“Who did I want to be surrounded by as a baby, a child, a teenager, a twenty or sixty year old gay man? Certainly not, at this latter age, by fabulous queens who breath narcissism and need their egos to be pleased as I die alone”, were the words by the poet Mark Doty that served as background while listening to a young man at a gay bar in Manhattan’s Upper West Side: perfect surroundings to study linguistic interactions. It was quite obvious to anyone listening to the young man, that his need to be pleased, to feel grand, was bigger than his ability to see his limitations, or for that matter, to realize that the older man listening to him was not only smiling or making small remarks, but judging. So many years in the academic world, as well as having experienced and studied all kinds of peoples, prepared the older gay man to be attentive to others and understand not only diverse types of discourses, but the frameworks underlying what was said. In the field of communications and literature it was called the “subtext”. In psycho-linguistics, “schemata”.
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