Next episode is the 200th, therefore this is the 199th. I raid the 66-page documents of ideas for episodes, that I have been keeping for nearly a decade, and present to you 199 ideas that I have not yet made into podcasts (except for this one).
Read moreAllusionist 198: Queer Arab Glossary
Since 2019, Marwan Kaabour has been collecting Arabic slang words used by and about queer people, first for the online community Takweer, and now the newly published Queer Arab Glossary. "When researching for this book, I discovered so much of the sociopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and historical layers that make up the words," he says. He also discovered quite a lot about frying, white beans and worms (metaphorical ones).
Read morePride playlist
Hello! Hereās a playlist of episodes of the show that are good to listen to for Pride month, but also at any time, because they are some of the most interesting and complex language matters that Iāve covered in the show:
Many Ways At Once. The Scots language didnāt have much of an LGBTQ+ lexicon. So writer and performer Dr Harry Josephine Giles decided to create one.
Polari was a secret language that was used mostly by gay men in London. And now lives on in the non-secret lexicon - you might not realise that you know some Polari words!
Two Or More is about the bumpy life of the word ābisexualā, describing things from oysters to space stations to God to hats and then people, where things get really complicated.
Parents is about how some of the vocabulary of pregnancy and parenting might not fit when youāre trans, and how to make the language gender-additive.
Rainbow Washing examines the trends in corporate performative allyship, and considers how to sort the real queer support from the harm-disguise.
Similarly, Queerbaiting follows a term from entrapment to marketing to the failures of onscreen representation.
Name Changers features listeners telling the stories of why they changed their names - often a big feature of a gender journey.
Thereās so much more to say about the word Queer, where it has been and where it is going now.
Survival: Bequest is about the MÄori word ātakatapuiā, a bit of linguistic evidence that prior to the European colonisation that imposed cisgender monogamous heterosexuality, MÄori culture had included myriad sexual orientations, gender fluidity and polyamory.
Survival: Today Tomorrow part 2 is about how new queer words are coined for the Icelandic language.
No Title is about making language gender-free. And there are unbeatable arguments to fell anyone who denies singular ātheyā, should you need those in your arsenal.
Joins is about how the available vocabulary for body parts can be a liability when youāre trans and/or non binary.
Aro Ace is about how newish words like āaromanticā and āasexualā enable people to voice their identities, and to find each other.
Pride, about why the word āPrideā was chosen to be the banner word for demonstrations and celebrations of LGBTQIA rights and culture.
And if you just need to shut off your internal monologue for a bit, you can replace it with a relaxingly scored list of gay animals.
Allusionist 144. Aro Ace
The word 'asexual' has been used by humans describing themselves for several decades; 'aromantic' is newer. Both words enable people to voice identities that were unacknowledged for centuries, to find each other and build communities together, and to provide counternarratives to what the allosexuals are pushing.
Read moreAllusionist 79. Queer
Strange or obtuse; a stinging homophobic slur; a radical political rejection of normativity; a broad term encompassing every and any variation on sexual orientation and gender identity: the word 'queer' has a multifarious past and complicated present. This is just a fraction of it.
Tracing the word's movements are Kathy Tu and Tobin Low from Nancy podcast, Eric Marcus from Making Gay History, and historian and author Amy Sueyoshi, with Jonathan Van Ness from Queer Eye.
Read moreAllusionist 56: Joins
As considered in episode 51, Under the Covers part II, the vocabulary for sex and associated body parts is tricky to navigate in many ways - but even more so if you are trans or gender non-binary.
Following that show, I heard from several trans and non-binary listeners, recounting their experiences of that vocabulary; so I decided to make this episode about it.
Read moreAllusionist 12: Pride
iTUNES ā¢ RSS ā¢ MP3
"The poison is shame. The antidote is pride."
Itās June; the President of the USA has officially designated it LGBT Pride Month, and thereāll be Pride events around the world.
Activist and the publisher of Homosexuals Intransigent Craig Schoonmaker recounts how the word āprideā was chosen, which eventually came to be the banner word for demonstrations and celebrations of LGBT rights and culture.
ADDITIONAL READING:
In the episode I contemplate the history of the word 'lesbian', and if you're also interested to know how 'gay' evolved from 'colourful' or 'cheerful' to its present meaning, read about it here and here.
For background on the Stonewall riots whence arose the Pride movement, listen to this short oral history on Witness by the BBC World Service. I haven't seen the Stonewall Uprising documentary, but the transcript is interesting.
Craig Schoonmaker mentions the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organisations in the USA. Here's a short history; this was its mission statement (from probably the mid-1960s), and here's what the FBI thought of it.
Fred Sergeant remembers the first Pride march.
Barack Obama officially proclaims June 2015 to be Pride Month.
There is a movement called Gay Shame, founded in 1998 as a protest against/alternative to what they saw as the overcommercialisation and conservatism of Gay Pride. Read about them here.
There is a transcript of this episode here.
CREDITS:
L. Craig Schoonmaker has several websites, including Mr Gay Pride, featuring articles and materials going all the way back to 1969; the Mr Gay Pride blog is also very interesting. He also runs a photo journal about Newark, NJ, as well as a version making the case for phonetic (fonetik?) spelling of English.
This episode was produced by me and Eleanor McDowall of Falling Tree, with help from Peregrine Andrews.
All the music in this episode is by Martin Austwick. Hear and/or download more at thesoundoftheladies.bandcamp.com.
Find me at facebook.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/allusionistshow and twitter.com/helenzaltzman.
