Now over to Colin Poppshed at the Gay Desk
Funny, because straight men worry about whether they might be or might be perceived as being gay all the time.
23 + 1 assholes, totally not gay /s
“No homo but happy birthday! Anyway which one of you fellas is up for some hotdogs and whipped cream?”
Having candles on your birthday cakes at all is pretty gay at that age
I’ve never seen a sentence use the same dumb logic it criticizes so succinctly before
It is an most joyful occasion for gaiety…
It’s a joke
You don’t have candles on your birthday cake just because you’re grown up? What a sad life.
No homo, but I love to blow a big candle on my b-day.
Big candle sounds like a plausible euphemism like bull or twink.
Aside from the homophobia, they still get birthday cakes with candles that say their age when they are 24?
What else should they get? Birthday cakes with candles that say someone else’s age? That wouldn’t make any sense.
Only if you are gay.
/s in case someone misses the “homophobic-phobic” joke.
are you kidding? gran was a party animal. if she got them why wouldn’t I?
So if you want to look extra gay, your candle says 24+/-x to get your age.
Nevermind the pretty pink cake for a good little boy this goes on.
The US equivalent is 67
Just going to say that looks way more gay than the number 24…
The more you try to avoid looking gay, the more gay you look. It’s funny coming from a place as gay as Brazil.
If you’re not gay, you must prove it by wearing a birthday tiara and listening to nothing but Judy Garland the whole day.
Science be damned but this may actually be the one thing that CAN turn someone gay.
Like just thinking about it makes me happy.
and we’re the “snowflakes”
You’re all worthlessly unique.
Can someone share some lore what is the connection between being gay and 24 in Brazil?
I shared it ITT, but basically:
There’s that stereotype of gay people being flamboyant, and often hopping in excitement. That created a bunch of associations between hopping animals and gay people; e.g. “gazela” (gazelle), “bicha saltitante” (jumping/hopping beast*), but specially “veado” (deer). Often spelled as “viado”.
And there’s a gambling lottery called “jogo do bicho” (critters’ game, or animals’ game). Illegal but extremely popular, to the point some knowledge of the game is part of the popular culture. It associates 25 animals with numbers, and #24 is “veado” / deer.
So: if 24 is veado, and veado is gay, then 24 is gay. Plop it into a macho culture, much like in the rest of Latin America, and you’ll see people avoiding the number. Even for their birthdays. Remember Latin America has a macho culture, and that leads to weird paranoias.
Nowadays it’s mostly a joke; but frankly I don’t like it, it still treats gay people negatively, as if “gay” was “to be avoided”. Roughly in the same level as “we did
$thingbut no homo!” in English, you know?There’s an illegal gambling game that has been extremely popular for decades called the animal game (jogo do bicho), in which each number represents an animal. 24 is the deer (veado). There’s also a derogatory word for gay men, viado. The two words sound the same. So 24 is “the deer’s number” but it sounds like “the fag’s number”.
Viado comes from desviado, which means someone who was driven off the proper path. It’s just a matter of homophony (and homophobia).
Viado comes from desviado, which means someone who was driven off the proper path. It’s just a matter of homophony (and homophobia).
I’ve seen people backtracking the etymology to desviado and transviado. I don’t buy it because clipping (truncamento) in Portuguese usually preserves the start of the word, even at the expense of the stressed syllable; e.g.
- universidade university → uni
- refrigerante fizz, soda, coke, pop → refri
- depressivo depressed → deprê
So following the same pattern for “desviado” the result would be *des or *desvi, not “viado”.
The explanation may be as simple as that the word works better as an expletive by keeping the stressed syllable. All the examples you gave are “friendly” clippings but “viado” is derogatory.
I think it also applies to expletives. Check for example ⟨vagabunda⟩* /va.ga.'bũ.da/; if there was some pressure to keep the stressed syllable it would be clipped into *bunda or *gabunda, but it’s usually clipped into ⟨vagaba⟩ instead. Technically the /b/ from the stressed syllable is still there, but the core /ũ/ ⟨un⟩ is gone.
*gotta explain this one to the folks here. “Vagabunda” means whore, promiscuous woman, etc. It’s highly offensive, way more than the nearest English equivalent (slut), it’s the sort of word to not use even in a joke. (The masculine “vagabundo” is depreciative but socially acceptable — it means lazy arse, do-nothing.)
There are other exceptions, though. Take the nickname for Fernanda, Nanda [nɜ᷈dɐ]
Nicknames are often erratic — cue to Juca (Joaquim), Chico (Francisco; no idea why the /ʃ/), Mafê (Maria Fernanda). I don’t know why, but I feel like they work through a different logic than simple shortenings.
Good argument. But then where do you think viado comes from?
Se incomoda se eu responder em português? Então, pra resumir a missa: tenho quase certeza que o xingamento (viado) vem do nome do bicho (veado). Motivos:
- Em português é comum alçar [e o] para [i u] logo antes da sílaba tônica; principalmente em hiato, que vira ditongo, e o [i u] vira [j w]. (O nome técnico disso é “alçamento pré-tônico”, caso queira procurar papers sobre o assunto.)
- Palavrões muitas vezes são escritos com uma ortografia mais popular, não-padrão, representando a pronúncia. Há outros exemplos disto; tipo boceta→buceta, foder→fuder, até mesmo caralho→caraio (e olha que [ʎ] “lh” →[j] “i” é bem restrito dialetalmente)
- Há outras expressões usadas para atacar a comunidade gay, associando-os com bichos saltitantes; tipo “gazela”, “biba saltitante”, etc. Tem também “bambi”, mas essa é claramente derivativa de “viado”.
Convincente. Dei uma pesquisada e me deparei com esse texto aqui, que atribui a origem do termo a um homem específico, um socialite português que vivia em Niterói, dono da marca Cigarros Veado e notório por suas escapadas com homens. O jornalista que inxestigou o assunto descartou as hipóteses do desviado/transviado.
Realmente o mistério é mais difícil de solucionar do que parece à primeira vista.
homophonophobia?!
Wow it’s like a homophobic lasagna. My heart goes out to you, gay Brazilians
This suggests widespread homophobia if enough of them could combine their brainpower to form these few thoughts
This suggests widespread homophobia if enough of them could combine their brainpower to form these few thoughts
Yup, that’s accurate. Welcome to Latin America and its macho culture. People don’t even get why those jokes are bad. Then when the LGBTQ+ community correctly points out that “a piada mata mais do que a bala” (the joke kills more often than the bullet), the default popular reaction is to claim “waaah they’re overreacting” (spoilers: they aren’t).
Luckily for us there’s nothing gayer than working together, so we should be safe
It’d be also good to mention that Illuminati confirmed
That’s pretty gay
Yeah sounds pretty gay (derogatory) to care that much about being seen as gay (celebratory)
