Public and Clandestine: Gay Men's Pseudonyms on the French Minitel

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the pseudonyms created by French gay men on the Minitel, investigating both their internal morphology and their social functions. Although pseudonymous messages are common in English language environments such as electronic chatrooms, graffiti and personal advertisements, none are as syntactically complex or as hard to decipher as Minitel `pseudos'. Can the widespread use and opaque structure of the French pseudos be imputed to their function as an `anti-language', i.e. the dialectal style of a community that feels itself to be under threat of exposure? I conclude that the pseudos owe their complex structure more to the resulting eroticization of the encounter than to any fear of outsiders.