Vulgar Tongues Read online

  This was just one of hundreds of soft-core novels found at bookstalls, hardware stores and railway stations across America at that time, helping to educate the gentle reader about a supposed world of depravity outside their experience. Would-be bisexuals were targeted by books such as Carl Dodd’s The Switch Hitters (1965), with the tagline ‘Lesbians, Nymphos, Fags and what have you – they used him for an erotic yo-yo till he didn’t know which way was which’. The novel’s title derived from a baseball slang phrase that originally denoted a batsman who could use both left and right hands, which itself coincidentally prefigures a later term for a homosexual, someone who bats for the other team.

  The reading public was certainly given many chances to pick up such phrases. Legendary book-length sex study The Velvet Underground (1963) by Michael Leigh – from which the pioneering New York band took their name – contained informative chapters on ‘Women Who Want Other Women’ and ‘Men Who Want Other Men’. The former chapter gave details of a lesbian magazine published by an organisation called The Daughters of Bilitis, in whose pages could be found terms like butch and femme, as well as letters from women who wrote that they had been in the gay life for several years.SSan Francisco as the trangely, the chapter on men contained no slang whatever.

  That’s an in-joke, you know. . .

  ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL FILMS at the box office in 1964 was the debut feature starring The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, whose audience at that time included a great many schoolchildren, some of whom can be observed on screen, chasing the band from place to place. However, it also contained a knowing scene with the band in the make-up room of a TV theatre, in which Ringo is under the hairdryer reading a copy of Queen magazine. Lennon combs Ringo’s hair, saying, ‘Hey, he’s reading the Queen,’ then looks round and comments, ‘That’s an in-joke, you know,’ to which Wilfrid Brambell – who in real life was gay – says, ‘It’s my considered opinion that you’re a bunch of sissies.’

  As it happened, if Ringo had been reading Life magazine that year instead, he might have chanced upon an article by Paul Welch in the 26 June issue entitled ‘The “Gay” World Takes to the City Streets’, which was an in-depth look at the homosexual scene in places like New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Even then, it referred to San Francisco as the nation’s ‘gay capital’. The piece explained terms like queen, cruising, drag and S & M, and gave an insight into the macho leather scene, courtesy of a bar owner in San Francisco’s warehouse district: ‘This is the anti-feminine side of homosexuality,’ he explained. ‘We throw out anyone who is too swishy.’ By contrast, there was also a photograph of a decidedly straight Hollywood drinking establishment, with owner Barney Anthony standing in front of a sign he had hung up behind his bar, saying ‘FAGOTS STAY OUT’ (sic). ‘I don’t like ’em,’ he told the author. ‘They’ll approach any nice-looking guy. Anybody does any recruiting, I say shoot him. Who cares?’

  Whatever else Mr Anthony might have been reading that year, it is unlikely to have been Hubert Selby Jr’s new book, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), whose self-contained second part is entitled The Queen Is Dead – inspiring the name of the 1986 LP by The Smiths – which begins with the words ‘Georgette was a hip queer’. Written in a street-smart New York vernacular, the slang consists of the usual words like fairy, punk, freak, queen and fag.

  In the UK from 1965, polari was being broadcast to the nation, courtesy of Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick as the camp duo Julian and Sandy, in the radio series Round the Horne, with scripts by Barry Took and Marty Feldman. The decriminalisation of homosexuality may still have been two years away, but these sketches were affectionately knowing and firmly let the audience in on the jokes, ‘We’ve got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time,’ they tell Kenneth Horne, who is visiting their legal firm, Bona Law, to which he replies, ‘Yes, but apart from that, I need some legal advice.’ Each week they plied their trade, so to speak, in a different setting, such as Bona Books in the King’s Road (‘Poe’s Raven,’ ‘Is ’e?’), or the Bona Nature Clinic in Harley Street (‘for your actual homeo-pathic practices’). When running a TV station – broadcasting, Horne suggests, to the Mincing Lane area – they have their own special version of popular series Bonanza, renamed Bona-nanza, as Julian explains, ‘Yes, you know, that western about those four great butch omees trying to find themselves up the Ponderosa. . .’

  While a large section of the adult population may have been tuning in, the idea that all gay men across the UK were speaking polari at that time is hard to support. For instance, the year 1966 saw the publication of a book by George Moor called The Pole and Whistle, set in an unnamed county not unlike Yorkshire, and – to judge from its music references – taking place in the very early sixties. ‘Never before has a novel treated the contentious subject of homosexuality with such honesty and insight,’ said the blurb – which is debatable, given precedents such as The Heart in Exile (1953) – but what is certain is that the book seems grounded in very authentic experience, yet contains little if any slang, and no polari. This contrasts somewhat starkly with the less serious approach taken by an American novel at that time, The Intruders – The Explosive Story of One Man’s Journey into a Homosexual Jungle (1966) by Brad Riley, which concerned the efforts of a straight Los Angeles private eye to foil a gang of homosexual pickpockets who were apparently ‘ruining the good name of the Hollywood homos’.

  A tweedy butch?

  AS THE SIXTIES MERGED INTO THE SEVENTIES, gay culture finally went mainstream. There were films and plays with lesbian themes or prominent lesbian characters: The Group (Sidney Lumet, 1966, based on the book by Mary McCarthy), The Fox (Mark Rydell, 1968, based on the novella by D. H. Lawrence), and, most famously, The Killing of Sister George (Robert Aldrich, 1968, based on the play by Frank Marcus). There were also homosexual-themed films, such as William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band (1970, based on the 1968 play by Mart Crowley). Even family listings magazine the TV Times treated its readers to a polari article (‘The Walloper’s Polari’ by P. Gordino, October 1969, walloper being slang for a dancer), which has an added layer of irony, since TV is also a slang term meaning transvestite.

  Not everyone was delighted with this turn of events. For instance, Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver had this to say in his 1969 book Soul on Ice:

  I, for one, do not think homosexuality is the latest advance over heterosexuality on the scale of human evolution. Homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become the head of General Motors.

  As for the female of the species, he was equally blunt: ‘If a lesbian is anything she is a frigid woman, a frozen cunt, with a warp and a crack in the wall of her ice.’ Cleaver, who began writing this book while serving time in prison as a serial rapist, was given glowing notices in many quarters, including, of all places, The Church Times (21 February 1969), where, by a strange twist of fate, the reviewer was a man named Martin Fagg.

  With the changing times came a new public awareness of formerly obscure slang words. In 1971, Daily Mirror columnist Marjorie Proops gave her readers the lesbian lowdown in a sympathetic article entitled ‘Sad Little Gay Girl’, which asked:

  What is a lesbian? Is she a mannish freak, a crew-cropped queer, a dyke in a collar and tie, a tweedy butch? Or is she, perhaps, the trendy dolly sitting beside you in the bus or the ordinary housewife doing her shopping in the supermarket?

  Pop it in the toaster

  AT THE SAME TIME IN AMERICA, Life magazine ran a lengthy article about the new Gay Liberation movement, under the title ‘Homosexuals in Revolt’, including a section about a lesbian couple, Barbara Love and Sidney Abbott, authors of a new book called Sappho Was a Right-on Woman (1972). This was also the year when what is thought to be the first specifically homosexual dictionary was published, The Queens’ Vernacular – A Gay Lexicon, by Bruce Rodgers, lifting the lid on a world of gym-addicted muscle queens, and listing fifty types of Miss, from prudish (Miss Priss) to activist (Miss Politics). Comp
are this with a much later publication covering similar ground, Gay-2-Zee – A Dictionary of Sex, Subtext and the Sublime, by Donald F. Reuter (2006), which has just a handful, such as Mister Sister for a drag queen, but makes up for this with a great many of the esoteric terms which have evolved over the past few decades. Among these can be found such expressions as pop it in the toaster (sex at breakfast time), cupcakes (‘a tasty set of bitesize buttocks’), slut but (‘a gay man’s home’) and convertible (‘a bisexual’).

  Here, just as in the obscurely inventive terms for straight-sex practices listed in Roger’s Profanisaurus, the creators of slang have reached for increasingly more specific ways of describing various activities, some of which are perhaps unknown to those engaged in them. However, the advent of AIDS in the 1980s eventually led to a greater general awareness of some expressions. While the Sun newspaper responded to the inclusion of a homosexual love story on the BBC’s flagship soap EastEnders in 1987 with the typically sensitive headline ‘NOW IT’S EASTBEND-ERS!’, the UK government ran television adverts talking about safe sex and condom use. This shift in priorities eventually led, a decade later, to the following notable exchange in the House of Commons, as the MP for Ipswich, Jamie Cann, attempted to explain the terms fisting and rimming to his honourable friends during a debate on the Sexual Offences Amendment Bill (1999), backed up by a pamphlet issued by AIDS charity the Terrence Higgins Trust:

  Jamie Cann: For example, rimming—

  Stephen Pound (Ealing North): Oh God!

  Jamie Cann: It happens. Rimming, where one man licks out the rectum of another man, is not a practice that I would want my sons to get involved in; nor indeed is fisting, which is when one inserts the whole of one’s fist and part of one’s forearm up someone else’s rectum.

  In Canada around that time, if you bought a pint of milk, one of the leading brands was marketed in a white carton with the word HOMO written in large red block letters on the outside – short for homogenised – and café owners would ask you, when ordering a cup of tea, whether you wanted some homo with that. From there, it would seem just a short step to conversation about teabags (gay slang for the scrotum).

  Since the 1990s, as a formal term, the acronym LGBT (standing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) has increasingly been favoured, rather than gay and lesbian, but many of the same core of slang terms which have seen service during the course of the last century are still very much in circulation. The word queer – at one time frequently an insult – has proved particularly durable, such as in the title of the American gay-makeover TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–7). Attempts have also been made in some quarters to revive polari, which had been largely dormant since the early 1970s, with notable exceptions in between, such as the Morrissey song ‘Piccadilly Palare’, which itself was on an album named Bona Drag (1990).

  Exactly which word people now choose to use in order to define themselves varies enormously, and, like many other areas of life these days, has grown increasingly complicated. In March 2015, the Guardian reported the chief executive of lesbian dating app HER saying that it ‘is about creating a space where lesbian, bi, queer, curious, flexisexual, pansexual and not-so-straight women can meet’. Still, as John Waters wrote in 2014, commenting on his sense of being a perennial outsider even in the gay community, not everyone fits the profile, no matter how many names may appear:

  Sorry, I also like Alvin and the Chipmunks better than the Beatles, Jayne Mansfield more than Marilyn Monroe, and, for me, the Three Stooges are way funnier than Charlie Chaplin.

  FIVE

  HERE’S TO CRIME

  I want my vigourish, doll

  EVER SINCE THOMAS HARMON published A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones in 1567, a great many authors and journalists through the ages have attempted to inform the public about criminal slang. Exactly what any of them have known about the subject has varied enormously.

  Harmon, of course, was a rich man addressing other wealthy property owners, advising them how to guard against burglars and recognise likely thieves. According to his own account, Harmon learned criminal slang at second hand, from talking to the beggars who called at his gate. By contrast, Dashiell Hammett, before he became the crime novelists’ crime novelist, acquired his extensive background knowledge in a very direct fashion, working as a detective for the Pinkerton agency in Baltimore, and then in San Francisco between 1915 and 1922. Not many other crime writers will have had the dubious pleasure, as he did, of being beaten over the head with a house brick in an alley while tailing a suspect. Understandably, when Hammett employed the language of the underworld and those that investigated it, it carried the stamp of authenticity, for example in his short story ‘Fly Paper’ (Black Mask magazine, 1929):

  The big man was a yegg [habitual criminal, also specifically a burglar]. San Francisco was on fire for him [he’s a wanted man]. The yegg instinct would be to use a rattler [goods train] to get away from trouble. The freight yards were in this end of town. Maybe he would be shifty enough to lie low instead of trying to powder [take a run-out powder, escape].

  At the other end of the scale, there are authors who seem to have learned everything they know about gangsters and criminals from reading other crime novels or watching television shows, while the actors who portray such people on screen may prove in real life to be about as hard boiled as one of the Teletubbies, and considerably less convincing.

  The latter problem was eloquently portrayed in Alfred Bester’s novel Who He? (1954), in which a well-heeled New York television director lays down the facts of the mobster life to an uncomprehending actor. When the thespian fails to put the proper authenticity into the line ‘I want my vigourish, doll!’, the director complains, ‘You don’t feel it like a gimpster’:

  ‘Vigourish,’ he explained, ‘is the thief talk for percentage. See? You’re filing a beef about your cut in the caper. . . . . Make like you’re pimping for the broad when you say that. You’ve got your hands up her skirt. You’re naked but you’re not catching any colds. Think about her naked and warm up. Then we’ll try it again,’

  Then there are the crime writers who knew the life from the inside, quite literally. Edward Bunker, for instance, had been sent to reform school at the age of twelve, was shot and wounded two years later while trying to rob a liquor store, then stabbed a guard while in youth prison aged fifteen, and eventually wound up doing hard time in San Quentin. This was just the beginning of two decades of life on the wrong side of the law, but he turned it all around in spectacular fashion with the publication of his first novel, No Beast So Fierce (1973), followed in 1977 by The Animal Factory, arguably the finest prison novel of them all. The stamp of authenticity is all over these books, in the motivations of the characters, the physical descriptions of the locale, and, of course, the slang, which is right for the time and place. The guards at San Quentin are bulls, knives are shivs, if things are going well then you are shitting in tall cotton, a criminal charge is a beef, and that ancient Shakespearean term for a whore, punk, is one of the worst insults you can throw at anyone. By contrast, Mario Puzo once said that when he created the unforgettable figure of Don Vito Corleone, he had never met any mafia godfathers, and was basically imagining the way they might talk among themselves:

  I’m ashamed to admit that I wrote The Godfather entirely from research. I never met a real, honest-to-god gangster. . . After the book became ‘famous,’ I was introduced to a few gentlemen related to the material. They refused to believe that I had never been in the rackets.

  Yet, whether this language came from personal experience, research or simply imagination, much of it then spread to the wider public through the medium of books, newspapers, films, plays, radio and television, so that people in quiet rural villages whose closest connection to a mob hit had been the buying of a Valentine’s card were now able to talk like a wise guy, should they have the inclination. On the other hand, some crime language which might at first appear to
be from the mean streets of Chicago or New York has another origin entirely. For instance, when a character in a novel speaks of a planned killing, saying that someone is ‘booked. . . to hand in his checks on June 14th’, this sounds as if it could be one of Capone’s hit men or a member of Bugsy Siegel’s Murder Incorporated talking. In fact, the quote is from an earlier era and the other side of the Atlantic; John Buchan’s 1915 British espionage classic The 39 Steps.

  Quick as a flash, right in the goolies

  IT IS NOT ALWAYS ABOUT shooting or stabbing people. Knuckles and boots can cause a variety of unpleasant effects, and there are many fine phrases inspired by the business of basic physical violence. In 1968, country star Loretta Lynn called on one of the best, going to fist city, after another woman tried to move in on her husband. In reponse, Loretta wrote and sang the No. 1 hit song ‘Fist City’ as a warning, one she also backed up in person.

  It is a staple of classic private eye fiction that the down-at-heel hero is roughed up several times in pursuit of a solution to their case. Cosh blows, punches and a variety of non-fatal physical abuse that would leave most ordinary people relaxing in hospital for several months are regularly absorbed and then shrugged off with disarming ease. A couple of rudimentary bandages, a slug of whiskey and then a wry explanation offered to concerned friends. ‘Who’s been kissin’ your puss?’ asks a character in Benjamin Appel’s 1934 gangland novel Brain Guy, One of the nicer dismissive replies to such an enquiry about facial bruises can be found in Michael Avallone’s The Bedroom Bolero (1963): ‘I tried to carry a moose head through a revolving door’.