by Sophie Senning, Chloe DiMario, and Olivia Gruber
Please note that “’Round Howard Street” blog posts feature archival documents which may contain offensive content. Language and images presented in some historical documents may follow incorrect and harmful stereotypes based on race, sexuality, gender identity, ethnicity and/or culture. Please read and review this blog with care. For our full Statement on Offensive Content, click here.
Language is an ever-changing part of our lives. It is different now than it was 100 years ago, 50 years ago, and even 10 years ago. One of these significant differences is offensive language often targeted at minority groups. Pejoration is a linguistic term used to describe when the meaning of a word garners a negative connotation over time. Slurs are some of the most common pejoratives discussed today, especially in fields of study dealing with social history.
Over the course of the last thirteen weeks, our class has been doing research on historic Howard Street in downtown Akron. For our research we have been looking at newspaper articles, personal testimonies, and various other historical resources to try and understand Black and LGBTQ+ life in the mid-1900s. Along with this, we have unfortunately come across instances of pejoration.
In 1936, the Torch Club ran an advertisement in The Akron Beacon Journal for an event tagged “The Torch Goes Gay.” It was followed by the phrase “Female Impersonators,” who we would now label as drag queens. There are still some people who define themselves this way today, but this term has been criticized as transphobic and offensive. However, this was an advertisement from the club themselves, showing how this term was originally more normalized. The shifting of identifying terms in the LGBTQ+ community is a consistent trend in history as can be seen with the debate over the term “queer.” However, it wasn’t just the LGBTQ+ community themselves who used these terms, but news outlets as well.
As Sophie Senning explains, working with these terms can be jarring, but using them yields better search returns. She says, “During my research for this class, I came across numerous slurs being used in articles about the queer community. I quickly realized that I got much better results from my searches if I used slurs, as that’s just how people were referred to. As someone who is transgender, having to constantly read these slurs during my research definitely got to me at at first. Although to be honest, most of them are things I’ve already heard people in my community (or myself) be called, so I grew numb to it pretty quickly out of necessity. In most of these stories you can tell that the queer people are being written about, rather than writing about themselves. Even in articles taking a more professional tone, queer people are treated as an oddity, a spectacle, lowlifes, something you observe but don’t actually want to associate with. Rarely do they do the seemingly obvious of asking queer people questions, instead choosing to speculate. It serves as both a reminder of how far we’ve come, while at the same time reminding me of the number of news articles I see regularly today that make the same mistakes.”
Many of the words we use today to refer to the queer community are actually very new. For example, words like “transgender” didn’t actually start being commonly used until the 1990s, and the original meaning of the word has changed since then as well. Originally coined in the late 1960s by transgender woman Virginia Prince, she originally intended for transgender to only mean trans people who have not had a sex change operation, compared to the then called transsexuals. Nowadays, the word transgender has become a blanket term for anyone that does not identify with their gender assigned at birth.
As we are looking at several decades during our research, knowing the right words to use has become a big part of finding useful information. For example, searching in the 1930s and 40s, words like “female impersonators”, “queer”, and “third sex” turn up more results. In later decades like the 1960s, the words “transvestite”, “gay”, and “homosexual” are more common.
Reading 1900s newspaper articles is enlightening into the negative attitudes LGBTQ+ individuals had to face and how they often were not in control of how they were portrayed. The language that was often used to describe them and their romantic lives is problematic today and is a clear product of a more ignorant time. As active learners of Akron history, we in the ‘Round Howard Street UnClass are responsible for reading and relaying the stories and attitudes of the past, despite the offensive nature of some.
Sources
Gary Felsinger, A History of Akron Gay Life. 2009.
“Strange ‘Third’ Sex Flooding Nation, Writer Reveals.” New Pittsburgh Courier. March 19, 1932
“The Torch Goes Gay.” Akron Beacon Journal. February 26, 1936