"Butch up"

[neil]

on 4/5/05 2:26 am, Arnold M. Zwicky at zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Butch up"
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--> -
>
> On May 3, 2005, at 4:43 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>> This is something that I heard for the first time, today. However,
>> according to a post to the Double-Tongued Word-Wrester Dictionary: A
>> Growing Dictionary of Old and New Words From the Fringes of English
>> <http://www.doubletongued.org/>, it dates back to at least the movie,
>> Die Hard With A Vengeance.
>
> i don't find it on this site, at least as an entry.  grant, you there?
>
> but this one's been around a while in gay male circles.  "butch up"
> your behavior, clothes, decor, etc., or just "butch it up": act
> conventionally masculine (to conceal your homosexuality, to avoid
> alienating people, whatever).  i'm away from my relevant sources, but
> i'm pretty sure it goes back a few decades at least.  it's an
> entirely natural development from the adjective "butch".
>
> arnold

Bruce Rodgers' The Queens' Vernacular (Straight Arrow Books, 1972) has:

'butch it up  warning to act manly in presence of friends who "don't know"
or the police who do. "Butch it up, Mae, Tilly's got us spotted."

--Neil Crawford