- Ken Cage Jacana Media
While many may consider the publication way overdue, others again may consider it rather puerile and frivolous, and indeed too sectarian in that it puts gay people in a self-defined linguistic ghetto, mirroring the exclusion and marginalisation that many gay people experience or claim to experience.
In either event, it's a very amusing book and informative in the sense that it sheds some light on the eternal debate about language. Here we have a language, grafted on to the mainstream South African consciousness, which, to say the least, is in itself begging for definition and identity, fractured and multilingual as that consciousness is.
And now this - a language of a minority within a minority. Strictly speaking of course "gayle" or "gay-speak" is not a language, but a set of terms, a patois of sorts, that reflects the particular experience of being outside what could problematically be termed "mainstream heterosexual culture".
Gay people, or at least those who choose to define themselves to varying degrees as belonging to that group, experience a different daily reality: most don't have children, they have only recently in this country acquired the rights that heterosexual people enjoy. But they have, on the whole, experienced a form of exclusion from society, in the workplace or family, depending on the environment in which they live and work.
This has led to a kind of defiance, an in-house consciousness, much of which has also been adopted by the very mainstream to which "gayle" owes its existence, even if only in reaction to the mainstream. And this books aims to reflect one aspect of this alternative consciousness, within a local context.
Cage's book comes with a preface and chapters dedicated to the whole phenomenon of being gay. He says that "gayle" primarily serves a function, namely concealment and its use in this regard was particularly prevalent in the 1970s, a period which he sees as the most oppressive decade "in South African history" for gay people.
Not that Jan van Riebeeck's time or that of the Victorians was particularly enlightened, so he should have steered cleared of such absolute statements. In his analysis Cage tends to elevate the phenomenon of "gayle" to the dizzy heights of academe, an elevation one is not sure it entirely deserves.
However, it remains true that the development of a language - or a "linguaggio" to use the Italian term for a language that arises out of a particular set of circumstances - is in itself a fertile field of study and reveals much about a given society.
Significantly, in what could be euphemistically termed our racially-conscious society, "gayle" has also been infected with the need to navigate around prejudice based on race, with the terms "Natalie" referring to black gays, or blacks in general, derived from the colonial term "natives".
Similarly Indians are referred to as "Iris", coloureds as "Chlora" and whites as "Wendy". Some of these terms have become virtually mainstream in the Western Cape, which has added a rich vocabulary of its own, mainly in Afrikaans. So we have terms like "jonkies" or "jongetjies" denoting young men, generally "active" gay partners. Terms which Cage says have their origin in the Western Cape are "Jennifer Justice", denoting the law.
The terms "Priscilla" for policeman is well-known too.
The book is filled with amusing terms, such as "hoogmof", meaning a rich or stylish gay person, a member of the haute moffoisie.
Many South Africans are familiar with the rather stridently derogatory terms relating to airline stewards, but what is interesting in Cage's book is the number of Zulu terms as well, often relating to experiences on the mines of Johannesburg: "Mkwehlo", referring to the marriage between men in single-sex hostels, "nkonkana" (Tsonga) referring to a young man who plays the so-called "female role" and "nongolozi" a Zulu word meaning a gay man, derived from the Johannesburg gang known as the Ninevites, whose leader was one Nongoloza Mathebula who forbade gang members to have contact with women.
All in all, Cage's book is a good read, fun to dip into and also the product of extensive research. It may be an open question whether a book such as this helps us to understand fellow South Africans better, or whether it promotes stereotypes and a sense of exclusion and/or exclusivity.
But that it makes a contribution to our rich linguistic heritage in our country, of that there can be little doubt.