• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Gays Can't Whistle?

Any link between the supposed homosexual proclivities of seamen and the traditional injunction against whistling while at sea?
 
Whistling as a covert signal within the gay community

In the last century gay men and women employed whistling as part of a set of signals to identify each other. Michael Wilcox, in his book Benjamin Britten’s Operas points out the allusions to homosexuality written into the opera Albert Herring by Britten: "...jangling keys, or in this case, the shop bell, whistling and Swan Vestas matches, [were] all used in wartime homosexual circles as part of the ritual of making contact."​

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/art...ucker-up-top-ten-practical-uses-for-whistling

Halperin decries Verdi’s Aida as an example of “the pomp and circumstance of official, heterosexual culture . . . and European chauvinism”. He, however, is an American chauvinist who splatters his text with lofty misjudgements and tasteless condescension. He dismisses (for example) David Beckham, who made his first-team debut with Manchester United at the age of seventeen, captained the English football team for six years (during which he played fifty-eight times), and has participated in a record-breaking number of tournament victories, as someone who “has devoted himself to appearing as much as he has to doing”. He wonders if Hegel “could whistle” (as schoolyard bullies claim gay boys cannot do), and imagines him “on the night of Judy Garland’s funeral on Friday, June 27, 1969 . . . among the queens who gathered outside the Stonewall Inn during the police raid on it”.​

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/how-best-to-be-gay/
 
It sounds to me like one of those humorous circumlocutions, like "He bats for Darrington" or "She favours the sensible shoe" or "He's on the other bus" or "Friend of Dorothy".

I say "humorous circumlocution" because "euphemism" implies a polite way of saying something distasteful, and we are surely past the era of assuming that homosexuality is distasteful.

If whistling were seen as something that a man would do, then "He can't whistle" would be a coded way of saying that. At one time in the UK, it was considered actionable slander to accuse a straight person of being homosexual, so there was a practical reason for not saying it directly. Some people may then have taken the expression seriously.

People's fascination with other people's sexuality is bizarre.
 
Does this mean that 80's rap act Whistle were gay now ?

 
Books could steer desperate, non-whistling gay folk towards social success:

Mouth-Sounds-1.jpg


The same book gives advice on how to master "labored breathing"

Mouth-Sounds-6.jpg


Courtesy of Awful Library Books, of course! :btime:
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top