Yes, there is indeed a very fine line in traditional gay male culture with feminine gendering like the kind I wrote about here.

The practice is dying anyway, but then it was largely ironic. It was in-group-speak not meant to be taken at face value. John wasn't actually calling us girls (even though he used those words). He was dismissing societal rejection by embracing the insults most commonly used against us.

He was also echoing, probably without knowing it, a sort of secret cant, a slang developed among gay men to communicate without being easily understood by outsiders.

John was pretty freshly out of the closet, so I don't suppose he knew that "Mary" and "Molly" went back at least a couple centuries as code words for gay man. (As seen in "Molly house," an archaic term for gay bar that goes back to 18th century London.)

Different times. When I arrived in New York City a decade later, I learned a lot more of that special vocabulary from my older partner Lenny and his friends.

That was especially interesting because I didn't feel much actual pressure to be closeted in a way that would make secret cants necessary. But my husband, only 20 years older than I, grew up in a very different, pre-Stonewall world where phrases like "friend of Dorothy" and the like were genuinely necessary in order to fly under the radar of societal scorn.

He spent most of his professional life working as a bookkeeper for a major publishing house. By the time I met him in 1990, he felt pretty secure at work, relatively confident that he wouldn't be fired if people discovered he was gay.

But that wasn't true for the first part of his professional life. He told me that in the 60s and even the 70s, he had to keep his secret to keep his job, which made special vocabularies practically necessary instead of just quaint or colorful.

He would have known right away what John was doing when he called us Mary, even if John didn't know for sure what the traditions were that he was repeating.