"Dicki Leitsch, an early gay-rights activist, who is now in his eighties, arranged to donate his old..."

“Dicki Leitsch, an early gay-rights activist, who is now in his eighties, arranged to donate his old working files to the archives of the New York Public Library… Jason Baumann, an assistant director for collection development and the LGBTQ initiative coordinator for the NYPL… took inventory… “This card file is great,” he said, flipping through a set of four-by-six index cards on which Leitsch had nearly typed out gay slang terms from antiquity. In the seventies, an “Alice Blue Gown” was a uniformed police officer. A “basket” was “the bulge caused by the organs when wearing tight pants.” Some of the definitions were more nuanced: an “auntie,” Leitsch had written, was “an ageing or middle aged homosexual, offtimes effeminate in character,” or “a person of settled demeanor who cautions against intemperate acts.””

- “Retrospective Dept.: The Advocate.”