Language of Concealment and the Word for “G”. Who Are the Heroes of the Queer Before Gay Time?

Abstract

Who (and what) was silent about the story told by heteronormative society? And how is the fragment of this story seen by “Others”? The article shows that the time of “queer before gay” includes (in Polish) not only well-known names such as: aunt or pedal, but also slang: ‘lala’ (doll), ‘przyjaciółki’ (friends), ‘siostry’ (sisters in Polish, girls in English), gays “from the outside of society”, as well as heterosexuals who got a ticket to the alternative world of the excluded. I tell this story from the perspective of the performative function of language (Althusser, Austin, Butler) and mechanisms of knowledge/power (Foucault). I focus on the activities of homosexual men encoded in their “hiding language” (sociopolitan gay). I show how the creation of the “homosexual” identity closed the community of aunts and pedals in a precisely defined form. And how camp and queering reality allowed them to function in this form. This article is thus another element of decoding the so-called language of concealment, so-called sociolect of Polish gays (aunts and pedals) and queering history of Poland (part of the queering history of Central and Eastern Europe).