Dossie Easton: I learned to use the word “slut” in an approving manner when I was living with gay men for fifteen years, and you know, the baths were a big deal during that wonderful time in the 70s, and it’s still continuing now, but the opening of sexuality was just gorgeous, it was just amazing, and so we did a lot of reclaiming of language. My friend Tee Corinne did a wonderful book called The Cunt Coloring Book, and we started using the word “fuck” in an approving manner, to talk about sex that we liked and felt good about.

There was just a sense, everywhere, and you could see it in Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, that was questioning this thing about bad language? Why is language about sex bad? And for that matter, bodily functions that we all do, why was that so incredibly taboo? It seemed like the whole concept of dirty words was about enforcing a certain kind of shame and the shame seemed to be a lot of policing of sexual freedom, so to me the reclaiming of language was very basic. Can’t we talk about sex in some language that is alive? Is a word “cleaner” if it has more syllables? If I call it sexuality, is that cleaner than calling it sex? If I call it human sexuality, that’s really clean, isn’t it?