PG 13

I've talked about this previously on Reddit where I have a sub called r/GenevieveFiles where I was hoping to curate LGBTQ culture to reduce the degree to which LGBTQ individuals are required to reinvent the wheel for every isolated individual trying to sort their lives. 

It's extremely challenging to try to dig up accurate historical information about sensitive topics such as sexual orientation or gender identity because it's typically a standard in most cultures that such topics aren't discussed publicly using explicit language. Polite phrasing only in public and that means you may not realize what they are really saying. 

I'm sixty and something like in the last year or two I learned that the ZZ Top song about a Pearl Necklace is a dirty song using slang for ejaculating onto a woman's chest. I've heard that song many times. I never thought it was a dirty song.

A lot of popular songs use slang for explicitly sexual things and it often goes completely unnoticed. Courtney Love, widow of Kurt Cobain, once said to someone "You do realize that song is about my vagina."

The song in question is Heart-shaped Box. While it's common knowledge that box is slang for vagina, I imagine a lot of people don't think that's a sexually explicit song.

I once saw something on TV talking about a deleted scene that didn't make the final cut for a black-and-white film from something like the 1950s. It was a discussion of sexual orientation using polite slang, along the lines of "Does he swing that way?" I want to say onions or food preference or something like that was involved. 

Censorship used to be more aggressive and this was sometimes both humorous and aggravating. Mae West was policed heavily and supposedly was denied the right to say "I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole." because it could be interpreted as sexual to which she replied in exasperation "Have you ever seen a ten-foot pole?!"

Mae West's home was profiled for some TV show about celebrity homes or lifestyles and the bedroom had something like mirrors on the ceiling and when asked about it she replied "It's so I can see how I'm doing." It never aired.

When Elvis Presley first started making music, they would introduce him and name his high school because it was the era of segregation and that was code for "He's a White guy." Rock and Roll is a marriage of Black music and White lyrics born of a history of slaves in and around New Orleans, Louisiana being allowed to keep their culture alive one day a week.

This birthed Jazz and eventually led to Rock and Roll. So Elvis was a White guy who got famous for Black music and now Rock and Roll is a predominantly White genre, though we do also have the phrase "Detroit: Rock City" and Detroit is around 77 percent Black last I checked.

Anyway, if you don't know the context and you look up and listen to original recordings of old radio shows or similar, "Introduction: so and so from thus and such high school." doesn't on the face of it look like a secret or polite coded message for a sensitive topic. You need to know it's the era of segregation and where you went to school was decided by skin color to have any hope of inferring that without being straight up told that was the purpose. 

People using slang that way are often not trying to fool people. They are typically complying with social expectations concerning good manners rooted in not wanting children to ask questions adults don't really want to answer. 

I've participated in online discussions where people who spoke English as a second language clearly didn't understand the sexual slang being used and I'm usually the only person willing to clarify "Uh, that's not what they meant, no." People being indirect like that are frequently doing so out of habit and are extremely uncomfortable with stating the same thing more explicitly and will err on the side of letting people not already in the know just wildly misinterpret it.

So if you are, say, under age thirty, you may be missing a LOT of references in books, movies, songs etc. and it gets worse if you are trying to do research about something very old or from a different country. They don't even need to be in a foreign language. The USA and England get called "Two countries separated by a common tongue."

This isn't just an English language phenomenon. Canadian French has differences from Parisian French. All languages wind up developing regional dialects or local quirks not readily understood outside that area.

The pieces I wrote were born of a discussion with a trans youth whose very religious father was being a jerk. In addition to the language notes, I suggested most people referencing the Bible aren't really making a good faith argument. They are looking for an easy way to say "Shut up. It's immoral. Conversation over!"

Most likely "Man shall not sleep with (some other word being misinterpreted as male)." is not an edict against consenting adult homosexual sex. It's more likely an edict that adult men have no business initiating sex with underaged boys and especially their own offspring. 

And when I wrote about that on r/GenevieveFiles, a sub with no meaningful traction, I was viciously attacked by a random stranger who had zero desire to have anything vaguely resembling a respectful debate in good faith.

If you are LGBTQ and trying to educate yourself about the culture, history and best practices of people like you, be aware that probably the majority of the information you need will be hiding in plain sight and other people will tend to be inclined to actively deny that interpretation on no meaningful scholarly basis.