two notes on MSM

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:18 PM -0500 12/22/04, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 11:35:22 -0800, Arnold M. Zwicky
><zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
>
>>1.  first, an antedating, though only from 2001 to 1996.  this from a
>>correspondent in england:
>>-----
>>‘Wanted: Aids Education Field Worker(s) for Men who have Sex with Men
>>(MSM). [
] The Cottaging or Cruising Project (COC) is an experimental
>>health promotion [
] seeking to employ two gay or bisexual men to
>>conduct fieldwork in identified public sex environments (PSE’s) in
>>Barnet, Brent and Harrow.’
>>–Barnet Healthcare NHS Trust advertisement, reprinted in The Guardian
>>Weekend, 28 December 1996, 22
>>-----
>>
>>again, in a social services context.
>>
>>i don't have the resources or the experience to do searches of the
>>required sort, so this antedating exercise is open for anyone who'd
>>like to try it.
>
>Earliest cite I can find on Proquest is from Jan. '93:
>
>---------
>Los Angeles Times, Jan 3, 1993, p. 25
>Joel B. Tan, a Chinese-Filipino immigrant, is program coordinator for the
>Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team, a nonprofit organization that
>provides education on HIV and AIDS to the Asian-Pacific Islander
>community. He was interviewed by Mary Helen Berg.
>[...]
>Monthly we pick several sites where we can find gay and bisexual Asian men
>and we go to straight bars now where we can find what we call MSM - men
>who have sex with men but who don't identify as gay or bisexual.
>---------

There was also, at least for a while, MWHSWM, a label which is both
quasi-acronymic (almost but not quite renderable as "mushroom") and
quasi-palindromic.  I suppose, given the earlier discussion, it could
have been palindromicized to MWHSHWM = 'men who have sex hastily with
men'.  (or "hurriedly", or "haphazardly")

Larry