Sociolinguistic Artifacts

Don Kulick's "No" paper reminded me of this classic Key & Peele sketch, in which the camera and audience at a town hall follow Jordan Peele's character while a member of congress is talking about gay rights. In this case, the camera and audience are calling Jordan Peele's implicitly straight character into being as a gay subject, which Peele attempts to circumvent by refusing to linguistically acknowledge the attention and instead scurrying around the room to hide. I think this is a (non-violent) example of the same phenomena Kulick talks about, since Peele's character evidently believes "to have to utter that ‘no’ oneself is to be forced to produce oneself as a non-masculine subject," which in this case means he can't just say he isn't gay.