Gender and Language

Cross Media Intertextuality and Performativity

11      In a 1997 issue of World Movie Monthly, Tim posted the following personal:

After a while, like a deer, we learnt to lick our wounds to ease the pain. After a while, we came to the realization that our darkest fears were remarkably average. After a while we bumped into each other in the shade of a tree. You smiled and sighed: Oh, you are here, too. (Tim, 29, friendship)

In answer to the above paragraph, Tim received more than 80 responses; approximately 70 respondents were male. By 1995, this staged performance, a tacit consensus among posters and respondents on the matter, unknown to non-community members, had become recognizable to the majority of gay men in Taiwan. In Tim's opinion, his personal ad disturbed earlier linguistic genres by deliberately omitting his offerings; it was thus too "obscure" for straight men. Fraught with ambiguity and dissonance, the stream of consciousness, tension, juxtaposition and struggling presented in personal ads, according to my informants, signified a gay sensibility.

12     In the interview, Tim continued to explain what constitutes "gay registers," or a gay archetype in Taiwan. The most popular icons surfacing in the gay scene he can think of are the "young-sad-boys" in Crystal Boys, a novel by Kenneth Pai published in Taiwan in 1983. Literally, "crystal boys" means "sons of sin," but it may also be an allusion to a state in which "friendless officials and concubine's sons"[8]Qu Yuan relates the notion of friendless officials and concubine's sons in one of the earliest pieces of Chinese classic literature, <em>Li Sao</em> (<em>Sorrow of Parting</em>), to the ostracism experienced by male homosexuals in modern society.the ostracized individuals in Chinese imperial society, had to learn to negotiate their identity. Ostracized by their schools and families, the protagonists of Crystal Boys are sentimental and depressed. The characters of Crystal Boys became convenient intertextual references. The shady trees, pagoda, red pavilion, lotus pool, skyline and moon reflected upon the small pond of the Taipei New Park[9]Beginning in the early 1980s, the Taiwanese gay community became increasingly visible in urban settings, most notably the Taipei New Park depicted in Crystal Boys and other gay-themed works of fiction. Located in proximity to the presidential palace and parliament, the Taipei New Park was established as a public space, but the Chinese-styled architecture and the abundance of shade combined with the frequent intrusion from patrols and the enforcement of martial law made it a significant location laden with cultural connotations for sexual minorities in the 1980s. became signifiers often appropriated in stream–of-consciousness passages. Notably, the semantic construction depends heavily on hidden dialogicity, i.e. the omission of the statement of one speaker in a dialogue between two persons. The meanings of words stretched beyond common dictionary definitions to point to individual and contextual differences.[10]Thus, the line "Oh, you are here too," derived from the theme song of the film version of <em>Crystal Boys</em>, Taiwan’s first gay-themed movie, and alludes to a reunion after a lengthy journey in which disbelief and mischief almost ruin homosexual relationships. Thus, although gay personals were not primarily a political medium, they nevertheless became subversive texts challenging conventional linguistic and semantic usage and heteronormativity and turned into a crucial vehicle for the construction of Taiwanese gay subjectivity. In addition to Crystal Boys, most gay-related linguistic registers were derived from art or works of literature, e.g. Notes from a Desolate Man, the winner of the China Times Novel Prize in 1994. In the text of Notes, the narrator, dying of AIDS in the end, discloses his desire and longstanding indulgence in anonymous sex across the world. While the writing in Notes illustrates the volatile relation between signifiers and signifieds, the intertextual appropriation of texts in personal advertisements enabled the respondents, most likely also the readers of Notes, to interact, to respond and to exchange their shared texts. The slices of life narrated in Notes were cited and reproduced among gay men in Taiwan, in particular, the protagonist's confrontation with his ex-lover's risky lifestyle, radical political activism, and eventual death. In the mindset of one poster, the perpetual recombination of fragments from Notes was emblematic of "the fragility of romantic love; the awesome power of eroticism; the solace of writing and the cold ennui of a younger generation enthralled only by video games" (personal ad posted in 1995).

From Mainstream Magazine to Cyberspace: From Asexual to Hypersexual

13     "Taiwan's gay movement is also a movement of media" (Chou 159). Scholars analyzing Taiwan's gay movements claim that the rapid emergence and growth of Taiwanese gay/lesbian/queer community in the 1990s can be attributed to computer-mediated communication (see Berry & Martin; Yang; Chou). The rise of the Internet during the 1990s has helped form a virtual community where gay/lesbian/queer people increase their visibility in an anonymous fashion (see Chang). The earliest form of interactive Internet communication in Taiwan was the Chinese-text-based Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The most popular IRC site for gays in Taiwan was MOTSS (Members Of The Same Sex). As a "virtual community" MOTSS provides a "public sphere," common ground for the sharing and discussion of issues important to its participants. In light of the accessibility and interactivity of the Internet, most personal posters migrated to such communities where members can garner resources and support to aid them in the pursuit of their lives. MOTSS functions as an alternative medium, and represents both a community to its subscribers and a resource to the gay and lesbian community in Taiwan.

14     Local web pages were scarce until 1997 and were not as popular as MOTSS due to their relatively non-interactive nature. However, the text-based format applied by MOTSS and similar sites gradually lost its attraction when regular websites were able to create new platforms that offered higher degrees of interactivity. The number of sites targeting gay people increased drastically after 1997. The advanced infrastructure of information technology in Taiwan helped facilitate a rapid transition from the text-based IRC to gay virtual communities in which users could post audio/visual/textual messages and communicate simultaneously.

15     In the digital age, gay linguistic registers emerged rapidly by either borrowing from anglophone gay cultures, reinventing the existing language or by concocting it from scratch. For instance, in order to be fully literate in the gay community, non-English speaking gay Taiwanese became at least acquainted with the following words: gay, lesbian, top, bottom, LTR, bears or even sugar daddy. Additionally, vocabularies were introduced to facilitate the process of interpersonal communication among posters and respondents. For instance, "flaming," in contrast to "discreet," refers to a target who unabashedly demonstrates his male homosexual identity.