Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Gay and lesbian people have a lot to thank John Waters for. He's provided us with some of the most memorable camp images of the century: Divine, cha-cha heels, Edith Massey as the Egg Lady. Now we can thank him for expanding our sexual vocabulary to include teabagging.

In Waters' latest film, Pecker, there is a scene in a gay club where tough straight boys earn extra money as trade, and where a customer gets "teabagged" by one of these go-go boys dancing on the bar. Teabagging (as shown in the R-rated movie) consists of the dancer letting the front of his underwear rest on the forehead of a delighted patron. In an interview, however, Waters explains that the word comes from an actual gay bar in Baltimore, and in that case teabagging involved a dancer hitting someone in the forehead with his balls.

View our poll archive

The visual image is fairly arresting-- setting your teabag down on a saucer is somewhat similar to letting your balls rest on some lucky guy's face or forehead. There's a similar change in the shape of the scrotum and the teabag as the bottom widens and the contents move apart from each other.

This amusing and inventive word might have remained confined to a few patrons of Baltimore's gay go-go bars if it weren't for Waters' film. Miss Poubelle is pleased to see, after a search of the internet, that the word "has legs," and is starting to be used in more contexts. The best indication that a sexual term is moving towards wider acceptance is its use in some of the multitude of internet porno sites. Several heterosexual sites use the term, but with a slight twist. In hetero contexts, teabagging generally refers to having your balls sucked by someone else, presumably female.

Another unusual twist on teabagging is found among computer gamers, especially those who play Quake. One gamer writes about "the filthy computer gaming industry habit known as teabagging. For those who aren't aware, this is the nasty act of touching one's bare scrotum to a personal item belonging to the person being teabagged." Many Quake players are apparently paranoid about the possibility that someone will teabag their keyboard or joystick while they are out of the room.

This strikes Miss Poubelle as a practice and a preoccupation that is definitely cut out for adolescent males. She would not be inclined to waste much time worrying about being teabagged, since she is past the age at which cooties strike terror in her heart. But she suspects that the real motivation behind the gamer's teabagging is fear of homosexuality. The somewhat convoluted reasoning seems to be that by putting my balls on your keyboard, I've set up a situation where you have indirectly come in contact with my balls, and since you've been in contact with my balls, you must be a fag.

Many of the gamers are teenage boys, of course, and they are too young to legally do anything more satisfying with their balls than putting them on other people's computer equi pment. But Miss Poubelle hopes that at least some of them will grow up a little less homophobic and a little more open to giving pleasure to others. After all, yesterday's teabagger is today's trade and tomorrow's...? **