Lavender language, the gay way to speak

From Regency England to 1920s Harlem to Miss Piggy, gay vernacular has given voice to homosexual identity and desire in a hostile world. In some parts, it still does.

Bill Leap, perhaps the world's most respected scholar in the field known as lavender linguistics, talks in a Southern drawl and cusses like a trucker's wife.

"Let me tell you what it is, honey," he says on a Monday afternoon from his home in Tampa, Fla. "Miss Piggy's English is so queer."

Leap, an emeritus professor of anthropology at American University …