My girlfriend has a FB friend in West Virginia who refers to LGBT with the initials BiGLT, so she asked me why do they have it that way. The SDMB does not have that character string, nor does Wikipedia. I prefer to avoid the Urban Dictionary. Google doesn’t enlighten with any explanations of why they say it that way. All we could tell is that the expression seems to center on the WVU campus in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Clearly, the intention was to foreground bisexual, since it’s so often overlooked or even made invisible. OK, that’s fair. I’m down with everybody getting a turn to go first.
But how come bisexual gets two letters while the others each get one? What was the reason for including the lowercase i? Why not BiGaLeTr? Or just plain BGLT? Are there any West Virginians who are familiar with this expression in the house?
So plausibly, the thinking went:
“We should put these in alphabetical order. BGLT.”
“BGLT sounds like a sandwhich.”
“How about BiGLT, pronounced Bi G L T then? That’s as easy to say.”
“Why should only Bi get a second letter? Why not BiGaLeTr?”
“Because that sounds stupid.”
“Won’t people see BiGLT and say “biggle-T”?”
“That’s just crazy talk.”
“OK, BiGLT it is.”
(Can anyone find out how it’s supposed to be pronounced? Looks like biggle-T to me.)
So I wrote to my friend who lives in Morgantown and got this answer:
Designed by a committee-- well of course; that’s a frequent trope for things that don’t make sense. What it is about committees that produces that effect is a question for another thread. My girlfriend’s friend on Facebook who lives in Morgantown isn’t even gay or anything and wouldn’t know the reason for BiGLT; she just picked it up because I guess it’s the local norm there.
I know a lot of “queer” aces but not a lot of intersex folks who take that particular label. And of course, plenty of trans* people aren’t queer at all, so one umbrella word is a hard sell.