Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Sex and bodily effluvia 153
Medieval theologians recognized that verse 26 speaks of lesbians (though the
term did not then exist) and that they were subject to the same laws as
sodomites 21 because they all engage in ‘unnatural sin’. 22 However, it is male
homosexuals who have drawn most attention; England’s 1533 statute against
buggery applied only to men. 23 This is, first, because men are more sexually
predatory than women; second, because the flamboyance of flaming queens
among male homosexuals renders them more noticeably different from their
straight peers than butch dykes in comparison with their straight sisters.
(Furthermore, butch dykes are a relatively recent phenomenon – we are not
speaking here of cross-dressers or transsexuals.) Third, some queens (effeminate
male homosexuals) adopt camp mannerisms (e.g. are limp-wristed) and
use the voice; 24 for these, there is no real counterpart among lesbians.
Nonetheless, in Britain in 1994, a lesbian primary school principal who
refused cheap tickets for Romeo and Juliet on grounds that the play is
‘entirely about heterosexual love’ 25 was described as follows:
With her short hair, heavy coat and workman style boots, she seemed to fit every
stereotype of political correctness. Even her sullen, plainly unrepentant, expression
seemed to match. (Guardian, 27 January 1994, p. 2)
Here, ‘political correctness’ seems to be a euphemism for butch dyke.
Throughout the twentieth century, the euphemism for a homosexual man
was confirmed bachelor.
In 1895 Oscar Wilde, wit, 26 poet, dramatist and poseur, was tried under the
Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Ellmann summarizes the Act:
Any male person who, in public or in private, commits, or is a party to the commission
of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any person of, any act of
gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and,
being convicted thereof, shall be liable, at the discretion of the Court, to be imprisoned
for any term not exceeding two years with or without hard labour. When it was pointed
out to Queen Victoria that women were not mentioned, she is reported to have said,
‘No woman would do that.’ (Ellmann 1988: 386)
In many of Wilde’s works, a secret sin or indiscretion is exposed and disgrace
ensues. Wilde was a man who ‘could resist everything except temptation’ 27
and who once said that life imitates art; 28 his did. Wilde, who was bisexual
but exhibited many characteristics of a flaming queen, was partial to what
would now be called rent boys, as well as to more aristocratic tricks (casual
sex partners); he was blackmailed by the rough trade and mercilessly exploited
by the beautiful, spoiled, spendthrift, reckless, vindictive Lord Alfred
Douglas, known as ‘Bosie’. Bosie was constantly at war with his father, the
nineth Marquess of Queensbury, an obnoxious, adulterous bully. Wilde’s
demise was, indirectly and in part, collateral damage. Queensbury was
smarting from the annulment of his second marriage and the suicide of his