Bekiand the great Gay language

Our local gay lingo is radical in nature

- Zofiya Acosta

What comes to mind when someone brings up gay lingo? It’s churva, right? Beki? Images of leggy pageant queens and their adoring fans? For me, whenever the topic of local gay lingo comes up, I remember something an old friend of mine said in passing when I first got her hooked on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” “I like this because I can understand this, unlike that churva speak.” Other times, my mind wanders to an old clip from an episode of “Banana Sundae” where Jason Gainza, in full babydrag, translates common words into gay lexicon. That’s it, that’s the segment. Let’s put a pin on that. Our local gay lingo comes by different names, and like many other languages that grew organically, the language predated each one of its names. There’s swardspeak, which comes from the archaic slang word “sward” meaning “gay man.” There’s also bekimon and bekinese, which are far more familiar to our generation, beki being the current favored term for gay men (or at least, a specific kind of gay man). According to Daryl Pasion, assistant professor at UPLB, the name of the argot depends on which generation is using it, with a common thread being to name it after the popular way of saying gay. “In the future perhaps, there will emerge a new term for gay and that will give birth to yet another word for gay lingo,” he says.