March 18, 2011

A Dictionary For All Things Lesbian

Photo: Ani DiFrancoJason Hickey/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/exquisitur/2552615542/">Flickr</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


As my coworker, the whipsmart Emily Loftis, and I were discussing our mutual crush on Kaki King, she posed this question:

Can you do a post about gay language for straight girls? I’m always afraid I’m going to say something dumb considering that in my hometown “gay” is synonymous with really dumb. Grrr. I don’t have much of a measuring stick to work with. If you could include language that a well-intentioned bumpkin should avoid using, that’d be swell too.

PS: Is there a word for a girl-on-girl-crush, when the crusher is straight?

Thus inspiring me to create The Lezicon at After Ellen! A go-to guide for lesbian-related words, slang, and way too many puns.

Excerpt:

Anna says: Great question! And thank you for asking. Some straight women think being a queer gal simply means that we have 38 ways to spell wimmin, but there’s so much more to it than that! Below, I present to you the following lezicon*, a queer dictionary of sorts, with relevant examples, celebrities, and everyday usages that you can use to impress your new queer friends at the next folk festival and/or Vagina Monologues production.

*Note of historical relevance: Gay terms obviously vary by time, region, and stereotypes. I can’t get them all, nor do I mean to offend anyone with generalizations. Tongue is firmly in cheek here, but I encourage you to add your own terms in the comments.

Androgyny: Generically speaking, someone who exhibits both masculine or feminine gender traits. Might also go by: gender fluid, genderqueer, or David Bowie.

Baby Dyke: A young lesbian, often fresh out of the closet, full of ideals and front row tickets to see Girlyman.

Beersexual: A gurl who will make out or sleep with another grrrl only while under the influence. Found often in reality television shows, in sororities, and in rare cases, Nick Lachey’s above-ground swimming pool.

Birkenstock-Blocking: When you are trying to hit on a wommon and another lesbian interferes.

Boi: Could mean any of the following, depending on context — a boyish lesbian, a soft butch (aka butch lite), a biological boy who hangs in queer circles, or a member of OutKast.

Read the rest of The Lezicon at After Ellen.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate