BILL LEAP, PERHAPS the world’s most respected scholar in the field known as lavender linguistics, talks in a Southern drawl and cusses like a trucker’s wife.
“Let me tell you what it is, honey,” he says on a Monday afternoon from his home in Tampa, Fla. “Miss Piggy’s English is so queer.”
Leap, an emeritus professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C., is writing a book, Language Before Stonewall.
“Back in the ’20s and ’30s, there was this massive use in some social sets in gay America of French as the quintessential gay language, and that continues to the ’70s,” he says. “Honest to God, Miss Piggy spoke fluent gay English. The way she slips in these little French things, the use of ‘moi’ and the hand gesture…
