legislation (which called for a minimum of ten years’ imprisonment), but the number of convictions climbed steeply. In effect, the deliberately vague wording of the amendment widened the law’s application, which until then had only been applied to the “crime of sodomy”; and Oscar Wilde would become one of its most famous victims.
Wilde’s first meaningful relationship with a man occurred in 1885 (a year after his marriage to Constance Lloyd), when he met a young Canadian by the name of Robert Baldwin Ross. Ross would become Wilde’s lifelong friend, and, eventually, his literary executor. Before meeting Ross, however, it is believed that Wilde had his first homosexual encounters while attending Magdalen College at Oxford, where he arrived in 1874. There, he became a student of English essayist and literary critic Walter Pater who, in his collection of essays,
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
(1873), celebrated,
sotto voce
, the esthetics of German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and called for the rediscovery of classical (Greek) morality. Wilde’s marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884 silenced (for a time) rumors of his homosexuality, which resurfaced in 1891 when he published his novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. The ambiguous figure of the novel’s young dandy, his double life, and his troubled relationship with his friend and portraitist Basil Hallward allowed for many levels of interpretation (whereas repeated allusions to Michelangelo, Montaigne, and Shakespeare were codes for the initiated reader). The year 1891 was also when Wilde became intimate with Lord Alfred Douglas (who went by the name of “Bosie”), son of John Sholto Douglas, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry. Although their relationship was short-lived, their attachment to one another endured: Bosie apparently introduced Wilde to London’s homosexual underground of male brothels, procurers, and prostitutes, and to the pleasure of, in Wilde’s words, “feasting with panthers.”
As a result, Wilde’s sexual recklessness put him at the mercy of potential blackmailers. Having a taste for provocation, he did not hesitate to receive, in hotels or at the Café Royal, young working-class boys whom he treated with generosity. And he and his friends wore green carnations on the opening night of his play,
Lady Windermere’s Fan
(1892), which some interpreted as a homosexual code. Wilde’s general insouciance, encouraged by Douglas, would reveal itself to be ultimately fatal: Victorian society only tolerated homosexuality if it were kept secret. By openly defying the unwritten rules of bourgeois conformity,Wilde became the target of rumors and accusations that became more and more overt: for one, Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, left a calling card for him at one of Wilde’s hangouts, the Albermarle Club; on the back of the card, he wrote, “For Oscar Wilde, posing
Somdomite
” (sic). Supported by Douglas, who loathed his father, but against the advice of most of his friends, Wilde chose to put an end to these incidents and sued the Marquess for criminal libel.