Republican Chickenhawks
Just within the last few decades, I can remember actually hearing people, within hearing distance of my own ears, complain about how the word "gay" has been lost from the average (heterosexual) vernacular. You know, all those middle-aged white guys who wanted to tell you all about, say, how they were feeling so happy that they floated to their feet and did a gay little dance, or how in their youth the sun would shine and the bluebirds would sing and things just felt so gay. Etc.
As you know, that dictional path is now closed to them, thanks to the homosexual insurgency that viciously attacked the language, pillaging and plundering, and absconded with unwilling hostages like "gay". Now we force those words to serve our nefarious purposes, mere proverbial and adverbial slaves subjugated by chains of taint to our rhetorical will.
How did we — the "gays" — manage to sieze control of such a useful word from the benevolent clutches of the "straights"? I don't know; the memories of the skermishes in that guerilla war have long since slipped below the distant horizon of the forgotten past. I guess, in the end, we gay people just needed the word more than they did.
Now it's our turn to loose a battle in the war over limited vernacular resources. It seems that there is a word, once relegated to the bottom drawer of the underground homosexual vernacular, kept hidden beneath our most unspeakable leather apparel, for which the straight vernacular has discovered a pressing need, an urgent call to duty that trumps any and all of our — the "gays" — now less-than-compelling needs for the word.
The word in question, of course, is "chickenhawk".
As far as I can tell, this newly devised use of "chickenhawk" is called upon to describe the modern-day phenomenon of the Strident Republican Supporter of the Lovely Little Bush War who, generally speaking, supports our troops in Iraq very, very vigorously but has more important things to do than enlist in the military. Given their hawkishness and their apparent disinclination for military action, the etymology of "chickenhawk" is pretty evident and appropriate. (See, e.g., "Generation Chickenhawk", by Max Blumenthal in The Nation, 28 June 2005. Also, my own post of a few days ago in which I mention, and give a link to information about, Jesus' General's "Operation Yellow Elephant", a bold and cunning plan to needle Young Republican Chickenhawks into revealing why it's so important to them that young democrats fight their wars for them.)
The word is clearly very, very useful in this context.* However, some people may not be aware that this word had for a long time been an important part of the "gay" vernacular. While it's true that it's been somewhat moribund in the last decade or two, it once was "our" word.
Fortunately, one thing has not changed: as a gay word it was pejorative, and as a straight word it remains pejorative. Originally, as a gay word, it referred to an older gay man (usually thought of as "troll-like" and pictured as wizened, i.e., probably over 35, the predatory "hawk") who had a taste for younger men (in the verancular, "chicken", possibly although not necessarily "jail bait"). To be honest, I've never known any chickenhawks personally and I tend to think that the vocabulary need was probably never really big enough to warrant an entire word to describe it, even if the word is colorful and bitchy, at one time required attributes for any decorative phrases in the gay vernacular.
In other words, I think it's needed with much greater urgency these days to describe the lily-livered Young Republicans than it is to describe a few older homosexuals who have probably by now found age-appropriate companionship on Caribbean Cruises and such.
Shall we call it an even exchange now, "gay" for "chickenhawk", and dry those crocodile tears about the loss from the heterosexual vernacular of the originally underused word "gay"?
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*Just for its sheer rhetorical exhuberance, consider this aside written by driftglass ("On This Fourth of July"):
(Seriously, watching these Gap-clad Yahoos trying to paper over the moral bankruptcy and cowardice of their party and positions with nothing but empty decibels and hysterically spasmodic knee-jerkery is like unto watching a Busby Berkley epic recast with Third Stage syphilitics, water-head drunks and St. Vitus’ Dancers: There’s a sense of horror that no Grown-ups are putting a stop to it… a certain, shameful, geek-show fascination…and a degree of wonder that, given the headless-Chickenhawk flailing that passes for forensic skills on the Right, they all haven’t just kicked each other’s million-dollar orthodontia down each other’s throats.)