• Dale Carnegie (The Bible and Gun Club):
  Successful author, who, in the USA in the 40s, started formulating rules for influencing people whilst they remained feeling good. Everything should, of course, proceed honestly, but persuasive salespeople like using those techniques as well. He also formulated ways of leading a balanced, trouble-free life and speaking in public. His books sold in their millions world-wide and to this day, certain high-school children in the USA have the chance to take part in so-called Dale Carnegie courses for free – businesses pay good money to train their managers in this way. A film version of Carnegie's philosophy, incidentally, is Alfonso Arau's schmaltzy A Walk in the Clouds with Keanu Reeves.

• Dorothy (Love! Valour! Compassion!):
  No, this code was in use long before the Golden Girls came along. The name is that of Judy Garland's character in the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz. This musical by Victor Fleming is an icon of gay films, even though not a single gay character appears in it. In the days when it wasn't the done thing to show oneself as gay in public, the name of a fictitious relative, Dorothy, would be introduced into the conversation at some point. If this resulted in the right kind of response, the flirt could carry on unhindered, without any heterosexuals present knowing anything was going on.

Judy Garland became an idol for gays overnight; there is even a theory that suggests one of the contributing factors to the Stonewall riots in 1969 was that New York gays were in especially bad spirits, just when the police felt like messing them around a bit again, because they had just learned of Garland's death. Other code words from The Wizard of Oz come up in other films, like the state of "Kansas", or the "red slippers" which just have to be clicked together to escape a situation, or, as in The Boys in the Band, which is referred to in Love! Valour! Compassion!, the Yellow Brick Road: "He's as straight as the Yellow Brick Road," which is, of course, spiral-shaped.

• top or bottom (Kiss Me, Guido):
  An often-used phrase in gay English-speaking circles, to denote whether someone is "active" (top) or "passive" (bottom). Of course, "top" can be associated with superiority, and "bottom" with inferiority (as in the cult British sitcom Bottom; where the characters are at the "bottom" of society), and so should be avoided. In an interview with Queer View, Lawrence Elbert, who directed Days of Pentecost, said, "The greatest insult he could throw at me was that I was a bottom. He equated 'bottom' with femininity, and femininity with something bad." (Quotation re-translated)

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