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Miss Poubelle was recently perusing XY, a relatively new gay magazine which is courageously aimed at very young gay men (roughly those in the 15-25 age group). This is a market that much of the general public would like to ignore because of its squeamishness about teenage sexuality. The magazine has had a hard time making a go of it financially because many potential advertisers run screaming from the concept of boys in love with other boys. They presumably fear that the audience is mostly chicken hawks, adult gay men who are attracted to much younger partners. But, despite the economic difficulties, XY editors have succeeded in putting out a magazine that has more original, unhomogenized content than four or five issues of most other gay mags.

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One of Miss Poubelle's favorite features is a column called "Semantics," where readers write in with their observations of young gay slang in the making. In the most recent column, one reader notes the phrase to drop a feather, meaning 'to give hints that one is gay'. The example is "I think my new neighbor is gay... dude has been dropping feathers while washing his car!"

Although from the cutting edge of slang, this expression ties in nicely with an older set of metaphors for voluntary and involuntary disclosure. It's of course related to the expression to drop a hint. Linguists call phrases like drop a hint dead metaphors -- those that we are hardly aware of. Why do we say drop a hint rather than any of a number of imaginable alternatives? The reason seems to be that our culture associates up with control and down with lack of control (think of tops and bottoms). When we drop something, it goes from being under our control to being out of control. As we say, now it's "out of our hands."

An earlier bit of gay slang based on a similar metaphor is to drop a bead, which means 'to reveal one's homosexuality inadvertently.' The idea here is that the closet queen is secretly wearing a set of pearls under the business suit. Before they drop, she is in control of her identity. But when the beads clatter to the floor, her secret is revealed.

It isn't clear from the example given whether dropping a feather is done accidently or not. Does the neighbor washing his car hope that others will figure him out? Or does he inadvertently do something that lets others know his secret? The language of the metaphor seems to suggest the second, since birds do not voluntarily drop their feathers.

The recent feathery turn of this phrase is fascinating because the revelation is not now a secret set of jewelry, but instead one's true avian identity. For who has feathers but a bird? The readers of XY may be chicken from the gay perspective, but when they are able to identify each other, they can form communities, since birds of a feather flock together. Miss Poubelle wishes them happy flying.