"Gay" Used to Mean "Stupid" and the Offense Therein

Great Debates
101

A pertinent update, from the Advocate’s web site:

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has expressed dismay at Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, a new film by Kevin Smith. GLAAD entertainment media director Scott Seomin claims in a letter to Smith that, among other things, “all references to gay men reinforce them as objects of acceptable ridicule and dehumanization” and “when sympathetic characters substitute the word ‘gay’ for something that is wrong or stupid, it validates a common slur used by school-age youth to mean anything unacceptable.” Smith, in an extensive posting on his Web site, notes that the pejorative use of the term “gay” by characters within the movie is primarily a function of their ignorance: “The jokes in the movie, while funny at face value, do far more than evoke chuckles at the expense of the gay community. I believe that they teach tolerance to the same audience that Scott feels won’t get the humor.”

102

Excuse the long quote as a refresher:

Got me thinking about something to do correlating sex and lameness and homosexuality on which I lost an afternoon’s thought a few years ago.

Okay so the deal is that in sixteenth-century France, to be ‘boiteux’, or ‘lame’, had a lot of myth surrounding it. Such that proverbs were coined, and French skeptical philosophers picked up on the image of the ‘lame-walk’ as a metaphor for irrational, skipping thoughts, to wit, being ‘lame-brained’.

Enter in Michel to Montaigne (a relatively nonhomophobe, see “On Some Verses of Virgil”). Michel writes an essay called ‘On the Lame’. And it is a conflagration of this metaphorical sense and the myths of the literal sense. His point is that it is only the lame who really understand anything, or that the only reason that really understands is reason that is skewed from the norms of common opinion. Meaning that it is actually a good thing to be ‘lame-brained’.

Don’t worry, I’ll get to the sex now.

In another essay, Montaigne writes about women who are witches. Somewhere he observes the common opinion that women who are witches better in the sack.

In another essay, somewhere else, Montaigne writes about a woman who leaps over a fence, and BINGO her little package comes out of this little skin covering, and everyone has to get used to the fact that Marie should have been named Jean. His moral is to ‘not judge a book by it’s cover’, and this essay is specifically about the homophobic censureship of Virgil.

All these vaguely linked allusions in Montaigne all somewhere collide somewhere or another. But it’s one thing to say that they were intended to collide, by Montaigne, and another to say that they collided in the minds of the reader.

What happened is that two French lit grad students, my friend and I, independently came to the conclusion that Montaigne says, somewhere, that “lame women are better in the sack”.

And to this day we can’t find the passage where Montaigne actually says this, and we are too lazy to trace whether the myth exists concerning the sexual prowess of lame females {although I think that Rousseau talks about it, the point was to demonstrate that he got the idea from Montaigne).

So we are lazy, unpunctilious readers.

But if Montaigne didn’t say this, how did we come to the conclusion about lame women and sex? Because of twentieth-century homosexuality’s association with the term gay. And this is not just a stab in the dark, but a real possibility.

Our Montaigne professor had written a book on that essay on homophobic censureship, never coming out directly and saying it was about homophobic censureship. His lecture is what gave us such a powerful recollection of poor Marie’s package falling out when s/he lept over that fence, and her/his subsequent identity crisis. And that same professor is homosexual, er, gay.

So whaddya do? The association of ‘lame-homosexual’ is so deep that we did a mis-reading, two separate people on two separate occasions? Sobering. Or perhaps, Montaigne really did intend for all of these myths about different people groups to be conflated such that he could reverse them, so that that ‘lame-brain’ is really the smart one, etc. ‘Lame-brain’ indeed became something of a compliment in France, referring to people who could think outside the box or outside the social norms. Skeptically inventive, or something like that. But precisely the connection that Erislover draws.

Of course, you stretch out the connotations, Montaigne’s real point is merely that skeptical philosophers (=himself included) are good in the sack.

103

Isin’t a thing like that the epitome of judging a book by its cover?

104

Bingo, it is!! :slight_smile: which is why Montaigne is such a brilliant writer who people should still read today (and not just the dirty parts).

But see what happened?

Don’t judge a book by it’s cover

Book:sexual organs :: cover of book: cover of sexual organs.

It’s not precisely a metaphor; it’s some other beastly variant of a metaphor with a long Greek name like synecdoche, which I think rhymes with the city in New York State. Meaning, there is a common ground for making the allusion: a literal cover to a literal cover associates books and sexual organs.

The thing is that in the sixteenth-century, people really didn’t mind it if you spoke about sex, just so long as your references to it were in the figurative sense, effectively covered by some literal meaning, like a rosebud, which alludes to the delectable part of female anatomy that the poem is in fact about. In the same sense, it was ok to talk about sex just so long as you spoke in Latin, not French. The foreign language covered the indiscretion.

So it was totally okay to talk about homosexuality and homoerotic scenarios, just so long as the covering was in place. In the case of Virgil’s poetry, Montaigne respects this social norm: all the homofriendly passages are in Latin.

But they are there.

Montaigne’s question is whether or not you can separate the ‘covering’ from what is underneath. You never know what accident is going to make Marie’s little Johnny come peeking out through the social fabric, disrupting everyone into wondering whether or not they knew it was there all the time or whether the question of Marie’s identity as a female is entirely relative to social context.

And this is precisely the point that Erislover is trying to raise, (or one of them).

Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.

And “don’t buy a cat in a bag.”

Another proverb that means just about the same thing. Check the merchandise before you buy or you might be cheated. An excellent capitalist piece of wisdom.

Only, in French, a female ‘cat’ is understood to be a reference to a particularly delectable part of female anatomy.

Reverse all the genders, and you get Marie/Jean.

“Don’t buy a particularly delectable part of male anatomy in a bag”.

Nothing to do with ‘checking the merchandise’, literally, but about nominalism, realism and essentialism and about the slippery nature of language: how on earth do you know when the figurative usage is going to reverse to the literal, in common usage, and vice versa, when ‘gay’ will jump the fence, as Marie did one fine day, meaning predominantly a homosexual and secondarily a happy person? And the person best positioned to see the slippage occur is the figuratively ‘lame’, the one who starts out as of step with conventional mores, tripping over what convention states is ‘rational’ and perceiving its irrationality: the homosexual trips over the usage of the word ‘gay’, and he lets the cat out of the bag.

And now I really am cribbing from Antoine Compagnon’s little book of the title, ‘Cat in the bag’.

Except that his point is that all these associations of language in figurative and literal allusions is completely arbitrary social convention, and it all changes, all the time. And he is right, except for a point: Marie turns into Jean, but now it is is Marie who is covered. Marie has not gone away. Marie and Jean are still connected by association. Even though that association is conventionally determined and shifting, once it is there it is there, hidden in the warp and woof of the society.

Just to say that the connection that Erislover raised between the words lame and gay as having in common a disregard for common rules of conduct–deviance from social norms–is quite a smart one.

And one that, in the French culture, was in my hypothesis almost certainly articulated in the Renaissance by Montaigne.

(And come to think about it, I think that I made the connection of Marie/Jean to lameness because I more or less assumed that a leap over a fence of such vigor as to make his/her packet fall out would have caused a sprained ankle, in the very least).
To more directly address the op, I think that what I am saying is that the language shifts…and then it doesn’t shift. Even if ‘gay’ comes to mean predominantly ‘a homosexual’, and no one ever thinks about it meaning ‘stupid’ or ‘lame,’ the fact is that the history of the word is there, somewhere, hidden, and it can be actualized. On the other hand, words really do shift meanings, completely flipping sides, depending on how a society conventionally defines them, and the conventional definition is the valid one.

So what does Marie do when s/he turns into Jean? What does the stunned village do? Do they address the hidden Marie, or do they address the visible Jean? Do they treat Jean as a female, because this is the conventional way to treat this person in their small society, or do they break with convention and treat Jean as a male?

It’s not even clear where the line between realism and convention lies.

105

I have not read this entire thread so I apologize if a link to this has already been posted.

There is a particularly funny Dykes To Watch Out For that deals with the topic of the OP beautifully.
http://www.washblade.com/forum/cartoons/dykes/010810a.htm