 Rachel Cook speaks fluent gay.
My stepfather was Italian, and if other
Italians were around, which was often, he would speak Italian even when there
were others present who could not.
My mother, who was of Chinese-Spanish descent
but could speak neither Chinese nor Spanish, liked to tell my stepfather how rude
it was to speak his mother tongue in front of non-Italian speakers; and as a
child I wondered why this upset her so. In my naiveté I just assumed it was the
easier option for him. It wasn’t until I was 12 that something much more
sinister was afoot.
My step-sister told me that the greatest
thing about being bi-lingual was that if you wanted to talk about someone and
they were right in front of you, you could.
“You can say whatever you like and they
have no idea,” she revealed. After she told me this, I began to imagine that
whenever anyone spoke anything but
English they were talking about me. I could be in a Chinese restaurant and a
group of Chinese people may have been ordering food in Chinese, but to me they
were saying things like, “Oh my god look what she’s wearing,” or, “Can you believe
the way those morons hold their chopsticks?”
The one thing I know is that if you are on
a tram or in an elevator and people start talking in another language, and you
suspect they may be talking about you; let me assure you, they are. My girlfriend, who’s Bulgarian, and her mother do it all
the time. Some poor unsuspecting sod gets
on the light-rail and all of a sudden I’m in the Eastern Bloc. God knows what
they are saying.
Occasionally I wonder if they’re talking
about me. Her mother could be saying, “Why couldn’t you have found a nice
Bulgarian girl?”, and my girlfriend could be answering “I’m just biding my time
‘til something better comes along,” and I would continue to sit there smiling dumbly
with no idea of what’s going on.
The joy of talking behind someone’s back in
front of their face is something I’m hoping to master one day, but until then,
the closet I’ve come to being multi-lingual is in understanding the language of
the gay.
In a café recently, a rather loud young man
gave his straight friends a run down on modern gay lingo. His preferred pronoun
for everyone was ‘she’, and he informed his friends that the gay scene was just
‘tragic’ these days. When the waiter placed his latte in front of him he said
‘thanks girlfriend’, and after taking his first sip he assured us all that it
was a ‘fabulous’ coffee.
It was strange, but without any prompting
he went onto explain what ‘barebacking’ and ‘felching’ were, and I could tell
that the mother next to me was calling on all her strength not to put her hands
over her six-year-old’s ears - as was I.
At no time did the baby-queen’s friends ask
him to clarify any of the terminology he was using, but by the end of his
tutorial the entire café knew what ‘topping’, ‘bottoming’ and ‘rough-trade’
were.
Eventually he paid the bill, said “ciao
girlfriend”, to the waiter and minced out the door. The café seemed to
collectively start breathing again, all a little shell-shocked, but no doubt wondering
how they could introduce the word ‘felch’ into their next conversation.
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