The Grammar of the Body: On Language That Cannot Be Transcribed
A personal record. Not for general circulation.
I have a friend—I will call him R., which is not his initial but will do—who can walk into a room and within four minutes tell you with reasonable accuracy who in that room is one of us, who is curious and afraid of his curiosity, who is hostile for reasons he has not examined, and who is entirely oblivious and will remain so regardless of what occurs around him.
R. does not do this by listening. He does it by looking. He reads a room the way a scholar reads a text in a language he has spent twenty years learning, and what he reads is not words but the entire orchestration of the body—the placement of the feet, the angle of the shoulders, the way a man holds his cigarette or doesn’t, the quality of attention a pair of eyes gives to another pair of eyes across a public bar. R. is not unusual in this capacity. Every man I know who has survived in this city has developed some version of it, because survival here requires fluency in a language that has no written form and that cannot be taught from a book, because the book would be evidence.
This is what I want to write about today: the language beneath the language. The spoken vernacular—Polari, the codes, the double meanings—is the part that has words, and words can be described. But the larger language, the one that operates continuously and simultaneously in every public space where “our kind” might be found, runs not through words but through everything else: the body, the face, the clothes, the placement of objects, the choice of location, the calculation of visibility. This language is so comprehensive and so precise that it communicates volumes in the interval between a glance and its return. It is also so deniable—so easily reread by the hostile observer as something ordinary—that it has survived in plain sight for as long as men like us have needed it, which is to say forever, which is to say always, which is to say the language is older than the word homosexual, older than the laws that criminalise what the language encodes.
Begin with the eyes, because the eyes are where everything starts. There is a look that is not a look—a gaze held half a second longer than the social contract of public space normally permits, withdrawn before it becomes staring, returned once if returned at all, withdrawn again. This entire exchange, which takes perhaps three seconds in total, contains a question, an answer, a follow-up question, and a provisional negotiation of next steps. Presented to a man outside our world, it would not register as communication at all. He would not notice it had occurred.
Presented to a man inside our world, it transmits with perfect clarity: I see you. I am what you might think I am. Are you? The absence of response terminates the exchange without damage to either party; the surface of the occasion continues unbroken; the man who did not respond has not been exposed, has not been forced to articulate a refusal, has not been placed in the position of having to name what he has declined. The language protects even those who do not speak it, because its protection is built into its structure: everything it says, it says in a form that can be unsaid.
The glance is the word. The held glance is the sentence. The returned glance is the response. And the art of the thing—the craft that takes years to acquire and that R. has refined to something close to genius—is knowing which quality of returned glance means yes and which means I am not sure what you mean and would like to be certain before I commit to anything and which means something that looks identical to the first but is in fact the hostile stare of a man who has understood perfectly and is deciding how to respond to the understanding. This last reading is the one that matters most, because misreading it has consequences. The body language of our world includes, necessarily, the body language of its dangers.
Move from the eyes to the clothes. I am not talking about fancy dress, not about the theatrical excess of camp at its most deliberate—that is a different language, one I will come to. I am talking about the subtle semiotics of the everyday: what a man wears on Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon, what he wears to a particular pub, how much care the care takes, which elements of the outfit are conventional and which are precisely chosen signals. A handkerchief in the breast pocket of a jacket is, to the surface world, a detail of masculine elegance. The colour of that handkerchief, the way it is folded, the pocket it inhabits—breast versus back—these are messages in a code that has evolved over years of use into something approaching a vocabulary of desire. The back pocket in particular carries a tradition of signalling that the surface world has occasionally glimpsed and always misread: it looks like nothing, a folded square of cloth, and it is a flag in a language the flag-reader knows precisely and the passer-by does not.
The handkerchief is only one word in a language of objects. A ring worn on a particular finger. A watch worn on a particular wrist, in a world where which wrist you wear a watch on is, officially, nothing. The precise degree of unbuttoning at the collar. The rolled sleeve that exposes not just the forearm but a particular quality of deliberateness about the exposure—the calculated casualness that is recognised by other men who make the same calculations as calculated, and by the surface world as merely casual. What these signals require of the reader is not knowledge of a codebook, because no codebook exists. They require acculturation: the accumulated exposure to a community’s practices over time, the gradual absorption of a sensibility, the development of an eye that has learned to see what the untrained eye filters out. You cannot fake this fluency. You acquire it by living in the world it describes.
I should say something about location, because location is perhaps the most powerful word in the language. The choice of where to stand—at which end of the bar, on which side of the street, in which part of the park at which hour of the afternoon or evening—these choices are not arbitrary. They are a grammar of presence. When I stand in a certain part of Hyde Park at a certain hour, I am not merely standing in a park. I am making a statement in a language that every man present is reading, and that statement is: I am here. I know what this place is. I know what it means that you are here too. The park does not say this; I say this by choosing the park, by choosing the position within the park, by choosing the hour. The uninitiated see a man in a park. The initiated see a sentence.
The pubs work the same way. Not all pubs—most pubs are hostile territory or neutral territory or simply ordinary territory where men who happen to be like us drink alongside men who are not and where no particular communication is possible beyond the purely surface variety. But certain pubs, at certain times, in certain cities, become known. The knowing of them is transmitted not by advertisement—the advertisement would be evidence, and evidence here is dangerous—but by word of mouth within the community, or by that subtler transmission that is not word of mouth at all but something closer to cultural osmosis: the slow accumulation of the right kind of people in the right kind of place until the place acquires a character, a recognisable atmosphere, a quality that men who need to find it learn to detect. When you enter such a pub for the first time already knowing what it is—when someone has told you, or you have read its atmosphere correctly from the outside—you are immediately inside a statement. The fact of being here is the opening sentence of an exchange you can extend or not as you choose.
Now I must address the tribes, because the language of the body is not one language but several, and the several are not always mutually intelligible, and the incomprehension between them is sometimes comic and sometimes painful and sometimes both simultaneously. Within our world—which the surface world sees, when it sees it at all, as a single thing, a single category, a single type of man with a single characteristic that defines him entire—there exist communities as distinct in their customs and vocabularies and codes as different nations. There are men whose language is the language of extraordinary precision in dress: the continental elegance, the particular relationship with beauty and surface and the cultivation of the self as aesthetic object, the company of certain artists and musicians and theatrical people, the late evenings at certain addresses where wit is the primary currency and the physical is subordinate to the performative. These men read each other through the quality of their aesthetic attention, through a knowledge of music and painting and literature that functions simultaneously as a genuine love of those things and as a shibboleth—a test of membership administered continuously and invisibly throughout every conversation.
Then there are men whose language runs in entirely opposite directions: the men whose bodies are the primary vocabulary, who speak through the deliberate cultivation of physical size and physical presence, who wear their sexuality in an exposure of flesh and muscle that is simultaneously an invitation, a challenge, and a provocation of the surface world—not the playful provocation of camp but the more unsettling one of refusing to be invisible about the body in a culture that requires our bodies to be invisible. These men also have sub-dialects: the men of the waterfront and the docks, who have the physicality of labour as well as desire and who move through the world in a register that differs utterly from the register of the interior decorator or the antique dealer who might, at a certain kind of party, occupy the same room. The handkerchief codes, the eye-language, the territorial claims of particular street corners and particular pub hours—these are, in some form, available to all of us. But each tribe inflects them differently, reads them through its own traditions, and maintains alongside the shared grammar a private dialect that is specific to its community and that an outsider to that community—even a gay man from a different tribe—will not fully penetrate.
I want to speak about the moustache, because the moustache is having a moment in our particular vocabulary that the surface world attributes entirely to fashion and to the influence of certain film actors, which is not entirely wrong but is not entirely right either. Within some of our communities, the moustache has acquired a significance that operates exactly as I have been describing: visible to everyone, legible to the intended audience, opaque to the unintended one. It is not a code in the mechanical sense—there is no rulebook that says this moustache means this thing. It is more like an accent: a mark of membership in a particular community, a signal of familiarity with a particular set of customs, a way of saying I know what world this belongs to without naming the world. The surface world sees a man with a moustache and sees a man with a moustache. The right kind of reader sees a man who is communicating something about where he belongs and what he knows and what he might want, and evaluates this communication in the context of everything else the man is simultaneously saying with his clothes, his posture, his location, his eyes.
This is the thing I most want to convey, and the thing that is most difficult to convey to anyone who has not lived inside the language: it is never one signal. It is always the entirety of the communication simultaneously—the aggregate of every choice a man has made about how to present himself in this space at this time, read together, in context, against the background of a long education in reading exactly this kind of aggregate. A single element—the handkerchief, the stance, the held glance—is ambiguous. The combination is not. The combination says something as clearly as speech, and sometimes more clearly than speech, because speech requires a shared surface language that the social occasion may not permit, while the body language operates beneath the surface occasion, inside it, throughout it, saying what cannot be said aloud without risk.
And risk is the word that does not appear in any account of a language built primarily for pleasure and privacy rather than for survival against prosecution. Our language carries, in every one of its elements, the memory of what happens when the language fails—when a signal is misread, when the wrong man sees the exchange, when the private vocabulary surfaces into the wrong context and becomes evidence rather than communication. We carry this memory in the language itself, in the precision with which we manage visibility, in the calibration of each signal to reveal just enough to the intended reader and nothing to anyone else.
The body reads the room. The room contains the law, the church, the neighbour, the employer, and also, in the same room, the only other men who know what we know and speak what we speak and have built, from the materials of survival and desire and the particular human genius for finding community in the most inhospitable conditions, something that functions—improbably, beautifully, with a coherence that the surface world cannot see and could not dismantle if it could—as a home.
We live in the body language the way you live in a city. We know which streets are safe. We know which windows are watching. We know which door, when it opens, opens into somewhere warm.
Vada the dolly eeks on the naff one in the corner, R. said to me last Saturday, eyes forward, voice level, tone entirely conversational.
I looked. I saw. I understood.
No one else in the room heard a word of it.
What is spoken can be reported. What is read in the body leaves no record that the law can subpoena. This is not an accident. This is the design.
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