Studies of language history and the studies exploring the histories of particular languages assume many forms in today’s linguistics research. Studies adding sexuality to those discussions, and then exploring (or theorizing) the connections between language and sexuality in history occur much less frequently, however. Notable exceptions include: Julia Penelope’s Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues (1990), Jeffrey Masten’s Queer Philologies: Sex, Language and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (2016), Madhavi Menon’s Unhistorical Shakespeare (2008), and Paul Baker’s Polari—The Lost Language of Gay Men (2002). These works use linguistic data to recover a language-based sexual past, and then to trace developments from that past to more recent times. Studies like Horswell (2005), Blackwood (2010), Msibi (2013), and Rudwick (2005) consider how connections between language and sexuality may reorient under the disruptions of colonial rule and other sharply potent historical moments.

The analysis of language which guides these studies is not limited to descriptions of syntactic and phonological structures or semantic and pragmatic processes. “Linguistic” analysis here draws on interests in language developed in cultural studies, literary studies, language and culture studies, as well as in sociolinguistics, socio-pragmatics, and other multidisciplinary fields; the same is often true of historical inquiry, whatever the topic of concern.

This book recognizes the importance of multidisciplinary analyses of language and sexuality in history. But this book explores various moments of connection between language, sexuality, and history before the events at Stonewall In (Late June 1969), and this book proposes that a Queer Historical Linguistics serves as the framework for that exploration.

To begin by clarifying the focus for this discussion: Why assign such importance to the events at Stonewall in 1969, and to the impact of those events on connections between language and sexuality before?

On the evening of June 26, 1969, there was an altercation between police officers and patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a bar on Christopher Street in Manhattan’s West Village. The Stonewall Inn was popular among straight-acting homosexual women and men, by butch men and queens, by dykes and femmes, and by people who might be called trans or gender-queer in today’s parlance. The altercation began in response to a familiar routine of police harassment: The police officers entered the bar looking for so-called suspicious activities. They checked some patrons’ i.d.’s, pushed some patrons into the street and arrested other patrons for “disturbing the peace”. When police officers tried to take the arrested bar patrons away for arraignment, others from the bar fought back in protest: Police harassment at gay bars had happened once too often, and enough was enough! A crowd of same-sex identified, trans and straight allies gathered outside the bar to lend support, as the bar patrons forced the police to retreat into the interior of the bar. While some in the crowd watched, others joined the bar patrons as they took over the street in front of the bar, disrupting traffic and voicing their anger through other means. That night’s activities finally calmed, but the next three nights saw more public demonstrations by queers and allies, and more confrontations with the police.

Stonewall was not the first instance that same-sex and trans subjects had taken public stands against homophobic harassment, discrimination, oppression, and violence. Trans and other homeless youth confronted management and the police at San Francisco’s (CA) Compton Street Café in 1965 on these very issues (Stryker 2008a: 63–66; b), and patrons of the Black Cat, a gay bar in Silver Lake (Los Angeles, CA), joined by members of PRIDE, a newly formed personal-rights advocacy group, used verbal and physical resistance to respond to a police raid on the bar in January 1967 (Faderman and Timmons 2006: 155–158). There had also been other moments of protest, like the picket lines calling for job security and other equal rights for homosexuals in front of the White House (Washington, D.C.) in the mid-1960s (Loughrey 1998: photo insert pg. 9) and protesting the US policy of excluding known homosexuals from active duty in the military (Loughrey 1998: 269).

These are urban examples: Examples of push back in various forms from beyond the metropolis are not so fully documented. Even so, what happened at the Stonewall Inn in late June 1969 has come to be been identified as

… the emblematic event in modern lesbian and gay history. [That event] occupies a central place in the iconography of lesbian and gay awareness [because] it marks the birth of the modern-day gay and lesbian political movement. (Duberman 1993: xvii)

In José Muñoz’s phrasing, besides being “… of course the birth of the modern lesbian and gay movement”, … Stonewall represents “… the initial eruption that led to the formalizing and formatting of gay identities” (2009: 115, reordered). Author and social critic Edmund White, who witnessed the events at Stonewall at firsthand, suggests that language change was part of this emergent “lesbian gay movement” and the “initial eruption of … identities” that it inspired. He explains:

Before 1969 only a small (though courageous and articulate) number of gays had much pride in their homosexuality or a conviction that their predilections were legitimate. The rest of us defined our homosexuality in negative terms and those terms isolated us from one another. (1980: 236)

So when someone in the crowd tried to mobilize those around him by shouting out the phrase “gay power”, everyone laughed.

The notion that gays might become militant after the manner of blacks seemed amusing – first because we gay men were used to thinking of ourselves as too effeminate to protest anything and secondly because most of us did not consider ourselves to be a legitimate minority. (1980: 236)

According, as political and individual impacts of Stonewall begun to unfold, White saw those participating and observing the events

… cast[ing] about for political and linguistic models. Black power, feminism, resistance to the War in Viet Nam and the New Left were all available, and each contributed to the emerging gay style and vocabulary…. (1980: 236)

With that “emerging gay style and vocabulary”, new forms of lesbian/gay related public presence and public assertiveness—gay liberation—began to “spring up across the country”, all of which quickly “transformed attitudes among homosexuals and modified the ways in which they speak” (White 1980: 235, emphasis WL).

Like White, Journalist Steve Thrasher (2012) traces these modifications of language specifically to the changes in visibility—being out of the closet—which the Stonewall moment inspired.

Were it not for a poor, chaotic band who bravely defended the Frist Amendment at Stonewall 43 years ago next week … there would have been no gay rights movement as we know it. The whole premise of being out has been predicated on free expression of once-taboo matters. (Thrasher 2012, emphasis WL)

Gay historian and political activist Eric Marcus agrees:

Before Stonewall, there was no such thing as coming out or being out. The very idea of out, it was ludicrous. People talk about being in and out now, there was no out, there was just in. (Marcus 2009)

Linguist Rusty Barrett argues that there was a sense of coming out preceding the Stonewall moment (2017: 7) and that it was similar to the self-declarations that orient coming out practices in the post-Stonewall era. Barrett’s evidence for this assertion of continuity is the entry for come out in Gershon Legman’s (1941) glossary of homosexual slang, published almost thirty years before Stonewall. But a close reading of that entry shows Legman describing a process whereby the subject “…become[s] more and more exclusively homosexual with experience” (1941: 1161), not a process of increasingly flamboyant declarations to the outside world, as Barrett’s argument assumes. In fact, Legman’s glossary entry noted the overlap between come out and (being) brought out, acknowledging the mentoring that more experienced subjects often gave to those just becoming familiar with the social terrain of sexual transgression. Mentoring continued after Stonewall, but it has been increasingly enhanced (and possibly upstaged) by circulations of information by peers and through electronic and other media. But the point remains, coming out after Stonewall involves forms of self-declarations made outside of the homosexual terrain, rather declarations made to other homosexuals (or by them) as subjects gained greater familiarity within homosexual settings.