# beards and walkers *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 08 Jun 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Alice Turner *08 Jun 1998, 08:27* A "beard" in the sense of an opposite-sex escort to give the illusion of a heterosexual couple is a homo (and hetero, actually) sexual slang term that has been around for quite a while. The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang dates it to the mid-70s, but I think that, at least in New York City, it may go back to the late 60s. The DSC, to my surprise, tags it as a male escort (for a woman), but that's wrong. A beard is usually a female escort for a man; the male equivalent (for a woman, not necessarily a lesbian) is a walker. -alga- ---