I’m more or less horribly out of touch with Chinese/Taiwanese slang, so I only know two terms:
同性戀 (tong2 xing4 lian4) - literally “enamored with the same sex”
同志 (tong2 zhi4) - the old commie term for “comrade”, now used as slang for a gay person
I also know a few terms that I now know to avoid when buying stuff* or reading fanfics: yaoi - hardcore male/male, depicting fairly explicit sex (although, oddly, penetration is only implied) yuri - the equivalent for female/female pairings uke - the femme/bottom/submissive half of a pairing seme - the macho/top/agressive half loli/lolicon - Short for “Lolita complex”, in which one of the characters is much younger, to the point of being severely underage
A x B - pairing between characters A and B, usually the seme is listed first noncon - short for nonconsentual; might not actually be rape, but the uke character is portrayed as not enjoying the sexual act (to paraphrase something I read somewhere, the attitude is: “no, but yes”)
*Dojinshi’s aren’t all porn. Some of the stories are funny, cute, touching, dramatic, etc, and the art is generally beautiful (even in the X-rated ones). It’s just that I wish I didn’t have to rip pages out of the binding about 50% of the time.
Looking at an Estonian slang dictionary and attempting to translate (which I’m only so-so at), I come up with several words.
There is ‘homoseksuaal’, which can be shortened to ‘homo’, both of which are apparently neutral. Then there are ‘pede’ and ‘pedekas’, both slightly pejorative shortenings of the offensive ‘pederast’.
Then there’s ‘gei’ or ‘gay’.
For lesbians ‘lesbi’ or ‘lespi’ (both probably pronounced the same way: ‘lespi’). A variant is ‘lesbar’/‘lespar’.
There are also the euphemisms ‘lilla’, literally ‘violet’ and ‘roosa’ literally 'rose. I also see ‘seenekorjaja’, ‘seenemees’ and ‘seenesõber’ which translate to ‘mushroom picker’, ‘mushroom man’, and ‘mushroom friend’ respectively.
Well, anyway, there are a lot of words to look through on this site and I’m slow to translate.
A last few ‘engelbert’, with no explanation; ‘vaseliinimees’, ‘vaseline + man’; ‘viinerimees’ i.e. ‘wiener man’.
I didn’t see so many words for lesbians, but maybe I they were among the words I didn’t really look at.
matt, all I can tell you is maricón for fag is current in American Spanish too. Read Little Heroes by Norman Spinrad and get several doses of homophobic Nuyorican stream of consciousness. “Maricones sin cojones…”
Turkish slang has two words for lesbian: sevici and ablaci. Both have the agentive suffix -ci (pronounced “ji”) used for practitioners. So ablaci literally means ‘older-sister practitioner’ and sevici literally means ‘love practitioner’, from the verbal root sev- ‘to love’.
So in Turkish lesbians are named for Love itself. That is so sweet!
Common to the whole Turkic language family across Central Asia is the noun for ‘girl’, qiz. At the same time, the common verbal root qiz- means ‘to be hot’. (cite: Sir Gerard Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth Century Turkish. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973.) It’s like finding a nice lesbian attitude embedded within Proto-Turkic philology! Girl, I love being a lesbian philologist!
(cite: Sir Gerard Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth Century Turkish. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973.) It’s like finding a nice lesbian attitude embedded within Proto-Turkic philology! Girl, I love being a lesbian philologist!