“I just want to be topped by a boy,” says a lesbian friend, as we’re on our way to what we hope will be a debauched night out in Soho.
“You want to be murdered by a young man?” I reply.
When my fellow gays use terms that I should understand but don’t, I like to make it look like I’m playing dumb when, in fact, I’m being dumb.
“No, a boi,” My friend corrects me, as if I can see her mouth form the letter I on the end of the word.
“Yes. Boy.”
“B-O-I.”
The ‘I’ on the end is important – it’s what makes a boy a girl. A boyish girl, probably in a baseball cap. I know this before forcing my exasperated lesbifriend to spell it out for me; it’s the “topping” part that has me scratching my head. As a whole, the phrase seems to hark back to the lesbianism of yore; Radclyffe Hall; poems with discreetly yonic flower imagery; secrecy in general. Polari was once used by gay men as the most literal form of slang (secret language). They may have, many decades ago, referred to a “dilly boy with a bona dish” so that any nosy heteros listening in wouldn’t understand that they were talking about a gigolo with a nice arse. Today, eavesdrop on a conversation between two women in the pulses aisle in Tesco and you may just hear about a “soft-butch gold star with a toaster oven”. That’s Lesbianese for “androgynous lesbian who has never slept with a man, but has slept with a straight woman”. Like Polari, modern lesbian vernacular is coy, verging on enigmatic.
I was recently asked if the word “cake” is lesbian slang. I knew that it was, but I had no idea what for. As a rule: when in doubt, always assume vagina. So that’s what I did. Is having one’s cake and eating it something to do with oral sex? Probably. Lesbians are big foodies, so it’s not surprising when edibles make their way into our sexual slang. I once heard a woman refer to going down on her girlfriend as “having quiche”. Although I’m certain this was a one-off, I was struck by lesbians’ propensity for sexualising things so insipid and vegetarian. As another rule: if an unfamiliar phrase sounds like the title of a Sarah Waters novel, it definitely refers to cunnilingus.
Keeping up with the latest dyke lingo has become a struggle. I really should have been on top of “topping”. As I later discovered, it means penetrating someone – be it with fingers or a strap-on.
The sexual “top and bottom” terminology is actually very old and is used by gay men as well as lesbians. I knew about that, but I’d never heard it used as a verb – I’d heard of being a top, but never of being “topped”. Maybe the nuanced term had passed me by, purely because I’m neither a top nor a bottom. Those sorts of labels are a bit IKEA instruction manual for my taste. Sexually, I’m no Malm chest of drawers. I’m more like a Lego house made by a nine-year-old, with doors in weird places and a boat in the kitchen. I can be assembled in all sorts of ways. Plus, I like it to happen organically. Stream of consciousness sex where things go in places spontaneously. I’ve never gone home with a lady and had her declare herself a top or a bottom, pre-shagging. Things just fall into place.
“So you’re versatile then?” my friend asks as we discuss topping.
“I suppose so…” I reply, furrowing my brow slightly. Having only ever used the word “versatile” to describe myself in job applications, the idea of being sexually versatile feels disturbingly David Brent-esque.
“But do you prefer fucking or being fucked?” the interrogation continues.
“What? It’s all fucking, isn’t it? Having sex is fucking. I like sex. Can’t we just leave it at that?”
“No, fucking means doing the penetrating.”
“So going down on someone doesn’t count as fucking them?”
“No.”
“Fuck.”
Content from our partners
Related
