Living
Queer conference explores language
Nuances exposed and examined — including porn star grunts, according to organizer
Organizers of the Lavender Language Conference say even the sounds gay porn actors make in the throes of passion have meaning and can teach us something about our gay lives. (Photo via Wikimedia)
Lavender Languages & Linguistics Conference
Friday through Sunday
American University
Washington
Prices vary — presentations may be attended individually and cost $25 per session for employed persons; discounts available for anyone who wants to attend but can’t afford to pay
Registration is possible on site or online
American.edu/lavenderlanguages
Watching gay porn at William Leap’s house near American University in Washington can be tedious.
“There’s a lot of hilarity with that,” Leap says. “My partner always wants to race through it. He says, ‘Oh, come on, this is stupid,’ and I’m like, ‘No, I need to listen to this. I want to hear the dialogue and really think about what phrases they’re saying.”
And yes, in a way, Leap does have a dialogue fetish but it’s not sexual. He’s a linguistics specialist and professor at American University in its College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Anthropology. His 20th annual Lavender Languages & Linguistics Conference, which he says is the longest-running queer academic conference in North America, convenes today. He and a stable of other academics will welcome about 150 attendees from around the world to a weekend jammed with about 80 presentations on queer language. Language used in gay porn is just one of the many topics that will be covered.
“We have a guy coming, and this is such a hoot,” Leap says with palpable glee, “who’s doing a presentation comparing the sounds guys make in coital ecstasy with the sounds animals make in the zoo and in the wild. He’s actually doing a phonetic technical analysis and comparison to see how, for instance, [gay porn star] Damien Crosse grunts, so I don’t know, we’ll see what he comes up with.”
But even with nods to porn and gay pop culture, isn’t the conference a bit on the geeky and dry side? Leap says no and that the use of language — from the way words are spoken to the origins of phrases and expressions — has a profound effect on LGBT lives. Yes, it’s his pet passion, but he says there’s something any queer person could find useful in the event.
“I think the real value in it is that it reminds us that gay is not a single phenomenon and no one owns it,” Leap says. “No one has a right to stand up and speak for all queer people and part of what we have to do as academics is make it clear that there’s this vast diversity of things associated with the use of language. Gays and lesbians have a rich history that has largely been ignored. These cultural experiences are not being talked about in textbooks.”
Leap started the event in 1993 with a half-day event and about 85 in attendance. Now it’s three days and he expects about 150 to register in addition to “walk ins” who come for “a session or two.” It’s a non-profit event and Leap says those who are interested but can’t pay will not be turned away or denied lunch/refreshments. He also says there’s a refreshing non-snob factor with the professors whom he encourages to mingle with attendees from all walks of life.
“There’s no attitude here, no prima donnas,” he says. “We really want an environment where everybody is free to talk to everybody.”
David Peterson, a gay associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, has been attending and presenting almost every year since 1995. He says the topics that have been explored over the years at the Conference have endless “real world” implications for LGBT people.
“If we want to counter the kinds of things the Family Research Council, for example, is doing, we have to have some understanding of what they’re doing or it won’t be effective,” he says. “We can’t just protest it and say, ‘They’re just fundamentalist Bible thumpers,’ because they’re really not. It’s quite interesting, and not what many people would expect, that they don’t use a lot of scripture quoting on their website and in their arguments. … There’s been a shift. One of the things they do is pretend to be social scientists saying very homophobic things in what appears to be the objective language of science.”
Leap is happy to go anywhere during a phone chat this week. During an hour-plus conversation, he touched on dozens of topics. Among them:
• On understanding how gay language has changed in 20 years: “One of the most important things we’ve learned is that 20 years ago, many folks thought there was a gay language, a gay way of talking where you could identify a particular accent or a single way of doing things and while there’s probably some truth to that, what we’re realizing now is it’s terribly complex. There is no single way of talking, there is no such thing as a gay accent and it really varies across different groups, segments, classes and cultures. … You try to translate a phrase like “coming out of the closet” into French, for example, and their reaction would be, ‘Why would I be in a wardrobe?’ … If they’re actually talking about telling family and friends they’re gay, they would say it in an altogether different way and that’s just one example. Referring to the ‘gayborhood,’ is another that just has no French equivalent. And that’s just using French as an example. You can imagine how this varies around the world.”
• Is faggot the new “n word”? “Well, yes and no,” Leap says. “A lot of guys use it as a term of self reference but get very angry if somebody else says it about them, so for many it is. It’s kind of like the high school expression, ‘That’s so gay,’ which is widely used as a bullying term. I don’t think this needs a whole lot of theorizing. It’s like queer was 20 years ago. We kind of took it back, made a joke of it and said, ‘You don’t own this term.’ We can do that with fag if we want.”
• Norman Lear could have Archie Bunker say fag on a sitcom 30 years ago but now celebrities who use the word get criticized and not just by GLAAD. What does that say about how language usage has changed? “It’s good because it keeps our issues on the front burner,” Leap says. “Yes, things have come a long way, but I still worry until we have some serious workplace protections in place. All these things we can do to keep that visibility going are good.”
• You say there’s no such thing as gay language, but you hear people say things like, “He was hot until he opened his mouth and a pink umbrella fell out.” People seem to know, at least among gay men in the U.S., pretty universally what that means. Thoughts? “It could be tone, it could be pitch. It’s really interesting because what it really shows us is that there’s no single thing as gay language, it’s really everyone’s perception of it. What they believe gay language to be.”
• Some celebs, when they come out, are very unequivocal. Others, such as Jodie Foster at the Golden Globes last month, don’t use the word lesbian, yet everyone watching knew what she meant. Does that cut it? “Of course it matters. Anyone who’s in a position of relative safety and privilege, should. I’m not going to say she should have, but I would have thought it would have been great and would have meant more to the 9-year-old girl watching. And yet what she did was absolutely wonderful and I’m dying to see a transcript of it, because you’re right, while everybody knew what she meant and it was her most direct statement yet, it was also terribly opaque on some levels. It’s a great example of using language in an indirect way though yeah, it would have been great if she’d just used the L word and been done with it.”
• LGBT has some universality to it, but people, in a quest to be inclusive, have added letters for those questioning, allies and so on. Is that OK? “This is when you see why the word queer has some appeal because it can encompass a whole range of counter-normative identities, aspirations and desires. And yes, this LGBTQ-adding on of letters gets to be this ridiculous alphabet soup where you can’t possibly include everybody in the phone book. A lot of it, for men who are same-sex identified, is, ‘Do you suck cock?’ But even then you have people, like Larry Craig, who are straight identified but like to suck cock. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want him on my team. One of the interesting things this leads to is how people make sense of themselves. You really start to see how many nuances there are to queer language.”
Advice
My family voted for Trump and I cut off contact
Now my father is ill and I don’t know what to do
Dear Michael,
I stopped talking to my family last year because they all voted for Trump. It’s not like they didn’t know whom they were voting for — they’d already had four years of seeing him in action.
I decided that I couldn’t remain in contact with people whom I felt wanted to take away my rights as a gay man. That is what they essentially did by voting for Trump.
They had come to my wedding in 2012, they had welcomed my husband and me into their homes for the holidays for our entire relationship, so I couldn’t believe how little they actually cared about me and my community. I was profoundly hurt.
They’ve reached out but I have been too angry at their hypocrisy to engage in more than a perfunctory way. I miss them, sure, but as I’ve watched our community be attacked, I just get so angry that I don’t want to talk. I certainly don’t want to hear them justify bigotry and hatred.
Now one of my siblings has reached out to let me know that my father’s health is rapidly declining. I’m wondering if I should rethink my decision and reach out to him, maybe even visit, before he dies.
But then I think of ICE’s attack on our country and the removal of the Pride flag from Stonewall and I don’t want to talk to people who support what is happening to vulnerable, marginalized people and the LGBTQ community.
My father was a good father to me. Even when I first came out to him, he was loving and supportive. I can’t square his behavior personally toward me with his support of this regime. The hypocrisy makes me so angry. How could he purport to love me and then vote against my freedoms?
I would love some suggestions about how to square my two opposing viewpoints.
Michael replies:
Many years ago, a great mentor taught me that the one thing you can count on in a relationship is learning to tolerate disappointment: Both being a disappointment, and being disappointed in the other person. This is true for love relationships and it’s also true for other significant relationships. All of us are different in some major ways and so we are bound at times to disappoint our loved ones in major ways, and to be disappointed by them in major ways.
That is why I’m not a fan of purity tests. To expect that someone must think like you (much less vote like you) in order for you to have a relationship with them is unrealistic, impractical, and sometimes damaging.
Of course, a person may hold some beliefs that give you reason not to want to have any connection to them. But is that the case here?
From your description, your family has always been loving and supportive of you as a gay man. That is no small thing. They seem to care about you enough to have continued to reach out, even though you have stopped talking to them.
Perhaps they had some other reasons for voting as they did, other than to roll back LGBTQ rights and to attack immigrants.
Instead of wondering how they could be so hypocritical, how about talking with them and striving to understand their choices? I don’t know what they will say, and you may hear different answers from your various family members. But at least you will get some clarity, rather than presuming that they made their voting choices from a place of malice. Then you will be in a better position to decide if you want a relationship going forward.
Another point to consider: Very few things are set in stone. Even if your family made their voting choices based on holding positions that you neither like nor respect, they may be open to shifting their views over time. One way to perhaps influence their thinking is by engaging with them, sharing your thoughts, and asking them to consider the possible consequences of their actions. If you choose to re-engage with them, two points to consider:
First, don’t expect that you will change their minds. You can advocate for what you want, but you have to let go of the results.
Second, they are more likely to consider your points if you do not approach them from a judgmental, self-righteous stance.
Many years ago, when I was newly a vegetarian, I was eager to challenge and “educate” friends who weren’t following my dietary ideas. Guess what? It didn’t work. Then I got some great advice: A great way to influence others to consider eating fewer animals was to serve them delicious vegetarian food.
The same point is true here. We can’t beat people over the head to agree with us. But if we approach them with some kindness, rather than with the certainty that we hold the moral high ground, we may help them see a bigger picture.
And sometimes, we too may see a bigger picture.
Michael Radkowsky, Psy.D. is a licensed psychologist who works with couples and individuals in D.C., Maryland, Virginia, and New York. He can be found online at michaelradkowsky.com. All identifying information has been changed for reasons of confidentiality. Have a question? Send it to [email protected].
Are you prepared to meet the changing expectations of tenants? Tenant priorities are continuously shifting. As professional property managers, my team has witnessed firsthand the evolving demands of tenants over the last few years.
Frankly, today’s D.C. residents have high standards. Many have shifted to remote work, and they are placing a growing emphasis on sustainability. And these expectations are poised to evolve even further, with factors like affordability, technology integration, and community-driven amenities taking center stage.
Understanding these changes and adapting your rental to meet the growing demands of tenants and their evolving preferences will not only help you attract high-quality residents but also settle into long-term success in a competitive market. Let’s look at key tenant trends for 2026 in Washington, D.C. by providing practical strategies that help owners and investors navigate this shifting landscape, ensuring your property remains desirable and profitable in an increasingly growing rental market.
According to Buildium’s 2025 Industry Report, tenant retention is rising, and that’s due to a number of factors. It’s expensive to move, so if residents are enjoying a peaceful and pleasant rental experience and they appreciate where they live, it’s unlikely they will spend more money to live somewhere else.
The “2026 State of the Property Management Industry Report” also noted the rise of “Resident Benefit Packages,” which has contributed to retaining good residents. When landlords and property managers offer benefits such as protection against late payment fees, online conveniences, credit monitoring, air filter drop shipments, preventative maintenance services, and even concierge amenities, they increase tenant satisfaction and retention.
By investing in resident benefits, you can increase the likelihood of keeping your tenants satisfied. They’re more likely to renew their lease agreements and contribute to the care and upkeep of their home.
Provide smart home tech
According to data gathered by Nasdaq, Washington, D.C., is one of the top 10 U.S. cities where remote work is most popular, with more than one-third of the population working from home at least part of the time. Even with the federal government calling many people back into the office over the last year, remote work continues to be normalized. Tenants are working and studying from home, and they need their home to support that lifestyle shift.
They’re looking for technology, and that factor provides you the opportunity for you to attract remote workers as residents. While smart home technology was once a fairly niche amenity, it’s now becoming the standard. It’s an expectation of most tenants in Washington, D.C., that at the very least they’ll be able to:
- Connect to fast Wi-Fi at their home
- Enjoy online rental payment platforms that are secure and convenient.
- Make routine maintenance requests through resident portals
It was also recommended considering installing keyless entry systems, offering upgraded security such as video doorbells, investing in smart thermostats, and making it as easy as possible for tenants to integrate their own digital platforms and apps into their home life, whether that’s Alexa or Siri or their own personal AI-driven digital assistant.
Community-Driven Amenities in Washington, D.C., Rentals
Are you renting out units in a multi-family building or an apartment? Washington, D.C., tenants are focused on community and social connection, and so the demand for community-driven amenities is on the rise.
In 2026, renters are looking beyond traditional features like gyms or pools, seeking spaces that allow for interaction, well-being, and a sense of belonging. Co-working spaces, communal kitchens, and rooftop gardens are now more popular in buildings that are working to attract tenants who prioritize shared experiences. A recent report from Ronco Construction reports that these are the emerging trends in multi-family housing amenities:
- Rooftop decks
- Outdoor lounges
- Community gardens
- Fitness studios
- Dog parks and pet spas
- Co-working space
Know your tenant pool
If you rent out single-family homes, you’re dealing with tenants who prefer privacy and space. In those multi-family buildings and condo communities, however, tenants are likely looking for opportunities to connect with their neighbors and make friends. We have seen tenants drawn to properties that offer event programming, such as fitness classes, happy hours, or cultural gatherings, helping create a sense of community in a neighborhood atmosphere.
As an owner, investing in these types of amenities can increase tenant satisfaction, encourage long-term leases, and set your property apart in a competitive market where residents crave more than just a place to live, but also a place to connect.
‘Green Renting’ in D.C.
Tenants want to save money on energy and utilities. Most of them would also rather do whatever they can to be more conscious of their effect on the planet. The city of Washington, D.C., actively encourages this. According to Building Innovation Hub, Washington, D.C., wants to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2032. More efficient building standards and energy incentives are making that possible.
Rental property owners can meet tenant expectations around sustainable living and environmental-friendly features by providing LED lighting, energy-efficient appliances, low-flow plumbing fixtures, and modern programs for managing waste and recycling.
Every tenant in Washington, D.C., is different of course, but there are common expectations that come with residents when they’re looking for a new home. Those highlighted here are even more important to tenants in 2026.
Find out how to make your Washington, D.C., rental property more competitive on the market. Engage a professional property manager for the advice you need.
Scott Bloom is owner and senior property manager of Columbia Property Management.
Real Estate
Surviving spring cleaning
Create a space that feels comfortable, welcoming, and easy to maintain
Whether or not you are getting ready to sell your home, spring is finally upon us — you know, the time of year when you can open the windows to a warm breeze and commit to decluttering and thoroughly cleaning your home.
While decluttering, you will be faced with the challenge of what to keep and what to discard. Mysterious items may appear: the missing charger, the set of keys that open nothing, or, with any luck, that one important document you know you put “in a safe place.” The journey often turns into an archaeological dig through the layers of your daily life. Along the way, you will likely encounter objects that have been misplaced or are no longer needed, and you’ll wonder why you kept them in the first place.
The kitchen junk drawer, for example, is a universal catch-all that defies categorization. You might open it looking for a rubber band and instead discover a lone screw of unknown origin, a tube of hardened Super Glue, and at least four pens that no longer work.
Closets offer another layer of surprises, where you can find things that don’t seem to belong at all: cash in a coat pocket, a single glove, a book you meant to read, or a box filled with cables for devices you no longer own.
It’s guaranteed that if you only have one of a pair of something, its mate will appear shortly after you have thrown away the one you had. And, if you were intentionally searching for an item, it will turn up in the last place you look, simply because once you found it, you stopped looking.
Linen closets and bathroom cabinets can also harbor oddities. Now is the time to discard half-used or duplicate products you don’t remember buying, travel-sized toiletries from trips long past, or expired medications.
Under furniture is where things get truly mysterious. Reaching beneath a couch or bed in search of a dropped item often yields a collection of the unexpected: assorted coins, dust-covered pet toys, a missing sock, and perhaps something that makes you pause, like a long-lost piece of jewelry or an object you were convinced had disappeared forever.
Organizing garages and basements takes the experience to another level, where consolidating tools or seasonal decorations stored there can quickly turn into an encounter with objects that defy explanation. Why is there a box of tiles from a renovation that happened a decade ago? Do you really need the instruction manuals for appliances you no longer own? What could possibly be in the box that hasn’t been opened since you moved in?
Even searches within a home office – looking through files, drawers of old electronics, or stacks of paperwork—can yield similarly strange results. I recently found several flash drives with client files from 2014, a cache of notebooks containing names and phone numbers of prospects who left the area 15 years ago, and Turbo Tax installation CDs from as far back as 1997.
If decluttering hasn’t defeated you, then thoroughly cleaning your house may not be as overwhelming as you might think. Breaking it into manageable steps makes the process far simpler and even satisfying. A consistent method is the key to success.
Before you reach for cleaning supplies, take one last walk through each room and gather items that belong elsewhere for return to their proper place. Put away clothing and take out trash. This step instantly makes your home look better and clears the way for more effective cleaning. Working from top to bottom, dust ceiling fans, light fixtures, shelves, and blinds first so that any debris falls to the floor for addressing later. Use a microfiber cloth or handheld Swiffer to trap dust rather than spreading it around. Don’t forget overlooked areas like the tops of door frames, windowsills, and baseboards.
Move on to surfaces. Wipe down countertops and furniture with appropriate cleaners. Squeegee windows to let the sun shine in. Pay special attention to kitchen appliances. Stovetops, microwaves, and refrigerator handles tend to collect grime quickly, as do the tops of upper cabinets. In bathrooms, disinfect sinks, toilets, tubs, and showers.
Lastly, vacuum carpets, rugs, draperies, and upholstered surfaces thoroughly, including along edges and under furniture where dust accumulates. For hard floors, sweep first, then mop using a cleaner suitable for the surface type. This final step pulls the whole cleaning effort together and leaves your home feeling and smelling fresh.
Ultimately, cleaning your house doesn’t have to be a daunting chore. With a clear plan and a little consistency, you can create a space that feels comfortable, welcoming, and easy to maintain – at least until this time next year.
Valerie M. Blake is a licensed Associate Broker in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia with RLAH @properties. Call or text her at 202-246-8602, email her at [email protected] or follow her on Facebook at TheRealst8ofAffairs.
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