It seems that the terms we use parallel those straight women use at the start—a date, then a boyfriend, for example. But then things change.
By: Neil Plakcy
Writing about the issue of gay marriage in MAHU FIRE made me think about the words that gay men use when we talk about that special guy. I don’t mean those little terms of endearment—sweetie, honey, baby. I wonder what you say when introducing him, or referring to him in conversation. Because the term you use says a lot about who you are.
I know a lot of gay men in their fifties, sixties and above who say things like “My lover and I lived in New York then,” or “Joe and his lover came to dinner.”
To me, the word lover carries a hint of illegitimacy. I think of married men and women who take lovers on the side. Maybe that’s why that term was adopted so many years ago, when gay men were first fighting to step out of the shadows and into the mainstream of American life. They were defying convention, so the word they chose was defiant.
When I was dating, before anything got serious, I used the term boyfriend, even though my friends were far from being boys. There was a light, casual tone to that term. It called up the innocence of youth—high school dating, furtive kisses in cars, gossip about who had a crush on who.
The term significant other is too antiseptic for me, reminding me of tax forms. There was a little rhyme coined when the census first tried to identify same-sex couples: persons of the same sex sharing living quarters, or POSSLQ:
“Come live with me, and I with you,
And I will be your POSSLQ.”
It’s also clunky to introduce someone that way. “This is Marc, my POSSLQ.” Sometimes, in joking, I’ll call him my insignificant other—but never when he’s around. (I also sometimes call him the Jewish American Prince of Darkness, but you know I’m kidding when I say that, right?)
I’m most comfortable with partner. We’ve created a partnership, I believe, sharing our home, our lives, our hopes and fears and dreams. And our dog, though he doesn’t care what we call each other as long as there are treats involved for him.
My cousin, though, has been using the term husband for years, long before it was ever legal anywhere. He’s a respected journalist, so I know he pays attention to words and their meanings. At the time he first started using it, husband was a term full of political weight. He and his husband had a commitment ceremony, so he felt he was entitled to use that term.
But today, with the legalization of same sex marriage in Massachusetts, and in certain foreign countries, should we reserve that term for those who have been legally joined? My mother’s cousin, a widow in her seventies, began dating, and then living with, a widower of a similar age. After a while, she began introducing the man as her husband, probably because she was embarrassed that they were “living in sin.”
They weren’t legally wed, any more than my cousin and his husband. But to me, Lucille was lying when she called Stan her husband—because she had the opportunity to marry him, and chose not to. If same-sex marriage becomes legal in Florida, will I start to feel that Ric and Steve should take that formal step, if they want to keep using the term?
In MAHU FIRE, my hero, Honolulu homicide detective Kimo Kanapa’aka, begins to date a guy who might be a keeper. By the end of the book, you might call them boyfriends. And who knows, if gay marriage becomes a reality, they might even be husbands someday.
One of the many things that gay and lesbian people have learned from the civil rights struggle is that words matter. In the choice of what you call that guy you love, our words matter just as much.
Neil Plakcy is the Lambda-nominated author of Mahu Surfer; his new book is Mahu Fire, which Publishers Weekly calls “engrossing… a sharp whodunit.”
ily created to protect her from the truth about her past much in the same way a parent uses a nightlight to protect their child from the dark. When Janine was twelve, growing up in the New York suburb of Roslyn, New York, her mother was diagnosed with a deadly cancer and died three years later. While a junior at Cornell University, Janine learned that her father was terminally ill. Five years later she receieved an unexpected phone call from her uncle, forcing her to re-evaluate her childhood and to not accept things as they appeared on the surface. 
Visit the
Recent Comments