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Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds
Examines the life styles of gay men and women and discusses the role of gay culture in mainstream society
341 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
February 20, 2012
oh my gawd. i just started reading this book and it is blowing my fuckin' mind and changing my fuckin' life! judy grahn tirelessly researches the origins of certain words, rituals, ways of knowing that queer people have utilitzed for our survival & our joy for millenia. SHE GIVES OUR HISTORY BACK TO US--that which has been silenced and destroyed and snuffed out. she takes it back. she takes it back. nothing less than a revelation. you'd probably like this a little more if yr woo-woo (which i CERTAINLY am). but really, incredible, mindblowing. you have to read this. i don't think it's even in print anymore, but that's what the library is for, my friends!
February 22, 2019
There's a lot going on in this book. It is certainly heartwarming and moving, perhaps strongest for me in the places where Grahn mixes her own story with what she learned over years of researching this book. The accounts of lesbian and gay life in the US from the 50s - 80s are really vital to read now - the publishing, the complexities of lesbian separatism, and particularly for me the engagement with the spiritual, magic and the occult. I also enjoyed the accounts of Native American gender and sexuality and the way Grahn traces their ongoing repressions and reassertions at the time of writing. Like Joan Nestle, Grahn is a great queer life-writer with one eye on the question of what the society is and how to change it. Sometimes this gives rise to sensitive accounts of her relation to Black politics and the civil rights movement, and near the end, in relation to AIDS, but other times this feels tied to a sort of progress narrative of history which I rather feel is better left in the past. It's not a book for queer nihilists, but that's no bad thing.
Anyway, it isn't an academic book, it's a sort of memoir-history-etymology-conjecture which is a form of writing I think poets often take. It's quite evidently of its time, and this stands out most for me in the way in which the term 'gay' is used overarchingly for narratives which I would now perhaps take to be trans, genderqueer, agender etc. This isn't always a problem exactly but I think new words expand the possibilities of understanding ourselves and bringing ourselves into being - 'gay' can feel like a bit of a catch-all term and sometimes leads to some rather broad generalisations (gay = shamanic etc). Occasionally I think she relies too heavily on etymology to make her point, as if leading back to the earliest usage of a word can uncover its essential 'truth'. I feel like poets and theorists can both get a bit seduced by this. Just because 'baed' once meant hermaphrodite doesn't mean I am calling ascribing to this bad sandwich some ambiguous sex/gender.
I found the last chapters ('Gay is Good' and 'But Gay is also Baed') picked up a question I've been thinking about in relation to 'queer' in 2019 - that if queerness is now accepted, normalised, assimilated and even praised in mainstream culture, what happens to the counter-cultural, the transgressive, the maybe even magic properties of queerness? Grahn frames this in relation to 'gay is good' vs the gay shamanic, border-crossing, disruptive trickster which she asserts appears constantly in different guises across millennia in all cultures. 'Gay people are not nice'. Her answer is a sort of vague 'we've got to transcend binarism and embrace duality and multiple stances'- which I suppose in many ways is borne out through later queer theory and becomings, but also doesn't really challenge reactionary politics.
I think it's a real shame it's out of print, as there's lots of rich and suggestive history which could still make many queers feel more at home in the world and time. I'm going to read it again.
Anyway, it isn't an academic book, it's a sort of memoir-history-etymology-conjecture which is a form of writing I think poets often take. It's quite evidently of its time, and this stands out most for me in the way in which the term 'gay' is used overarchingly for narratives which I would now perhaps take to be trans, genderqueer, agender etc. This isn't always a problem exactly but I think new words expand the possibilities of understanding ourselves and bringing ourselves into being - 'gay' can feel like a bit of a catch-all term and sometimes leads to some rather broad generalisations (gay = shamanic etc). Occasionally I think she relies too heavily on etymology to make her point, as if leading back to the earliest usage of a word can uncover its essential 'truth'. I feel like poets and theorists can both get a bit seduced by this. Just because 'baed' once meant hermaphrodite doesn't mean I am calling ascribing to this bad sandwich some ambiguous sex/gender.
I found the last chapters ('Gay is Good' and 'But Gay is also Baed') picked up a question I've been thinking about in relation to 'queer' in 2019 - that if queerness is now accepted, normalised, assimilated and even praised in mainstream culture, what happens to the counter-cultural, the transgressive, the maybe even magic properties of queerness? Grahn frames this in relation to 'gay is good' vs the gay shamanic, border-crossing, disruptive trickster which she asserts appears constantly in different guises across millennia in all cultures. 'Gay people are not nice'. Her answer is a sort of vague 'we've got to transcend binarism and embrace duality and multiple stances'- which I suppose in many ways is borne out through later queer theory and becomings, but also doesn't really challenge reactionary politics.
I think it's a real shame it's out of print, as there's lots of rich and suggestive history which could still make many queers feel more at home in the world and time. I'm going to read it again.
May 25, 2018
I will always be grateful to Judy Grahn for her tireless research into all things gay. If you are a late bloomer and not quite yet caught up with the language and history of gay and lesbian culture, this is a fun and surprising read. If you are already in seasoned queerdom, I'm betting you'll still find this book fascinating if you are curious about pink flamingos, "pansies," and the Isle of Lesbos. It makes a great little gift for anyone just coming out, too!
Want to read
April 10, 2008I'm like 40 pages in. So far all I can say is ugh. Not too much excitement. Maybe I'm just not in the mood to read about what the closet was like in the 50s and 60s right now. Contemplating shelfing this in favor of something more current, for the moment at least. I HATE giving up on books.
February 8, 2017
This is absolutely THE most important book I've ever read. It changed how I thought about people, family, community. I can not do it justice in this review other than to say read it. Especially now.
June 19, 2024
Another Mother Tongue is one of the dozen or so most important books I have ever read. It may well be one of the most important books ever written, at the very least having to do with queer life.
It is a luminous tapestry uniting strands of cultural history, folklore, the queer collective unconscious and autobiography, woven with superlative skill in which is recounted everything of importance about us as a people: who we are, where we've come from, and why we are special. The author develops her thesis that, as queers, we are heir to a special office of great antiquity and critical import. We queers are the standers on the Threshold and keepers of the Gate. It is to those like ourselves that civilizations and societies locked in the throes of radical transformation turn, as though to a physician to assure a painless and quiet death for the old and as though to midwives to attend the safe birth of that which is new.
The product of over a decade of research, the author has done nothing less than retrieve our entire suppressed history, our folklore, our pantheons of deities and demons, our spiritual heritage and its lineages and our glorious language - another mother tongue.
Among the most critical things we learn (or are reminded of in case we've forgotten) from Ms. Grahn's epochal volume is that our tradition is an old one - a very, very old one, and that it is continuous thanks to the work of our spiritual ancestors: our first lover's first lover's first lover.
We are reminded that it crosses national and hemispheric boundaries, and that it has spiritual roots.
Grahn also reminds us of the intense degree of violent oppression to which the matrix heterosexist culture has gone (and may be prepared to go again) to marginalize our traditions, rob us of our empowerment, cripple our psyches and deny our special worth and status.
The author relates in her notes how, of all of the moving events that followed the initial publication of AMT in 1984 the most moving was her encounter with a Maori lesbian in New Zealand, who fell weeping into her arms because she at last could see and understand the meaning of her life story.
Having read and re-read this volume, I know just how that woman felt.
Judy Grahn has brought to our collective consciousness as a people things long kept within the racial memory. This she has done in a beautifully readable fashion.
She knows all of the old stories, and she has the signs and persuasions - all of them. This is a book that deserves to be read, read again and loved.
It is a luminous tapestry uniting strands of cultural history, folklore, the queer collective unconscious and autobiography, woven with superlative skill in which is recounted everything of importance about us as a people: who we are, where we've come from, and why we are special. The author develops her thesis that, as queers, we are heir to a special office of great antiquity and critical import. We queers are the standers on the Threshold and keepers of the Gate. It is to those like ourselves that civilizations and societies locked in the throes of radical transformation turn, as though to a physician to assure a painless and quiet death for the old and as though to midwives to attend the safe birth of that which is new.
The product of over a decade of research, the author has done nothing less than retrieve our entire suppressed history, our folklore, our pantheons of deities and demons, our spiritual heritage and its lineages and our glorious language - another mother tongue.
Among the most critical things we learn (or are reminded of in case we've forgotten) from Ms. Grahn's epochal volume is that our tradition is an old one - a very, very old one, and that it is continuous thanks to the work of our spiritual ancestors: our first lover's first lover's first lover.
We are reminded that it crosses national and hemispheric boundaries, and that it has spiritual roots.
Grahn also reminds us of the intense degree of violent oppression to which the matrix heterosexist culture has gone (and may be prepared to go again) to marginalize our traditions, rob us of our empowerment, cripple our psyches and deny our special worth and status.
The author relates in her notes how, of all of the moving events that followed the initial publication of AMT in 1984 the most moving was her encounter with a Maori lesbian in New Zealand, who fell weeping into her arms because she at last could see and understand the meaning of her life story.
Having read and re-read this volume, I know just how that woman felt.
Judy Grahn has brought to our collective consciousness as a people things long kept within the racial memory. This she has done in a beautifully readable fashion.
She knows all of the old stories, and she has the signs and persuasions - all of them. This is a book that deserves to be read, read again and loved.
December 10, 2019
This book was exactly what I needed to hear from a cultural history. It's got its problems, sure - having been written about 35 years ago by and primarily for lesbian women, it's not exactly the sort of thing that fits primarily into my personal wheelhouse. But it's one more thing I can point towards and say that I'm not a total aberration - that gay people have always existed in some shape or form through the ages, have fulfilled cultural roles and been valued for it. That the modern form of virulent fundamentalist Christian repression is not the norm historically (and thus can end as surely as it began). An invaluable introduction into queer myth, legend and history.
March 16, 2021
This book is a mix of autobiographical anecdotes, cultural history and etymological research mixed with spirituality and scattered with letter type passages to the authors first lover. It's an interesting attempt to decode gay slang and embrace words like (bull)dyke, fag, fairy etc. by showing the historical context. Furthermore it gives the reader a sense of how life was for a queer person before stonewall in rural America - those were the parts in the book I liked the most. It's well written, though definitely too esoterically tinged for my liking. All in all.. I like Grahns poetry more.
February 8, 2018
A wide-ranging, consistently engaging tome blending Gay etymology and mythology as one. Grahn pulls from texts and traditions across the globe, seeking to weave a cultural tapestry befitting her grand queer tribe.
April 24, 2020
Part memoir, part queer folklore.
January 22, 2023
I read it as an obligation as a gay person. Interesting, but very long and at some point rather uninspiring.
February 26, 2023
Intéressant d'un point de vue historiographique, mais n'a pas super bien vieilli.
October 8, 2023
an essential period piece
February 25, 2011
A very inspiring look into the etymology of many gay words, and queer cultural history. Grahn writes with a sense of flow and continuity, so that it is a pleasurable read. Made me reclaim a lot of words and phrases.
June 25, 2007
queers are mystics. it's awesome. good for new queers who are feeling lost in the world. made me feel like part of a long line of importants.
September 5, 2007
this was one of the first books i read when i came out...definitely recommend it for folks who are just starting this part of their journey.
July 24, 2017
A nice overview of queer themes in literature and history and the author's experience in the gay world of the mid-to-late 20th century.
March 31, 2012
A really good book of origins for Queer Folk!
August 15, 2016
The first work I ever read--at the beginning of my coming out process--on gay culture. Fascinating and enlightening.
September 11, 2016
There are some fascinating historical details in this book!
Read
October 1, 2024Long ago.
Only comment is "fair--dated, poor premises"
Only comment is "fair--dated, poor premises"
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews