I actually can’t take credit for the actual double entendre that I use for the first panel. That goes to Donald Vining, who said this in his essay about being a gay man in the 1940s:
“I adore seafood.Gorge myself whenever the fleet’s in. But I can’t abide fish,” [a gay man] might say, and any gay man would instantly know that the speaker was turned on by sailors and turned off by women, while the puzzled Mr. and Mrs. Readers Digest, listening in, would assume this was a discussion about food preferences.
This use of slang and double meaning hasn’t stopped since then, even though one doesn’t have to be quite as secretive as they used to be. I often take for granted that certain terms and phrases are used within the gay community that have no equivalent in the straight one. How many times have you tried to explain bear and twink to your straight friends? There’s an entire part of an It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode that illustrates this perfectly.
But which comes first, the chicken or the egg — or perhaps, in this case, the bear or the cub? Did these “titles” come from the fact that there were already large amounts of these types of gays and therefore we needed to attach a classification to them? Or now has it become so ingrained that new gays attach themselves to one of many sub-categories, like some sort of homosexual career. If a gay man decided that he’s into big, burly, hairy men, but not that much into leather, and actually enjoys wearing surfer style clothes and tanning, is he still a bear? Or a twink?
Oh no, that’s right, he’s a jock.
Not all men decided to adhere to some form of stereotypical gay, which keeps things interesting. In fact, I’d say these labels and corresponding attributes are simply an advanced form of the mating call; they only seem to come out in any sort of force at some location were one might want to be noticed — gay bar, club, coffee shop, dungeon, church… I don’t expect that an Abercrombie boy walks around in his house with his hair gelled. But I could be wrong.
You should hear some of the silly names I’ve run into while reading about 19th century cruising. The Victorians were fucked up.
It seems to me that the names always come after the establishment of a group or behavior that needs naming, though sometimes the actual naming comes from both outside and inside the group at the same time. You can think of the difference between terms like fag, puff, fairy, and dyke–all terms employed first by straight society to name queer groups–and terms like twink, Mary, friend of Dorothy (or Friend of Dorian, if you’re from the turn of the century), or stone (butch).
A few months back, someone wrote in to Dan Savage trying to coin a new sex term for some particular practice he and his partner were into. Mitten humping or something, I don’t remember. His Royal Savage said how names only catch on when there is a need for them. Think of pegging, he said, a name invented by the Stranger for when women fuck men with strap-ons. It is now a common sex term, not because people heard the name and thought it sounded fun, but because it was a behavior that already existed and just needed naming.