Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

How do gay men or lesbians recognize each other in public? These days, a rainbow flag bumper- sticker or rainbow bead necklace might be a good clue, but the signals have always been changing. It seems to Blanche that pink triangles peaked as a signal at some point in the 1980s.

This intuition verified by a quick check at an on-line gay retailer, which revealed that one can buy beads, necklaces, lapel pins, ear rings, bumper stickers, pens, luggage tags, mugs, thongs, wallets, steering-wheel covers, key rings, and leis with a rainbow flag, but almost nothing with a pink triangle. An informal count of the buttons available showed 53 with rainbow flags, but only two with pink triangles.

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Part of the reason for the change is pure fashion. Pink triangles are no longer the " in" way to signal that one is out. One might reasonably make an argument that the rainbow is a better symbol for our political movement, since it emphasizes the beauty that results from diversity. Pink triangles identify us with a painful part of our past history (Nazi camps), while rainbows identify us with a hoped-for and inclusive future.

But the rational basis for picking one symbol over another is limited. Suppose you thought of a cool new symbol to identify gay people (sperm whales, for instance), and you could make a terrific argument for why sperm whales were better than rainbows. It wouldn't do you much good to wear your sperm- whale yarmulke to temple in hopes of meeting that special someone to celebrate Tisha B'Av with. Nor would your sperm-whale t-shirt and sperm-whale necklace do much good while cruising the Fens. In neither case would anybody understand the signal you're trying to send.

There is a long list of things that once served as secret signals to other gay people that have now fallen by the way. For example, green carnations and red neckties served as gay signals at the time of Oscar Wilde. Cut sleeves and half-eaten peaches were symbols of same-sex love in China.

So perhaps it ought to not to be a surprise to learn that among the Aztecs, chewing gum was supposed to be a signal of homosexuality, as the scholar Geoffrey Kimball has discussed. The Florentine Codex is a long 16th century document in Spanish and Nahuatl-- the language of the Aztecs. In one part of the document, it has the following discussion (ably translated into idiomatic English by Kimball):

"Those sick people that are called homosexual men, truly it is their inheritance, the chewing of gum, it is just as if it were their inheritance, it is just as if it were their fate. And whosoever chews gum in public, he arrives to the status of faggotry; he equals the state of male homosexuality."

Why exactly chewing gum had this status, we will probably never know. Something about oral pleasure, perhaps?

And though it may seem odd to imagine the Aztecs chewing gum, in fact they and other indigenous people from Mexico invented the practice. Europeans borrowed the practice from them. The original gum is made from a tree sap called chicle, derived from the Aztec word tzictli.

The Aztecs did not have a very good opinion of homosexuality, and the Spanish attitude was even worse. So nothing of the pre-Columbian culture of homosexuality still survives in Mexico, and Mexican gay men are now using rainbow flags, just like the rest of us.

If history is any guide, the rainbow flag will also become passé at some point and we will have to find some new symbol to let us identify each other. Gum is not the likeliest of future choices, but figuring out what the next symbol should be will give a future generation of GLBT people something to chew on.