An Investigation Into the Form and Function of Language Used by Gay Men in South Africa
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RAND AFRIKAANS UNIVERSITY An investigation into the form and function of language used by gay men in South Africa Submitted as partial fulfilment for the degree Master of Arts In the Department of Applied Linguistics and Literary Theory by KEN CAGE November 1999 Supervisor: Dr M.E. Sweetnam Evans ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the following persons for their contributions to this study: My supervisor, Dr Moyra Sweetnam Evans, for enthusiastic support and constructive guidance; The members of staff of the Department of Applied Linguistics and Literary Theory at the Rand Afrikaans University for their consistent support and interest; The staff of the Inter-Library Loans Department in the R.A.U. Library for excellent and friendly service in sourcing the many books and articles which I required; My mother, Patricia Cage, for proofreading much of this study; My life-partner, Deon Hendrikz, for his understanding, interest and support; The many gay men and women who participated in the gathering of data and who gave me encouragement in my research. CONTENTS Chapter 1 1.1. Background 1 1.2. Terminology 4 1.2.1. The meaning of the word 'gay' 4 1.2.2. The meaning of the word 'subculture' 7 1.3. Why study gay 'language'? 7 1.4. Handling of sensitive material 10 1.5. Gayle as an element of 'Camp' 10 1.6. Origins of the gay subculture in South Africa 12 1.7. Reasons for this study 13 1.8. Personal Experience 13 1.9. The Parameters of the Research 13 1.10. Presuppositions 14 1.11. Overview of the Contents 14 Chapter 2 2.1. Methodology 16 16 2.1.1.The first questionnaire 2.1.2.The second questionnaire 16 2.2. How the questionnaires were disseminated 18 2.3. Demographics of the respondents 19 Chapter 3 3.1. The form of Gay Language in South Africa 22 3.2. Gayle as an anti-language 23 3.3. Gayle as a variety of language in a contextualised situation 26 3.3.1. Field 27 3.3.2. Tenor 28 3.3.3. Mode 31 3.4. Elements of Gayle 31 3.4.1. Lexical items 31 3.4.2. The Element of Feminisation 32 3.4.3. Heterophobic and Homophobic Elements 35 3.4.5.The Element of Reginisation 37 . 3.4.6.The Element of Globalisation 37 3.5. The Use/Function of Gayle 38 3.5.1. Concealment 38 3.5.2. Identification 39 3.5.3. Revelation 40 3.5.4. Humour 41 3.5.5.A form of verbal creativity 42 3.5.6.A social engineering device 42 3.5.7.A form of protest 43 Chapter 4 4.1. Conclusions 45 4.2. Recommendations 46 4.3. Presuppositions 47 Bibliography 48 Appendix A: Lavender Languages VII 55 Appendix B: A partial Polari lexicon 61 Appendix C: A lexicon of Gayle 67 Appendix D: Interview with an SAA flight steward 108 Appendix E: Frequency of word usage 113 Appendix F: Research Questionnaires 120 Appendix G: Glossary of reginised phrases in Gayspeak 131 Appendix H: Categories of words found in Gayle 134 Appendix J: Empirical Data 136 Chapter 1 1.1. Background It is well documented that due to global oppression within the Judeo-Christian tradition, gay people throughout the Western world have, for a long time, used a secret form of language to communicate among themselves. Examples of this secret language have been traced back to the gay subculture of the High Middle Ages (Higgins, 1993:54). The term 'language' is used here, not as an indication of a constructed language, with its own phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon, but in the same way in which the linguist speaks about 'men's language', 'women's language' and 'children's language'. In the United Kingdom this gay 'language' is called Polari. Although difficult to document, it is thought that Poled dates back to the mixing of the gay subculture with that of the underworld at the time of the Industrial Revolution when people drifted from the small rural villages and communities towards the larger towns, in search of work and opportunity. These urban locations offered an increased opportunity for the development of communities of outcasts, and molly houses flourished (private places for men to meet, drink and have sexual relations with one another)(Norton, 1992:52). Consequently, a linguistic culture of Polari developed which seems to owe much of its formation to the lingua franca of travelling showmen in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (http://www.cygnet.co.uk/—cdenning/ polari.html). The disappearance of large numbers of travelling performers in the early twentieth century denied the language its breathing space and, as many of the entertainers moved into travelling circuses, the language moved with them. During the ensuing years, Polari fed into the theatrical profession, a profession traditionally associated with 'poofs' and 'whores'. By the mid twentieth century, Polari had become an elaborate code which gay people used to communicate in order to conceal their sexual orientation. It is a particular form of slang which comprises odds and sods from rhyming slang, circus backslang, Romany, Latin, canal-speak, Yiddish and criminal cant. It is best described as a collection of expressions and words thrown together to make an arcane glossary, whose zenith was during the 1960's when it became the lingua franca of British gay men. As a result of the close ties between Australia and New Zealand with Britain, Polari spread to these countries and became widely used in gay circles in Australasia. It was more common 30 years ago when gay men had more need of a private slang, than it appears to be today. This seems to be confirmed by the 1999 BBC production of the gay series "Queer as Folk", which is an eight- part teleseries documenting the lives of a group of twentysomething gay friends in Manchester in the 1990s. Produced by Red Productions for Channel 4, and distributed by An Investigation of the Form and Function of Language used by Gay Men in South Africa Page 1 Video Collection International, this series was broadcast on BBC Channel 4 in April/May 1999 as mainstream fare. Throughout the 6 hour series, not a single word of Polari is spoken, even for humorous effect. This indicates that Polari is possibly an anachronism no longer spoken by young gay men in Britain. A new book on Polari by Paul Baker of Lancaster University, based on his doctoral research, is scheduled for publication early in 2000, and promises to be a comprehensive study of the language. (An example of Polari words is supplied in Appendix B.) Gay men in the United States developed their own language which became known as Gayspeak or Queerspeak. It did not rely on Polari as a base, and appears to be an indigenous argot which developed in the gay ghettos of New York and San Francisco from the fifties onwards. Much has been written about Gayspeak, and Bruce Rodgers has compiled the most comprehensive dictionary (over 12000 entries) on this language variety in Gay Talk: A (Sometimes Outrageous) Dictionary of Gay Slang. The Gay Phrase Book — Get your man in six different languages by Barry McKay (1997) is a multi-language dictionary which gives equivalents for English gay words and phrases in French, German, Japanese, Italian, Nederlands and Portuguese. The existence of this book indicates that gay language is not restricted to English speakers. At about the same time as Gayspeak was developing across the Atlantic, 'coloured' and white South African gay men were also starting to use their own in-group form of communication. It became known as Gayle, a name which derives from the lexical item Gail, which means 'chat' in the language. It is suspected that Gayle originally developed in the `moffie' drag culture of the Cape 'coloured' community in the Western Cape in the 1950s, and was Afrikaans orientated. This Afrikaans form of Gayle was later transplanted to a large degree into the predominantly white Afrikaans gay subculture in Cape Town, and then to Pretoria (Olivier, 1994:223). The language spoken by English-speaking gay people in Johannesburg differed in many ways from this Cape original for various reasons: 1.1.1. The state-inspired division between English and Afrikaans speakers in South Africa in the sixties and the seventies, led to a conscious effort to avoid speaking Afrikaans by English speakers, who, as a result of their experience with Afrikaans during national service, inter elle, practised a type of linguistic apartheid of their own and viewed Afrikaans as an inferior language. English gay men consequently adopted many items of Gayspeak into their speech, as a result of their contact with gay men abroad, particularly in the United States. This contributed greatly to the globalisation of gay English in Gayle. An Investigation of the Form and Function of Language used by Gay Men in South Africa Page 2 1.1.2. This linguistic apartheid was compounded by the social apartheid of the time, and consequently there was very little communication between white English speakers and coloured Afrikaans speakers. 1.1.3. Many white Afrikaans gay men in Johannesburg tended to be anglicised and most of them spoke both English and Afrikaans fluently, preferring to speak English in social situations. These Afrikaans-speaking gay people were probably the first wave of the current "Anglikaners" in South Africa — mother-tongue Afrikaans speakers who have adopted English as their everyday language. This adoption of English as the language of choice in the Johannesburg gay environment may be a reflection of the rejection of the values of the Afrikaans political establishment, which promulgated draconian anti-gay legislation, and was therefore seen as the enemy of the gay cause.