I can call myself homosexual, because I’m male. But what about females who are lesbian? Homosexual just doesn’t seem right, given the “homo” part implies male. (French: homme; Italian: uomo, etc.)
Maybe I’m missing out on Queer History here, but I want to know if lesbians have their own nasty “category,” like gayboys do.
If ypu don’t know, let’s celebrate anyway by flying on the Wonder Woman invisible jet to Lesbos, and have a big-ass party. I’ll bring the clam dip.
Technically, dictionary-definition-wise, “homosexual” means both male and female. But in colloquial conversation, people tend to use “homosexual” to mean guys and “lesbian” to mean girls. No idea why, sorry.
“Homo” in homosexual means attracted to the same sex, not to men, as can be seen by its converse, heterosexual. If “homosexual” meant “attracted to men” then heterosexual women would be homosexual, if you see what I mean.
“Homo” does also mean “man,” but I believe it’s a different derivation.
Yes, AHunter3 is right, you’re mistaking a derivation from Greek for a derivation from Latin (a common enough error).
The French and Italian words you quoted come to us from Latin, but homosexual comes from Greek - it means a person attracted to others of the same sex, not those attracted to the male sex.
AHunter3 and MsWhatsit have nailed it on the head.
However, the Latin homo doesn’t have strong connotations of manliness. It’s more like “that guy over there”. That’s the joke in Nietzche’s Ecce Homo; the title translates (roughly) as “Hey, look at that guy over there.”
While you’d probably get looked at funny for calling a woman “homo” in ancient Rome, it’s not the same as calling her vir. That’d just be wrong.
On a side note, very few people would picture a pair of women if you mention a homosexual couple. The term “lesbian” seems to be required to invoke that image.
I could also add that homosexual was not originally a Greek word, and so it has nothing to do with the culture of ancient Greece - the people who coined the word just decided to use a Greek root (the -sex part is Latin in any case).
There’s roots, and then there’s popular 21st-Century usage. I know of no lesbians who would ever call themselves of others “homosexual”. I sure wouldn’t.
By the same logic women would not be homo sapiens.
Course then you have the people that actually believe that…
As for lesbians calling themselves “homosexual” I don’t know of any native english speaking gay men who refer to themselves in that manner either. I generally refer to myself as gay when needed.
I think the term “lesbian” refers to the inhabitants of the island of Lesbos. A famous female author lived there (name?) and wrote about her relationships with women. The stereotype of Lesbians that they are all lesbians.
So, lesbians didn’t choose the separate term for themselves.
English sucks major donkey balls. When a corporation (not a state) sends the first load of Mars colonists, they’ll be using a brand-new language and forbidding other languages to be spoken in public.
Although gender neutral language was popular in the 1980’s and 90’s coming out of the cultural changes of the 1960’s and 70’s, gender neutrality" in job related language was (IMO) mainly a female heterosexual phenomenon. Lesbians in the last generation or so, have not been shy about wanting to “own” those differences. I think the term “womyn/wimmin” and its derivations are indicative of this “equal but separate” identity statement(s). In sum I don’t really think lesbians (in particular) are all that concerned about gender neutrality issues.
ultrafilter’s right. Homo in Latin is better translated “human”, male is vir, female is femina. It’s the silly English language that confounds human and male. See Dorothy L. Sayers 1946 essay “The Human-Not-Quite-Human”. http://mnatal.members.easyspace.com/dlshuman.htm
I hated Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, and the only joke I understood was when the main character, a repressed homosexual and Classics scholar, said he was offended by the word “homosexual” because it combined Greek and Latin.
Anthracite, is/was your Sappho article available on the web somewhere? I could swear I read it while doing research on Sappho for a women’s studies class my senior year in high school. It gives me a smile to think I cited a Doper before I’d even ever heard of the SDMB.
I don’t know if they called it Platonic; the adjective comes from the name Plato, and his description of love in “Phaedrus”. Platonic love is certainly not just a male homosexual relationship. It is a relationship based on a pure love between two people (often a young person and an older mentor figure) that is not tainted by jealousy or lust. The term “Platonic relationship” is today generally used to mean “just good friends” because a Platonic relationship is non-sexual, but Plato considered it to be much more than that. It was real love.
