"Hey, Boys!"
"Hey, Boys!" It's such a simple greeting. Two words, six letters, and two punctuation marks. It's a greeting I hear oh so often roll off the tongues of friends-of-friends, casual acquaintances, and guys I know from my yoga classes. And I hadn't really thought too much about it until I heard something very similar voiced in an episode of Seinfeld, Season 2, The Apartment. In this episode, TWICE, Jerry overhears his building's property managers arguing in the hallway right outside his apartment. The two gentlemen can be assumed a gay couple by the way they are bickering back and forth. And both times, in the middle of their of their argument, Jerry walks into the hallway and interrupts them, calling out, "Boys! Boys!"
Listen for yourself:
Now, if these two men weren't assumed to be as gay, would Jerry have greeted them as such?
In my own life, I haven't done enough research to figure out whether the gay acquaintances in my life reserve "Hey, Boys!" for when I'm walking with my boyfriend, or just any other out gay man. If the former, it could be a signal of respect for our relationship. If the latter, an acknowledgment of our shared gay experience. But either way, I find it insulting.
What grown adult man refers to another man as a "boy" and doesn't expect to get beaten up? When did it become socially acceptable to trivialize someone's adulthood and masculinity by referring to them as juveniles?
The answer is obvious. Gay men all suffer from Peter Pan syndrome. We all want eternal youth. We want to be young and beautiful, like A&F models or college wrestlers (NSFW). To gay men, being referred to as a boy is a compliment.
I think it's time to question this. I'm proud of my adulthood. I'm proud of my masculinity. I'm fine with the fact that I don't have a perfect, virile, college-jock body and never have. I don't need to be reminded of this youthful ideal that I've been struggling to come to terms with all my life.
Men out there, how do you feel being referred to as a boy? Does it matter if it's coming from a fellow homo versus a straight person? Ladies, is there any similar greeting that lets you know that the speaker knows you're a homa? Am I getting my panties all in a bunch over nothing here?
5 comments:
This reminds me of how annoyed my mom would get when I was a young athlete and people would yell, "C'mon ladies!" as we pummeled through each other. (Then, I went to a college where the mascot(s) were the Lords and Ladies, and there was nothing else to yell.)
I grew to share this annoyance and now correct people when I'm at female sporting events, so I don't think you're getting your panties in a bunch over nothing.
Now I just refer to everyone as "guys," so much so that my kids used to joke about it.
Not to mention the fact that in the South 'boy' carries a whole other set of connotations.
And then, a word can mean so many different things. I've had good friends, gay and straight, who refers to me as 'boy', as in 'my boy has my back', or 'me and my boy . . .'
And sometimes when my friends are acting stupid, gay or straight, I may say 'c'mon boys . . .' meaning, 'you are acting like kids'
I know what you say re Peter Pan. Anyone who has seen a 50something struggling in A&F clothes has seen it. The 'boy' thing you mention here, though, is more of a case-by-base sort of thing.
Maybe it's not PC or whatever, but I think "boys" is just a term of endearment. I don't use it as an alternative to "men," as you seem to imply, but to the less-formal "guys," and partly because, for example, "going out with the boys" caries a different connotation from "going out with the guys," without sounding clunky, like "going out with the gay guys" might. Further, a behavior I've observed both in myself and in straight female friends is to assign potential romantic interests nicknames that involve "boy": "boy with the dog," "baseball boy," etc. I think this is more a natural extension of "boyfriend," and its implication of "boy" as appropriate for a romantic interest, than it is an attempt to infantilize the person in question.
And, for the record, I also sometimes might refer to a friend as a "crazy kid" or something like that, which could apply to either a male or female. I also sometimes refer to "guys and girls," and many other similar figures of speech. Frankly, I think it's all much ado about nothing.
I was once told that there are three types of gay men:
Child: Too young to get into the bars.
Boy: Fuckable.
Man: Decrepit.
As to what all that means or even implies, well I'll leave that to others.
I guess I must have picked up the Boys thing from my friends because whenever we talk about my gay friends it is always me and the boys or something to that effect. I went out with the boys. I guess it implies that we are playing around and having fun instead of being serious grown ups.
I thin the word Man is loaded with symbolism, too. It is very hard to say when a boy becomes a man, though some cultures have ceremonies around such things. In my head I am still very young and I like going out with the boys.
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