When I wrote last Friday’s post on homophobic language I said, “The words gay (used in a demeaning fashion), fag, sissy, fairy, queer, faggot can do psychological damage to a young person especially when used in a degrading way.” Roderick, a reader of this blog, and always such a sweet darling, asked, “Joe, interesting that you don’t even mention the term “queer.” Is it or is it not homophobic?” I pointed out that I had mentioned it; however, it was a brief comment. So, I thought perhaps I should do another post on derogatory gay euphemisms. They have been used in movies, by politicians, religious leaders, and everyday people. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Below are some terms I feel are important to address.

The first term is gay when used in a demeaning fashion. It is interesting how that word came to mean homosexual. It appears to have its origins around the 12th century in England derived from the Old French word ‘gai’, which in turn was probably derived from a Germanic word though that isn’t completely known.  The word’s original meaning meant something “joyful”, “carefree”, “full of mirth”, or “bright and showy.” However, around the early part of the 17th century, the word began to be associated with immorality. Fast-forward to the 19th century, and the word referred to a woman who was a prostitute or a gay man who slept with a lot of women (ironically enough) often prostitutes. 

However, in the 1920s and 1930s, the word’s meaning began to change. In its sexual definition, a gay man no longer meant a man who had sex with a lot of women, but now referred to men who had sex with other men. By 1955, the word officially acquired the added definition of homosexual male. The 1938 movie, Bringing Up Baby, was the first film to use the word gay to mean homosexual.  In one scene, Cary Grant ends up having to wear a lady’s feathery robe. When another character asks why he is wearing that he responds with an ad-libbed line, “Because I just went gay.”  At the time, mainstream audiences didn’t get the reference, so the line was popularly thought to have meant, “I just decided to be carefree.” Whether Grant meant gay as in homosexual or gay as in carefree is up for debate, but rumors about Grant’s sexuality have always been around especially when it pertained to his relationship with Randolph Scott.

Queer is a word particularly traumatic for me. I don’t like hearing it, and I don’t use it. Some people classify queer as a sexuality different from gay especially in the term genderqueer another word for non-binary. Merriam-Webster defines “queer” as a “sometimes disparaging & offensive” term for same-sex attraction. Some LGBTQ+ activists began to reclaim the word as a deliberately provocative and politically radical alternative to the more assimilationist branches of the LGBTQ+ community. Even with that usage, I still find it offensive because of personal experiences. As I said in Friday’s post, “When the gay community normalizes these words, they don’t know the traumatic affect it can have on someone younger.” When it comes to the word queer, I find it homophobic, and it causes a great deal of discomfort. However, others in the LGBTQ+ community don’t see it that way as long as it’s within the LGBTQ+ community or in academic usage such as queer studies. I guess it is up to which side of the fence you fall. 

My daddy always told me not to be a sissy. I hate the word. I think we all know this, but it deserves repeating: sissy (derived from sister), also sissy baby, sissy boy, sissy man, sissy pants, etc., is a pejorative term for a boy or man who is not traditionally masculine and shows possible signs of fragility. Sissy implies a lack of courage, strength, athleticism, coordination, testosterone, male libido, and stoic calm all of which have traditionally been associated with masculinity and considered important to the male role in Western society. A man might also be considered a sissy for being interested in traditionally feminine hobbies or employment (e.g., fashion), displaying effeminate behavior (e.g., using hair products, displaying limp wrists), being unathletic, being homosexual. By the 1930s, the most damning insult was to be called a sissy; the word was widely used by American football coaches and sports writers to disparage rival teams, and to encourage ferocious player behavior. Good students were taunted as sissies, and clothing styles associated with higher social classes were demeaned as sissified. 

Fairy denotes not only homosexuality but effeminacy. It has been used when speaking of gay men for over 100 years. One example of its use was from the Roaring Twenties. On a Friday night in February 1926, a crowd of some 1,500 packed the Renaissance Casino in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood for the 58th Masquerade and Civil ball of Hamilton Lodge. The New York Age reported nearly half of those attending appeared to be “men of the class generally known as ‘fairies,’ and many Bohemians from the Greenwich Village section who [….] in their gorgeous evening gowns, wigs, and powdered faces were hard to distinguish from many of the women.” For the most part, fairy has been stripped of its power by the Radical Faerie movement and new-era queers. On a side note, Faerie Camp Destiny, the Radical Faerie sanctuary in New England, began in the town where I currently live though it has since moved. (It is now in southern Vermont.) Radical Faeries have always been a special group in the gay hippie sanctuary of Vermont.

While growing up, I heard other phrases from my mother.  She would describe gay men as having “sugar in their shorts,” that they were “light in the loafers,” or the ever-popular “queer as a $3 bill.” Because of my mother’s derisive use of these phrases, I particularly hate them. Though I don’t remember my mother using it, “limp-wristed” was another common phrase. Holding your hand up and flipping your wrist down so it looks limp has been a code I’ve known for most of my life to mean gay. Southerners have always enjoyed using colorful language to disparage people. Sodomite was well-known in the South during the 19th century. Though it is the place where LGBTQ+ people have the least rights and respect, a Williams Institute study looking at LGBTQ+ demographics across the United States found that the South had the largest LGBTQ+ population of all other regions in America. With an LGBTQ+ population of 3,868,000, the South surpassed every other region in its makeup of the 11,343,000 Americans—roughly 4.5 percent – that “identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.” Eventually, the South will have to wake up and start treating their own people better.

Before ‘’gay’’ became common and accepted parlance, the world had many other unofficial names for men who liked men. Some names were self-created by the gay community, and others were thrust, often cruelly, upon gay, bi, and queer men. Following are a few terms used in the past some of which are thankfully becoming obsolete while others are being reclaimed by the gay community. Mary is a mostly innocuous term from the middle 20th century used among gay and bi men. It was first mentioned in the early 1900s and has been reclaimed by the gay community. An example is Hamburger Mary’s Bar & Grille, a gay-themed and LGBT-friendly burger restaurant chain started in San Francisco in 1972. The eateries are often in gay neighborhoods and are intended to represent stereotypical gay culture through humorously named menu items, flamboyant décor with many of their locations hosting drag shows on weekends.

Nancy boy is based on a vaudeville term. The ‘nance,’ was a gay burlesque character from the 1930s who created laughs as he pranced about the stage creating campy scenes and sketches of gay life. The ‘nance’ character put on an outrageous show and was popular with audiences. In the late 1930s, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, fearful of how the lurid burlesque shows would make his city look in the upcoming World’s Fair of 1939, cracked down on burlesque houses. Part of LaGuardia’s anger was aimed at the ‘nance’ whom critics said created audiences of lusty gay men having sex in the dark balconies of the burlesque emporiums. It was an outrage, the Mayor said, and police began swooping down on burlesque shows closing many and forcing others to drop the ‘nance’ act or greatly curb it. The term has always been used to mock gay men and today is still used in a derogatory fashion.

Flowers have a long association with the LGBTQ community. The American “Pansy Craze” of almost 100 years ago cemented the use of that flower’s name as a slang term for gay men. During the Pansy Craze of 1930–1933, drag queens, known as “pansy performers”, experienced a surge in underground popularity especially in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Oscar Wilde earlier turned the green carnation into a symbol for gay men in England by wearing one in his lapel. Violets were associated with Sappho herself, and the calamuswith Walt Whitman. A pre-Stonewall gay bar at the corner of Christopher Street and Gay Street was called The Flower Pot. While we don’t know whether “lavender” refers to the color or the herb, either way, the word seems to have been used in connection with gay men since the 1920s. It’s now used interchangeably with “rainbow” to mean “LGBTQ+” at events like Lavender Graduations, and the annual Lavender Law Conference of the LGBT Bar Association.

While we are on the subject of plants, a “fruit” is another euphemism for a gay man. I don’t think “fruit” has been reclaimed. It still gets under my skin. It’s a word used to laugh at us. When I first came out in graduate school, one of my professors walked up to me at a bar gathering of the History Department and drunkenly said, “Congratulations, I hear you are a fruit.” I was horrified. It was an inappropriate thing to say to a student. He was a very rude man from Canada, a historian of Latin America. Canadians don’t tend to be so rude at least I’ve never found them to be. However, it’s what I’d expect from a Latin America historian. Sorry if you are one, hopefully this doesn’t pertain to you, but I have always found them not to be the nicest of people. When it comes to historians, we all have our own quirks associated with our disciplines; medievalist are always a strange bunch of people, military historians tend to be rivet counters (obsessing on minutiae of their particular interest, especially military and technology history), oral historians tend to be the most liberal and social justice-minded. I could go on, but I will likely offend someone if I haven’t already. Besides, I’m off topic.

I know this list is only the tip of the iceberg. I stayed with American euphemisms and derogatory terms. I did not delve into words and phrases for the rest of the LGBTQ+ spectrum.  Lesbians, bisexuals, transgender, non-binary, etc., have derogatory terms directed at them. I also didn’t discuss the more subtle and not so subtle terms used in politics for gay-baiting such as fussy, hysterical, San Francisco, wine drinker, lifestyle, etc. Then there is the rest of the world who have their own terms; the list goes on and on and on. While terms are being reclaimed by some in the LGBTQ+ community, I cannot stress this enough: many of them will continue to be hurtful to other members of the community. Childhood and family trauma live with a person their entire lives. It is forever. When you grow up hearing words and phrases used derogatorily and directed at yourself, it is almost impossible to reclaim them and use them for your own empowerment. 

On July 4, 1965—four years before Stonewall—39 activists from D.C., New York, and Philadelphia marched on the place where the Declaration of Independence had been signed roughly two centuries earlier. They wanted to remind the nation that their rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” had been denied. Dressed in formal attire—the men in coats and ties, and many of the women in skirts and dresses—they carried signs that read Equal Treatment Before the Law and Homosexual Bill of Rights.

For the next four years, the organizer of that protest, Craig Rodwell, along with his comrades, Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen, marched in Philadelphia. Their demonstrations became known as “the Annual Reminders.” But in the summer of 1967, Rodwell also decided to do something that was, in its own quiet way, more radical than marching. He wanted to open a bookstore. Rodwell was the vice president of the Mattachine Society, a gay male political group. He wanted to make the Society more accessible to people, instead of just sitting in an office. He wanted the Society to set up a combination bookstore, counseling service, fund-raising headquarters, and office. When the Mattachine Society rejected Rodwell’s plans to open a bookstore, he resigned from the group and decided to do it alone.

The Stonewall protests two years later would draw broad attention to the struggle for gay liberation, but that struggle did not start in 1969. There were protests, and thriving gay communities, before that night in New York City—and Stonewall’s success was rooted in those earlier efforts. Activists like Rodwell understood the value of visibility; he was among the architects of New York’s gay-pride parade. But some were struggling not just for rights or liberation, but for something still more revolutionary. They were fighting for what they called “gay power,” the authority to define their own identity. Their efforts produced the intellectual revolution that lent the Stonewall protests their power, and which helped ensure that long after the protests were over, the changes they wrought would endure. The victories of Stonewall, then, had the unlikeliest of birthplaces: the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop.

In 1967, there were no gay community centers, save San Francisco’s Society for Individual Rights, that offered cultural programming and recreational activities. There were no gay bookstores that included shelves of gay books. In fact, there was no such thing as serious gay nonfiction. Libraries had systematically cataloged homosexuality as a deviance or a disorder. There were the occasional novels—notably, The Well of Loneliness, published by Radclyffe Hall in the United Kingdom in 1928—but mostly there was pulp fiction and porn, and novels that had queer subtexts. In 1870, Bayard Taylor had published Joseph and His Friend: A Story in Pennsylvania, widely considered to be the first American gay novel. Joseph and His Friend was the story of a newly engaged young man who finds himself instead falling in love with another man. The book was not well received. Then there is Bertram Cope’s Year, a 1919 novel by Henry Blake Fuller, which is sometimes also called the first American gay novel, but it was never widely circulated, and the gay theme was never fully specified. Gay novels have always had a specific but not large audience. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, gay literature was very hard to find in bookstores. It was even worse in the decades before I was born.

Therefore, Rodwell wanted a bookstore that would provide LGBTQ people with intellectual engagement as well as books on homosexuality. He also wanted the store to offer psychological-counseling services because, in 1967, the American Psychiatric Association still listed homosexuality as a mental illness in its diagnostic and statistical manual. For many queer people in the 1960s, the search for books, which offered some clues about homosexuality, was how they navigated their way out of the closet. When I first wanted to find out what it meant to be gay and was trying to understand my sexuality, the internet wasn’t widely available, and books were the only place to turn. When I was in college, Books-A-Million and their mall store Bookland had few if any gay books. Luckily, Montgomery had a Barnes and Noble back then, and the store did have a small gay literature section. It was worse in the 1960s. Those who went looking for gay books typically came up empty-handed. 

Rodwell boarded a bus and headed to Fire Island, a Long Island beach town that had become a gay hub, with the hope that he could earn enough money working as a bartender to open the store. Three months later, he arrived back in New York City. He found a storefront in the Village with a rent of $115 a month. He had to come up with the first month’s rent plus two month’s security. That amount came to $345, which was one third of what he’d earned tending bar. So, he paid the rent and security deposit and opened the first-ever gay bookstore in the world at 291 Mercer Street, between Waverly Place and East Eighth Street. In 1973, Rodwell moved the store to 15 Christopher Street. He kept the Mercer Street store open for several months, for “sentimental reasons,” but finally closed it in May 1974.

He wanted a name that would tell people what the shop was about, so he tried to thin of the most prominent person whose name I could use who is most readily identifiable as a homosexual by most people. Oscar Wilde seemed the most obvious at the time, so he called it the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop.

Rodwell planned the official opening for a few months later, on November 24, 1967. His mother arrived from Chicago the day before and they stayed up all night setting up the store. His plan to offer counseling services never came to fruition, but the store itself proved unexpectedly radical. The few identifiably queer books that could then be found in libraries—by Hall or Wilde or any other queer writers—were scattered by differences in genre, nationality, and date of publication. As Rodwell and his mother placed books by queer authors on the same shelf, they redefined the meaning of homosexuality. It was no longer simply a deviance or a disorder. It was, instead, a coherent category—with shelves of books to prove it.

The bookshop was immediately popular within the gay community. The store was packed, especially on Saturday afternoons, when Rodwell served free coffee and pastries. News of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop traveled around the country, and around the world. Gay readers wrote to Rodwell, asking for book suggestions and praising him for making LGBTQ novels, newspapers, and pamphlets available. Young men wrote, asking for advice on how to come out. European tourists told their friends, who made it a point to visit the Oscar Wilde Bookshop on their trips to New York. American soldiers stationed in Vietnam ordered books and asked for magazine subscriptions to The New York Hymnal, a journal Rodwell founded and edited. A handful of Americans and Europeans wrote to Rodwell asking for help on how to establish their own stores, which led, for example, to the creation of Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia. (The store title was taken from the title of James Baldwin’s 1956 homoerotic novel, which was the first gay book I ever bought and read.) The bookshop had not only become a major touchstone for New Yorkers but also symbolized the promise of gay liberation to many others throughout the world.

On June 28, 1969, Rodwell was walking home from a bridge game with a friend when he heard noise coming from the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar that had been owned by the Mafia and frequently raided by the police. At first, he ignored it, but then he noticed that a crowd had formed around the police wagon; people were resisting being handcuffed by the police. Rodwell climbed onto the steps of the highest stoop and yelled, “Gay power!” and “Christopher Street belongs to the queens!” 

While Rodwell and others defined homosexuality on their own terms, refusing to allow those in positions of authority to be the sole authors of their identity, the revolution was not over. Discrimination continued. Decades of activism lay ahead. The Stonewall uprising amplified the work that Rodwell and others had been doing before 1969. And it was those networks of activists, and the intellectual revolution they set in motion—reclaiming and defining their own identity—that transformed Stonewall from an isolated event into a turning point in the struggle for gay liberation. The protests themselves eventually ended, but the books and articles these activists published endure, and continue to inspire new generations. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop closed on March 29, 2009 citing the Great Recession and challenges from online bookstores.

This post was adapted from an article in The Atlantic by Jim Downs, a history professor at Connecticut College.

On May 27, 2020, after 11 a.m., a 38-year-old African American transgender man, Tony McDade, was fatally shot in the Tallahassee, Florida, by an officer of the Tallahassee Police Department. The circumstances surrounding McDade’s death are still murky. Tallahassee Police say McDade was a suspect in a fatal stabbing that occurred shortly before his death. They also claim he was armed with a handgun and he “made a move consistent with using the firearm against the officer.” An eyewitness report has contradicted statements by the Police Department that McDade was armed with a gun. But this barely made the news. Why?

McDade doesn’t check off the appropriate boxes for being a “real” victim. He was transgendered, and for some, that’s not the face of the Black Lives Matter Movement and Protests. McDade’s death came on the heels of the high-profile deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd—who were killed in police encounters in Louisville and Minneapolis, respectively.

Florida has been an epicenter of anti-transgender violence over the past two years. Last year, the American Medical Association deemed a surge in the murder of transgender people an “epidemic.” The vast majority of victims are transgender women of color. Of the 52 reported murders of transgender or gender non-conforming people in the past two years, about 1 in 7 were in Florida.

I was going to talk about other civil rights moments when people who didn’t fit the bill of the perfect victim and were pushed aside or forgotten, but I decided to do a bit shorter of a post today. Did you know that five women refused to give up their seats to a white person and were arrested in 1955 before Rosa Parks became the face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott for doing the same thing? For one reason or another, the other women did not fit the profile that the Movement wanted. Several of these women did file the lawsuit Browder v. Gayle which eventually end bus segregation. Bayard Rustin, one of the organizers of the March on Washington, was eventually pushed out of the Civil Rights Movement for being gay. In many civil rights movements, those who didn’t fit into the perfect profile were ignored or pushed out. In the early gay rights movement, men who couldn’t pass as “straight” were not allowed to march with the Mattachine Society. The examples are really too numerous to mention all of them.

Never forget that Marsha P. Johnson, a black self-identified drag queen, was a leader of the Stonewall Riots. Many of the rioters in June 1969 were transgender, and we owe it to transgendered people of all races for the gains we have made in civil rights. Let’s not forget the “T” in LGBTQI+, because they are also our brothers and sisters. They deserve to be recognized as well. Just because a person doesn’t fit the perfect profile you want to see represent people that are treated unjustly, they were still treated unjustly, nonetheless.

As newly out actor Justice Smith recently said while protesting for Black Lives Matter:

“[Nicholas Ashe (his boyfriend)] and I protested today in New Orleans. We chanted ‘Black Trans Lives Matter’ ‘Black Queer Lives Matter’ ‘All Black Lives Matter’. As a black queer man, myself, I was disappointed to see certain people eager to say Black Lives Matter but hold their tongue when Trans/Queer was added. … I want to reiterate this sentiment: if your revolution does not include Black Queer voices, it is anti-black. If your revolution is okay with letting black trans people like #TonyMcDade slip through the cracks in order to solely liberate black cishet men, it is anti-black.”

While I know what it is like to be a gay man and have to hide who I am, I cannot begin to pretend that I know what life is like for a person of color. I know that the LGBTQI+ community and communities of color have faced similar struggles and fights for equal rights, it is far from being the same. Many of us can, and have, hidden our sexuality, but people of color can’t hide their skin color. African Americans need our support at this time. We are a nation in crisis, and we need to all come together to make it a better place. Especially since we have a president who as The New York Times reported: “Trump increasingly sounds like a cultural relic, detached from not just the left-leaning protesters in the streets but also the country’s political middle and even some Republican allies and his own military leaders.”