Research Rabbit Hole: hairpins and coming out

As an author and reader of queer historical fiction – and in particular sapphic stories set in the past – I always want the worlds I’m writing to be as true a reflection of their setting as I can make them. That often means spending hours falling down research rabbit holes, following one breadcrumb to the next. It suits me as both a massive procrastinator and an all-round trivia nerd.

This week, the rabbit hole I fell down was all about how you might hint to a new friend or a potential lover that you were, in fact, of the homosexual persuasion. In other words, how you would come out.

When I was first coming out back when you had to have a university email address to sign up for Facebook and we still took digital cameras on nights out, I understood that term to mean telling everyone, loudly, proudly, shouting it from the rooftops that I wasn’t just shit at pulling men. I was actually – and enthusiastically – pretty good at charming women.

I think that’s what everyone these days understands by the term “coming out”. But in today’s research rabbit hole, I came across an interesting tidbit I wanted to share with you: back in the 1930s, coming out (or being brought out) had a totally different meaning.

Stolen from society’s debutants (think Bridgerton’s girls bowing and scraping to the Queen), it initially meant that someone had found gay friends and the gay life. It didn’t mean sitting your mum down and saying, “You know my friend Jenny…”

As phrases like coming out got further and further embedded in gay slang, the association with debutante balls and being brought out into society got weaker and weaker, and people started to think that to be coming “out”, you must have been “in”. I can’t find any information on when we started to think of ourselves as hiding in a closet, but George Chauncey’s research in ‘Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World’ shows an absence of the phrase in personal diaries and letters before the 1960s.

In ‘Coming Out Under Fire’, an excellent book on gay men and women in the US armed forces during WWII, Allan Bérubé describes how a baby gay would “drop hairpins” or hints to let other queer people know they were gay.

Maybe they’d discuss a fondness for the Wizard of Oz, or sensible shoes, or the 1940s Chappell Roan herself Marlene Dietrich. In fact, army base “music rooms” were often a kind of queer cruising ground. You’d sit in there, listening to records and eyeing up the cute thing in the chair opposite.

It was even, Allan Bérubé tells us, a way to drop a hairpin – “Does this base have a music room?”.

In the seventies, when the Michigan Womyn’s Festival (food for another blog post, no doubt!) was in full swing in the US, apparently a woman could drop the name of an entire Midwestern state into the conversation, and it was almost as heavy a hint as a carabiner swinging off her Dickies belt loops today.

And let’s not forget the heady days of early 2021, still in the grips of lockdowns and social distancing, when Swifties everywhere from Tumblr to the New York Times went round and round in circles looking for hidden meanings in “you could hear a hairpin drop” on evermore.

When you were confident the hunk you’d been winking at over the record player was queer too, and maybe you’d had a couple of gin and dubonnets, and you felt safe and daring, you could come out all the way, pull out every last hairpin and “let your hair down”.

More than twenty years after the Second World War, the riots at Stonewall were even referred to as “the hairpin drop heard around the world” by the LGBT activist Dick Leitsch[1]. Around the same time, Antony James in ‘America’s Homosexual Underground’ gave this wonderful example of the phrase in use: “Women who understand homosexuals are said to ‘know the score.’ They’re not supposed to be shocked by anything. So when they attend a party there’s no furtive whispering at the door. You don’t hear ‘Keep your hairpins up, dearies...There’s a “straight” inside.’.”

As that last quote suggested, on the other hand, if you wanted to pass as straight in a potentially hostile straight world, you’d “put your hair up” – mask your queerness, talk football, keep the sass in check, laugh at straight men’s jokes when all the time you’re just praying for the bear…

So next time I find an escaped bobby pin hidden in my sheets, blocking the hoover or tangled somehow in the spaniel’s ears, I’ll just take it as a reminder that I am out, loud, proud and not bad at charming pretty girls (at least according to my girlfriend!).

[1] Dick Leitsch, “The Hairpin Drop Heard Around the World,” New York Mattachine Newsletter (July 1969): 21-23, cited in Carter, Stonewall, 314.