The history of queer identity is full of coded language and expression.
Navigating social norms, censorship and the threat of persecution, LGBTQ+ individuals have long found secret ways to communicate with one another. Like other marginalized groups, they adapted language and symbols to foster new modes of shared understanding, allowing for the discussion of sensitive topics related to identity, sexuality and lived experience while avoiding confrontation with the wider world.
History is replete with examples.
Oscar Wilde is said to have encouraged his friends to wear green carnations on the opening night of his play, Lady Windermere's Fan. Asked what the symbol meant, he is said to have replied, "Nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess." The unnatural colored flower may have been the author's subtle nod to a lifestyle seen as unnatural in the sensibilities of the time.
From green carnations to the infamous "gay earing" to the elaborate "hanky code" that originated in 1970s gay leather culture, subtle signaling of shared subcultural identity has long been a part of the queer experience.
Coded expressions, by their nature, are also a means of preserving privacy. Beyond mere signaling, queer culture has established entire linguistic codes in times of great persecution. Adopting an argot fosters solidarity and in-group identity while also serving as a means of collective resistance to countervailing societal pressures.
Beginning in late 19th century London, a slang language called Polari emerged among performers and other iconoclastic circles that together made up what passed for the underground gay subculture of the time. Polari is a prime example of what linguists call an argot, "cryptolect" or "cant" — by any name a type of linguistic system that evolves explicitly to prevent outsiders from understanding. The jargon included a bizarre mixture of Cockney rhyming slang, Anglo-Romany and "thieves' cant," which together made shared understanding nearly impossible except by those in the know. Supposedly, this cryptolect is the origin of quite a few English words including naff, butch and even the recently re-popularized zhoosh.
Coded communication systems — from the simple to the sophisticated — have served as a vital survival mechanism in social environments that could be profoundly hostile to the queer experience. In a sense, they have functioned as a means of audience selection long before the days of the Instagram "close friends" story.
The intense need for secrecy in explorations of queer identity has also sparked the creation of personalized cryptographies.
Anne Lister, a notable early 19th century British landowner and diarist, meticulously recorded the intimate details of her daily life, including her romantic experiences with other women, in diaries using a complex personal code she termed "crypt hand." Though she experienced an intense need to record and analyze what she thought of as the "oddity" of what today we would call her sexuality, her writings were never meant to be understood by anyone but herself and her most trusted lovers, with whom she may have shared the key to deciphering her writing.
Crypt hand was a privacy preserving technology of the highest order, a private sanctuary for self-expression and identity affirmation when broader articulation was dangerous.
Luckily, Lister made use of a simple substitution cipher that was easily decoded in later years. Her journals now represent a treasure trove of first-person accounting of a deeply personal queer experience, which has sparked academic analysis across a variety of fields.
Lister's story highlights the importance of total privacy to the exploration of identity, the need for self-rhetoric as a means of exploring and reaffirming our individual journey. Perhaps there is nothing gayer than a privacy enhancing technology.
But the existence of this story also highlights the tragic irony of those who must embrace lives of secrecy to avoid cultural taboos and preserve their own safety. The rich and ever-evolving cultural tapestry of LGBTQ+ life — whether expressed in the Victorian court, the timeless traveling circus, the underbelly of the dockyards or the bars and cafes of 20th-century cities — is largely lost to history. For every story that can be sung there are thousands more that never will be.
In this way, a person's individual embrace of data hygiene, to "data minimization" of a kind, serves to preserve privacy, safety and autonomy while also dooming their story to obscurity. For queer folks, the tension between the desire to chronicle and preserve the richness of life and the need to live it unobserved and unmolested has frequently been overwhelming. This tension is reflected across hundreds of years of coded art and literature, from Shakespeare's "fair youth" to Gertrude Stein's "husband." Art finds a way to reflect, even if it can't fully record.
The unsung stories of queer life can be thought of as a testament to the successful protection of personal privacy. They also highlight inequities that persist today. Though the details may be lost to history, we hold on to the shadows of those who came before in the form of coded stories, new and old slang and the types of cultural traditions we honor each year during Pride.
Please send feedback, updates and epistolary musings to cobun@iapp.org.
Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, CIPP/US, CIPM, is the managing director, Washington, D.C., for the IAPP.
