Sutton uses her academic tools in a variety of ways.
#NAMES OF GAY PORN STARS HOW TO#
No one knew how to pronounce it, and very few people knew where it came from." When Nike first got started, for example, people had a hard time with that name. "Even with a horrible name, the brand might still work. Sutton is a founder of Catchword, a San Francisco naming firm that works with companies to name products, create taglines and revamp brand structures.Ĭatchword, along with other Bay Area naming firms like Igor, Idiom and Lexicon, sprang up during the Internet boom when selecting a domain name was a hot issue.Įvery firm has its own philosophy on the best way to name names, but Sutton says, in general, the name alone won't make or break the product. Laurel Sutton is still a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley in "an obscure part of phonetics that only my adviser and I care about," but she has managed to parlay her knowledge of linguistics and passion for names into a business. "The Jewish girls were labeled smart, the Italian girls were seen as passionate, and so on, " Lawson said.Īnother active member of the name society brings an entirely different perspective. Sure enough, Lawson found that people's impressions were colored by the perceived culture of the names. In one study, he selected a group of young women with "ethnically nonspecific faces" and gave them three ethnically distinctive names for three groups of subjects.
How does one become a namer? Members of the American Name Society enter the world of naming from many directions.Įd Lawson, a professor emeritus at SUNY Fredonia and former president of the American Name Society, was a psychologist who studied stereotypes before focusing on names. The last names reflected a number of American masculine obsessions, like cowboy themes (Tex, Denver, Steers, Colt), aping celebrities ( Thom Cruz, Clark Kent, Mike Nichols), and animals and objects that sound tough (Wolf, Cougar, Panther, Saber, Stryker, Mallett). He found that the vast majority had completely white- bread, all-American names with a common metrical pattern of syllabic stress (strong-weak emphasis, as in the names Chet Roberts or Tag Adams). After screening out specifically ethnic films, he had 2, 622 names to analyze. In a session titled "How to Name a Porn Star," which understandably drew a standing-room-only crowd, Stanford Professor Arnold Zwicky looked at names of gay porn actors.
(Drag kings are women performing as men, often, like drag queens, to music.) Sample names: Moby Dick, Pat Riarch, Jacques Strap and Miles Long.
If hyperfeminity was the drag queens' goal, drag kings work equally hard to come up with deeply masculine markers. Ethnic stereotypes got some play too, with China Silk and Bang Bang Ledesh. Unsurprisingly, many drag queens chose honorifics such as Lady and Miss and upwardly mobile names like Xaviar Onassis Bloomingdale or, less frequently, overtly lower-class monikers such as Winnie Baygo or Mary K. The next two papers were probably chosen for their mirrored themes - Philip Carter's "The Social Meanings of Drag Queen Names" and Rebecca Childs' "Drag Kings: Creating a Name in a More Socially Conscious Performance Space." Carter distributed a handout breaking down a list of drag queen names in the Washington, D.C., area by racial and class markers. Right, Deli Pickup, Senorita Chien de los Perros (meaning, approximately and politely, Miss Dog of the Dogs) and street names playing off of Beach and Buch (they sound like "bitch" and "butch," no?). Who knew that although drag queens usually employ sexual innuendo or humor in their stage names, it is strikingly uncommon for male gay porn stars to do so? Apparently, bland names are perceived to be more attractive.īutters delivered a paper on names in gay-themed novels before Stonewall, the 1969 riot that brought national attention to the gay rights movement, with names as heavily symbolic as Mr. In the "Queer Names" panel alone, vast stores of cultural information were mined from, for instance, the methodical study of gay male porn names.
Issues tackled at the conference speak to how many things can be discerned from studying names - chosen names, given names, place names, product names, names in fiction and names in history.