gay lifestyle

[Arnold Zwicky]

some notes on safire's treatment of "lifestyle" in his column
yesterday (20 july 2003)...

the reference to the OED is somewhat beside the point.  the 1929
alfred adler citation is from material translated from german, and
uses "lifestyle" (gm. Lebensstil) in a sense different from the ones
that have become current in english.  both senses are essentially
compositional: "lifestyle" as 'style of life'.  but adler used it to
mean 'style of a life', referring to a basic character established in
childhood and extending throughout life', while later english uses can
be glossed as '(chosen) style of living', something that could be
altered without great difficulty.

safire cites me as pointing to "the German sociologist George Simmel's
1900 _Lebensstiles_".  what i supplied was merely a reference to a
secondary source, the "lifestyle" entry in dynes's Encyclopedia of
Homosexuality, written by warren johansson.  simmel's use of
Lebensstil (not Lebensstiles) was of course in german, not english, so
it's not relevant to the OED citation list.  anyway, it's georg, not
george; i'd guess this was a copy editor's "correction", of the same
sort that bedevils my daughter elizabeth, whose name is often
"corrected" in the text of the german and french translations of her
books, to elisabeth.  in any case, i'm not responsible for claims
about simmel; i was just passing them on.

what i *did* comment on were uses of "gay lifestle" by gay people, to
refer to a particular constellation of attitudes and practices
(crystallized in the 1970s) characteristic of certain urban gay men,
and uses of "gay lifestyle" by outsiders, to refer either to
homosexuality in general or to homosexual acts.

the in-group use, which is discussed at length in the johansson
article, is what michaelangelo signorile calls the "(urban) gay (male)
*scene*".  he takes this collection of attitudes, ideologies, and
practices to have enormous visibility and influence in the gay (male)
world, well outside of the (minority of) gay men, largely young men,
who might be viewed as its central practitioners, and he views this
influence as baleful.

safire quotes The Times Stylebook as advising that phrases like "gay
lifestyle" be avoided, on the grounds that they "imply that all gay
men and lesbians live the same way."  this is an incredibly weak
objection, since the same objection could be made to any brief label;
AAVE is not spoken by all (and only) african americans, and so on for
a great many other familiar examples.  there would be little reason to
object to "gay lifestyle" - or "yuppie lifestyle" etc. - if it were
understood to refer merely to one highly visible collection of
attitudes and practices; a reasonable person should understand that
such labels do not refer universally to a group.

note that signorile chose to use "scene" instead of "lifestyle".  i'm
sure this is not an accident or some idiosyncrasy on his part.  i'm
sure he was avoiding "gay lifestyle" because of outsider uses, to
refer to homosexuality in general or to homosexual acts.

safire quotes two (of many) correspondents who objected to his earlier
use of "their _lifestyle_" (that is, homosexuals' lifestyle),
apparently as a reference to homosexuality in general.  the letter
writers referred to "the code word _lifestyle_...always derogative in
intent" and to the word as "a politicized, freighted word meant to
devalue sexual orientation as a mere choice".  safire's response to
this is to cite an inoffensive use of the word "to categorize people
based on their consumer or fashion choices", adding that the word "is
now taken by gays as moral condemnation of their sexuality."  he
thus suggests that the usage that gay people are objecting to is
merely the inoffensive usage and that gay people are hypersensitively
reading insult into it.

what he misses here is something that i made explicit in my e-mail
to his office, namely that derogation is clearly *intended* by
many who use the expression "gay lifestyle".  (this is the same
issue as with "gay agenda".)  such uses poison the expression and
make it difficult for a writer to convey a simple compositional
meaning.  in safire's case, it would have been open for him to
have written

  Homosexuals hail the decision as the law's belated recognition
  of fairness, which it is, but some would escalate that to
  American society's acceptance of homosexuality, which is at
  least premature.

but he chose to write "their _lifestyle_" instead of "homosexuality".
what does that choice convey?  did he really want to convey that?  a
careful writer should want to be scrupulous about distinguishing modes
of living, sexual orientation, and engaging in particular sexual acts.
taking safire to be a careful writer, as a careful reader i'd have to
assume that he had some reason for using a reference to the first of
these three things to convey reference to either or both of the other
two, and from what i know of other people's similar usages, i'd
suspect that his intention was to derogate.

actually, when i read his first piece, i *did* suspect this, and i
was surprised, given the tone of the rest of the piece.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)