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Language Before Stonewall pp 215–300Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Learning a Language of Sexuality

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Abstract

This chapter examines how people learned discretion, responses to surveillance, and other linguistic practices expressing messages about sexual sameness before Stonewall. Direct mentoring was helpful, and so was overhearing (Bubel in Journal of Pragmatics 40:55–71, 2008), instances where the learner gained new information while observing, as a third-party observing language use between others. Print resources were helpful, whether dedicated to homosexual interests or written for a general audience and open to a sexualized reading. Enlistment in the US military and women’s softball playing and spectatorship offered contexts that encouraged language learning through immersion and through translanguaging, incorporating new knowledge about sexual language into their existing linguistic knowledge base, producing “confluences of scripts” in various forms (Provencher in Gay French: Globalization, Language and Sexual Citizenship in France, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2017) related to sexual sameness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

    William L. Leap

  2. Department of Anthropology, American University, Washington, D.C., USA

    William L. Leap

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Leap, W.L. (2020). Learning a Language of Sexuality. In: Language Before Stonewall . Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33516-8_4

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