Hermaphrodites in hypothesis

by David Benjamin 

 

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.” — Oscar Wilde

 

MADISON, Wis.—A lexicographer walks into a bar.

More accurately, it’s a gay club. Glenn, the lexicographer, is uneasy—indeed, deeply troubled— not because he’s uncomfortable among the “men” milling, drinking, laughing, talking, flirting and attempting to dance what looks to him like a hip-hop macarena. His linguistic dilemma is that he doesn’t know whether to call this place “gay” and, worse, what term might apply—without offense—to the club’s denizens.

Gingerly, he approaches a patron at the bar. He excuses himself for intruding and asks a question that has nagged him since he first encountered the mystery in an issue of Rolling Stone. “Are you a plus?” says Glenn.

“A what?” asks the person.

“A plus. You know, the last dingbat in ‘LGBTQ+’.”

The patron, whose gender identity Glenn cannot determine in so brief an encounter, flees the bar. Glenn sighs and orders a Cosmopolitan. He takes the opportunity to ask the bartender, “Are these all … gay men here?”

The bartender smiles ironically. “Mas o menos,” he replies.

“No women?” says Glenn. “No … er, Lesbians?” In his mind, this word is capitalized, but he’s uncertain. Should it be? 

The bartender actually laughs. “Nope. No women here, at least not in the physiological sense. Lesbian or otherwise.”

“I see.” Glenn considers this and asks, “What about Bs? Any of them here?”

‘What’s a B?”

“You know, the third letter in LGBTQ+. Bisexual.” Secretly, Glenn is as troubled by this abbreviation as by all the others. He wonders fussily whether “B” should be replaced by—or paired with—an “H,” designating “hermaphrodite,” a somewhat old-fashioned term that seemed to Glenn—purely in a lexical context—to also leach over into the turf of the transgender/transsexual “T”.

Discreetly, Glenn shares none of these reflections with the bartender.

“Got no idea,” says the publican, dismissing Glenn. “You want somebody who swings both ways, ask around.”

Glenn sips his Cosmo pensively. At his university, advocates for LGBTQ+ rights talk about a non-cis, non-hetero “community” with a solidarity rooted in their sexual and gender diversity and mutual acceptance. It’s a family, they say.

But here, Glenn is surrounded by ostensible males of an evidently homosexual predilection, but no ostensible females. The gay bar contains no gay women. 

Glenn calls the bartender over, declines another Cosmo, and asks, “Is there such a thing as a Lesbian bar?” 

The barkeep ponders the notion. “Hypothetically?” he says. “Sure, why not?”

Thus encouraged, Glenn wanders the canyons of his mind until he turns a corner, sees a sign in pink neon and enters a hypothetical Lesbian nightclub. Avoiding the bar, which is patrolled by a non-binary weightlifter with Japanese tattoos and a rainbow-dyed U.S. Marines bowlcut, he buttonholes an ostensible woman dressed in scholarly tweeds and drinking dry sherry at a corner table.

Excusing himself for his presumption, he presumes to ask, “Are you a plus?”

“What’s a plus?” asks the woman, marking her place in a slim volume of Sapphic poems with a flamingo feather.

Glenn explains. The other, who introduces herself as Vanessa and specifies her pronouns as “she,” “her” and, puckishly, “its,” echoes Glenn’s “plus” puzzlement. “I’ve decided not to think about it,” she says. “I’m terrified that it might have something to do with horses, corpses or altar boys.”

Thankful for a sympathetic, albeit hypothetical, interlocutor, Glenn ventures further toward a solution of his lexical perplexity. Tabling the “plus” caboose, he says “That still leaves the ‘Q’ question. What oppressed minority does it signify? Quadruplets? Quarterbacks? Quakers?”

“Don’t be intentionally obtuse, fella,” says Vanessa, sharing her sherry. “You know very well it stands for ‘queer.’”

This answer hardly satisfies Glenn, who’s a stickler for acronymic brevity. “I feared it might be so. But it’s redundant and therefore superfluous,” he insists. “Of all people, you should know that virtually every human who falls under  one of the categories in ‘LGBT’ has been labeled, derided and persecuted as ‘queer.’ I see a certain logic in clumping this socio-sexual subgroup together under ‘LGBT.’ It makes similar sense to refer to it generally—although somewhat pejoratively (or frivolously)—as ‘queer.’ But adding the ‘Q’ imposes a tautology! When one says ‘LGBTQ,’ it’s like saying either ‘LGBT/LGBT’ or ‘queer/queer.’ N’est pas?”

To amplify Glenn’s point, Vanessa cites the phenomenon of “syllable creep” in the English vernacular. “There’s a sportscaster,” she says, “who has turned ‘comfort’ into ‘comfortability.’ Too often in newscasts, ’grudging’ becomes ‘begrudging,’ ‘regardless’ morphs into ‘irregardless’ and ‘definite’ is ‘definitive’ even when it’s not.”

“So, we’re talking about acronym creep,” says Glenn.

“Oh, it’s more than that,” replies Vanessa, warming to the topic. “It took a long time—centuries—for non-straight people to adopt and circulate a term that doesn’t isolate, disparage and demean us. We evolved from the casual enunciation throughout society of ‘homo,’ ‘dyke,’ ‘faggot’ and so forth to a broad acceptance of  a word without stigma—‘gay’. Hooray.”

Vanessa goes on. “But, no sooner did we unite under that simple syllable, becoming a ‘gay community’ bursting with ‘gay pride’—we even appropriated the word ‘pride’—than we construed an acronymic tongue-twister that separates us all over again, from one another and from the larger human family.”

Vanessa sips from her glass. She notes that a faction of the gay community prefers the term, “LGBTQI+.”

Glenn asks about the “I” and Vanessa interprets it as “intersex.”

“What’s that mean?” asks Glenn. “Wouldn’t it be covered by the ‘B’?”

“No idea,’ says Vanessa, polishing off her sherry and signaling the waitperson. “It’s as mysterious as the ‘+’.” 

It occurrs to Glenn that the tendency to categorize and balkanize gender and sexuality is the flip side of the fallacy that sexuality is a binary proposition. By “coming out” in vast numbers and demanding both recognition and rights (like marriage and gender-affirming medical treatment), gay and trans people have shattered taboos, opened minds, broadened society and literally expanded what it means to be human. 

However, by using language to separate their sexual variety into subspecies, the gay community subconsciously compromises its sense of family. Is it a community at all when only ostensible males frequent gay bars? 

“Besides,” says Vanessa, “there’s nothing that quite so alienates regular (straight) people as making them give up a nice simple word— like ‘queer’ or ‘gay’—and replacing it with an off-putting abbreviation that sounds like it was minted by an elitist dyke who teaches gender studies at Mount Holyoke.

“What if,” asks Glenn, who’s getting a little sloshed on dry sherry, “I make personal linguistic judgment in favor of clarity, simplicity and community, and just say ‘gay’?”

Vanessa tips her glass in tribute and says, “That probably makes you a plus.”