PIGEON = 'sponsee'

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Another discussion group has raised the issue of the earliest use of the word 
PIGEON in Alcoholics Anonymous to refer to a person who is 'sponsored' by 
another person in the program (the SPONSOR-SPONSEE relationship is a widely 
recongnized and reifed aspect of the program, e.g., new members of the Program are 
strongly encouraged to find a person with long-term sobriety who will act as 
their SPONSOR, a person who will guide them, generally through daily contact, 
through the program).

I believe that this term PIGEON used in this sense is at least 30 years old 
in A.A. in the United States. But apparently does not appear with very great 
frequency in the usual data bases.


In a message dated 12/11/03 7:01:39 PM, someone writes:

 This paragraph appears in a novel, Lawrence Block's _Small Town_,
2003, p. 78), on the same page that also includes the useful lexical
items "cruisier" ([re Christopher St. in Greenwich Village:] "at this
hour on this nice a day it would be a little bit cruisier than he
could stand") and "lesbian bed death".

"The conventional wisdom in AA was that one ought to choose a sponsor
of one's own sex, to keep sexual tension from undermining the
relationship. That was fine for straights, but it wasn't that simple
in gay AA, where the term _pigeon-fucker_ had been coined to label
sponsors who took sexual advantage of sponsees. (He'd heard the term
at his first meeting, and thought it was some kinky practice he'd
somehow missed out on.)"

This was the only occurrence of this form that I could locate on
either Nexis or google (yes, there were 11 google hits but all seem
to involve the compositional meaning alluded to in the parenthetical
from the end of the passage above, as opposed to the idiomatic sense
defined in the previous sentence).  Granted, the use of "pigeon" for
a dupe of one sort or another is well-established in slang use, but
if I'm correctly interpreting the practice of pigeon-fucking to
require the AA (if not gay AA) context and the establishment of a
sponsor/sponsee relationship to be exploited, it counts as a
translucent, if not opaque, compound.