In re: How did “gay” come to mean “homosexual”?
“Since we are the reason for the 90s being gay,
We all wear a green carnation.”
— Noël Coward, Bitter Sweet, 1929
I’d actually be more interested in how they feel about “gay” being used as a noun.
Not being snarky, I’m genuinely curious. It sounds a bit demeaning to my ears, but I’m not a gay, so what do I know?
I am one gay man who finds the use of the word as a noun to be annoying. To me it is an adjective.
up until the late 70’s we all called ourselves gay, men and women. the feminist movement empowered the women to own their own label and they began to demand that we use the term lesbian when referring to them. also, many lesbians wanted to take the “man” out of everything and also referred to themselves as womyn. at this point, the annual Gay Pride parade and events changed to Lesbian and Gay Pride.
once AIDS reared it’s ugly head, the womyn’s separatist movement pretty much ended and it was the lesbians who first came to the aid of the gay male community, organizing new AIDS service organizations in particular and, in general, providing aid and comfort to those dying. we owe them much gratitude.
sometime after that, the bi-sexuals demanded inclusion and it became LGB Pride. at about the same time the transgendered community also wanted in on the fun and so today we have the LGBT community, tho many question why trans people are included as their issues are a question of gender identity and not sexual orientation.
we are a very diverse community that somehow manages to come together under one big rainbow flag.
psgoodguy, is this the column you’re referring to?
How did “gay” come to mean “homosexual”?
When commenting on one of Cecil’s colums, it is helpful to others to post a link to the column in question.
Also, did you mean to reply to John W. Kennedy’s thread in this forum?
But that’s a common enough thing in English where adjectives that are used frequently become nouns.
Like the word “deep”. It describes water for example, but can be used in the phrase “the deep”.
Mod note: I have merged the two threads on the same topic, with the same title. That is, psgoodguy and cochrane’s posts are now in the thread started by John W. Kennedy
I think it’s a lot closer to “black” becoming “blacks” than something as innocent as “the deep.”
Aren’t we up to LGBTQ now?
Nevertheless, it is so that the use of an adjective as a substantive is so common that there’s a word just to facilitate discussing it, viz., “substantive”.
What does “innocent” have to do with it? Yes, that is a more parallel example, because it refers to groups of people rather than something else, but it’s still the same process.
Reads better
About the only thing you got right here is that there are such things as lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transsexuals.
Lesbian has been in use since around the turn of the century at least, with most of the current forms of female seperatism coming afterwards as far as purposefully getting together to form their own communities and villages.
As for transsexuals, they’ve been part of the queer rights movement since at least the Stonewall riots (And ahead of the curve in throwing the cafeteria riots in california a few years earlier). It’s not a matter of ‘well what’s with all these transsexuals just showing up,’ it’s that transmen and transwomen have been part of it since the very beginning.
Sincerely wondering how queer could be another category not already represented with the categories of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender.
I think the Q means “questioning.” In other words, a person may be unsure of his sexuality, so the LGBTQ groups encourage those people to come along.
And, I guess I didn’t get the latest magazine. Isn’t “queer” a slur towards homosexuals, much like “nigger” is to blacks?
Some people advocate a take back the word approach. There’s also genderqueer which is basically people who don’t feel any desire to match traditional conceptions of gender and don’t particularly care if that upsets straights.
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Well, yes, in scietific and psycho/sociological and medical literature. When did lesbians start self-identifying as “lesbians?” Not until the middle of the 20th century I’ll wager.
The very etymology of the word “lesbian” strongly suggests a non-clinical origin.
Forgive me if I am not posting this correctly… the format on this message board is confusing… but there was a question asked concerning the origin of the term “gay” as relating to a male homosexual… and I thought that this little known fact might shed some light on both the term gay, and also the term fag.
The Yiddish term FAYGALA: A male homosexual. (literally, little bird.) …yup, pronounced fag gayla… maybe just a coincidence…but there it is.