Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Venereal disease

A few years ago, I was sitting at brunch with the usual gang when, as it sometimes does after several rounds of mimosas, the table fell quiet, each of us lost in thought or gazing out the window at the boys on the boulevard.

This went on an uncharacteristically long time, for us, when finally a thought popped into my head and I snickered. More of a snort, really. We'd been imbibing since 11 and it was now well past two.

"What?" inquired The Giant Queen, shifting in my direction, desperate for the conversation to resume.

"I was just thinking," I said, "about venereal words."

James whipped his head toward me. "I'd lower my voice if I were you."

"No, no," I said, lightly slapping his face. "Not that kind of venereal. I mean terms of venery. It's an olde" — I pronounced the 'e', old-ee — "English thing, a sort of parlor game. Venery words were taken from the sport of hunting, collective nouns for groups of things."

I had just be given a delightful book, An Exaltation of Larks, which explained this in far more detail than James' increasingly glassy stare told me he would sit for.

"Like a 'gaggle' of geese or a 'pride' of lions. They're words, collective nouns," I stressed again, "that represent a group."

"And that's funny?" The Giant Queen looked dubious.

"Well, there are others," I explained. "More modern ones, and funny ones too. Like a 'magnum' of gunmen, or a 'blur' of Impressionists."

"And that's funny?" The Actor chimed in, looking confused.

"No," I said. "What's funny is I was sitting here wondering what the group of us might be called."

Jeff didn't miss a beat. "That's easy," he exclaimed. "We're a 'dish' of brunch queens."

I had to concede that wasn't bad at all, sophisticated, even, for Jeff, taking in the double meaning of "dish" to mean both gossip and plates and bowls. I gave him a little round of applause. He beamed and gave me another round of cocktails.

For the next hour, we avoided the withering glance of the waiter who would really rather we'd just cleared off so he could cash out and go home ("Ignore her," Jeff averred. "She always wants to leave early." and I had the distinct impression he was talking about more than work) and made up terms of venery for things familiar to us.

I hadn't thought of them in years but, last weekend, as a brunchtime conversation — an almost entirely new gang, alas — wound down to silence, suddenly they were there again and I found myself scraping my memory to recall them all.

They're reproduced herewith, along with some recent additions:

• A clutch (as in pearls) of gay men.
• A U-Haul of lesbians. (James suggested "A lick of lesbians," but we made him leave the table and think about what he'd done.)
• A confusion of bisexuals.
• A rage of AIDS activists.
• A peck of shirtless boys.
• A fancy of drag queens.
• A swagger of tops.
• A brace of bottoms.
• A tease of twinks.
• A press of muscle Marys.
• A bulk of bears.
• A largesse of sugar daddies.
• A bump of circuit boys.
• A desperation of trolls.
• A mess of therapy junkies.
• A raven of club kids.
• A hide of leather men.
• A delusion of ex-gays.