I reviewed this cool book for EdgeBoston.com
OUTBURSTS: A QUEER EROTIC THESAURUS by A.D. PETERKIN
If you were ever proud of how well you talk dirty, this thesaurus can be humbling indeed. There are 145 pages of words for every organ and every attitude embraced by the ideas of queer and erotic. “Penis” alone rates 10 pages, with a special section for “Penis, large” – itself broken down into “well-endowed” and “circumference.” Are you gagging to hear a few? For well-endowed we have ankle slapper, donkey-rigged and baby’s forearm. Superior circumference is thick as a wrist or just like a coke can. Continue reading down the page and you’ll encounter such lyrical terms for “Penis (circumcised)” as peeled queen, low neck and kosher meat.
It is an intelligent, informed thesaurus, providing some sense of how queer vocabulary developed – partly from hetero insults and partly from secret terms invented to promote mutual recognition between queers in the pre-Stonewall days when everyone was in the closet. Gender differences are fascinating: “Pubic Hair (female)” gives us (among dozens) assbeard, twat fuzz and the always polite muff; “Pubic Hair (male)” offers fewer choices, but includes the adorable fuzzies, gorilla salad and treasure trail.
OUTBURSTS spices up the classic idea of the thesaurus by adding vintage photographs, mostly erotic, as well as contextualizing our terms within the homophobia of their development. Polari, the secret language used from the 1930s by London’s gay men, “contained some 500 words about sex, the body, physical appearance, meeting places, straights and gays,” Peterkin tells us in the Introduction. That’s where we got such terms as “cottage” and “trade.”
He outlines some of the differences in usage of the same words – not the least “butch” and “femme.” He makes the insightful point that when lesbians talk about a “butch,” they’re referring to someone who wears her queerness in a way that challenges traditional femininity, and when gay men call someone “butch,” it may well describe someone who passes or who plays up traditional masculinity.
If ever there was a perfect bathroom book to dip in, this is it. Toss your Farmer’s Almanac and place this nicely in reach. That way, the next time you need to urinate (drain your radiator or kill the grass), you can use the time to brush up on your erotic vocabulary and improve your own self-image by learning 60 words for pervert.
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