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Miss Poubelle's neighbor in West Hollywood is a rather handsome man (let's call him Billy), who has a seemingly never-ending stream of short-term male visitors. This has led to a certain amount of debate among the other residents of the apartment building. Some of us are of the impression that Billy is a whore and is turning tricks upstairs in his apartment. Others of us think that Billy is merely a slut, and that the visitors are his tricks.

We are probably not going to find out anytime soon which faction is correct. But the debate set Miss Poubelle to wondering about the word trick and its two disparate senses. To say that the men are his tricks means that they are casual sexual partners whom he has picked up somewhere. But to say that he is turning tricks means that he is engaging in prostitution. Why the difference?

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Like many elements of gay language, trick originally comes from the language of prostitutes. Trick is from the Old French trique meaning "deceit, treachery, cheating," and there are similar words in other Romance languages. In Italian, for example, triccare means "to cheat." In general, to play a trick on someone means to deceive or cheat them.

Trick and turning a trick were used as early as 1865 to refer to committing a variety of minor crimes, including robbery and prostitution. The following quote from 1926 shows this pretty clearly: "Ewing was a thief, who... had settled in Chicago.... He did not ply his trade here, but after 'turning a trick' outside the city, would return to Chicago."

This quote shows us that the earlier usage of turning a trick covers several different types of criminal mischief, including burglary. But from around 1920, the term seems to have been mostly confined to prostitution, and this is pretty much the only way the phrase is used now.

We don't know exactly how this term and others like it were transferred from prostitutes' language to the language of gay men. It is possible that male prostitutes picked up the phrase in their professional life and passed it on to the larger community of gay men, but that is speculation.

For prostitutes, a trick is just a customer or a John. But when gay men talk about their tricks, they don't usually mean that money was exchanged. Miss Poubelle would guess that when gay men first started calling casual sexual partner tricks, there was a bit of humor involved. After all, gay men have probably been calling each other whores since day one, and what could be more a natural flame than calling your friend's date his "trick"? We might compare the way that people sometimes talk about needing a sugar fix, humorously appropriating the language of addicts to describe non-chemical cravings.

Trick does not strike Miss Poubelle as conveying a particularly sympathetic attitude toward one's sexual partners, since the term seems to imply that sexual partners are interchangeable. That seems a rather poor attitude to take; Miss Poubelle thinks you should have as many partners as you want, but you shouldn't treat people like pieces of meat. Still, trick is certainly a convenient monosyllabic alternative to phrases like "one-night stand." And we all know that last night's trick very often develops into tomorrow's live-in treat. So despite the word's origin in crime, Miss Poubelle is willing to accept trick as a respectable part of a modern gay man's vocabulary.

Now.... who is that young man headed up to Billy's....?