Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

When you visit the local Wal-mart or Sears, do you look suspiciously at the men behind the counters, suspecting them of effeminacy? Blanche suspects that few readers would make this odd connection between swish and sales.

So it may come as a surprise to learn that one hundred years ago, social attitudes were quite different. Men who worked as sales clerks were widely derided as unmanly, and were often suspected of engaging in acts which could not be named.

A preferred derogatory term for such sales clerks was counter-jumper, and use of this term generally showed that the speaker thought such work inappropriate for real mean. The following 1841 quote from the Oxford English Dictionary shows the general associations of the phrase, "They... know that I'm only a tallow-faced counter-jumper." Presumably the clerk is tallow-faced (i.e. pale) because he spends his days inside a shop, rather than out in the sun-- working like a real man.

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An extraordinary example of the effeminate associations of sales clerks can be found in an 1860 parody, which was published in Vanity Fair (and reprinted in Jonathan Katz's Gay American History). The poem lampoons Whitman's "Song of Myself" in the following lines:

I am the Counter-jumper, weak and effeminate.

I love to loaf and lie about dry-goods.

I loaf and invite the Buyer,

I am the essence of retail...

I am the crate, and the hamper, and the yard-wand,

And the box of silks fresh from France,

And when I came into the world I paid duty,

And I never did my duty,

And never intended to do it,

For I am the creature of weak depravities:

I am the Counter-jumper,

I sound my feeble yelp over the woofs of the World.

We also find a fascinating depiction of a counter-jumper in the novel Rose o' the River, written in 1905 by Kate Douglas Wiggin, best-known as the author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

In Rose o' the River, the heroine Rose must choose between two men. One is Stephen Waterman-- stout, masculine, and clumsy-- and the other is Claude Merrill-- a sophisticated and well-dressed glove salesman with elegant manners. Claude's effeminacy is sufficiently clear when his character is introduced with lines like the following "It is quite conceivable that a man can sell gloves and still be a man; but Claude Merrill was a manikin," and "Stephen could have furnished the stuff for a dozen Claudes and have had enough left for an ordinary man besides."

One crusty old coot says of Claude, "I allers distrust that pink-an'-white, rosy-posy kind of a man." Miss Poubelle will leave it to the imagination of her readers which of the men eventually triumphs.

Rose o' the River is a curious reminder, however, that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, effeminacy and homosexuality were not necessarily linked. Claude Merrill in the novel is depicted as less-than-a-real-man, doing woman's work in a store rather than tilling the soil or butchering hogs. But he is at the same time a flirt and an attempted seducer of women.

So in the curious world-view of that period, counter-jumpers and others who failed to do real man's work were derided as less than true men. Some of these men were engaged in the "weak depravities" of the Whitman parody, while others used their effeminacy as a tool to woo females.

As for the connection between working in sales and being effeminate, that seems like a strange and obsolete connection to us. But before we feel too smug about our modern enlightenment, we would do well to consider the ways in which we gay men-- and society at large-- continue to idealize and fetishize "masculine" professions. Are we so much more advanced in our estimation of "butch" work?

The Village People didn't contain any sales clerks, college professors, or day-care providers. We find websites touting the sex appeal of truckers, athletes, and soldiers. But Blanche wants to know-- where are the sites that explore the erotic potential of food stylists, fashion designers, and magazine columnists?