Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 16:33, 23 May 2005

Gay, in addition to meaning happy, also means, simplistically, "preferring the same sex" in current usage, though to tie down the word to a specific cultural meaning might be to misrespresent a huge community of individuals who find themselves described by the word "gay".

The term "gay", or "lesbian" for women, is preferred by many in the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) community because it describes the overall "orientation" of the person and does not focus the definition only in sexual or physical terms. The LGBT community represents the emotional, cultural, social and erotic lives of its members; a natural-born community without an innate cultural unity. The LGBT community has been and still is a community of struggle.

Aside from their long-term romantic and/or erotic relationships, gay and lesbian people establish same-sex friendships, love interests, and life partners; this means that they may choose to attend same-sex friendly social gatherings and church services, rather than face discrimination. The modern gay and lesbian community has no real commercial bias.

The gay and lesbian community represents a social component of the global community that is underrepresented in the area of civil rights. The current struggle of the gay community has been brought about by social globalization: the LGBT community seeks marriage rights, in all places and at all times.

Gays and lesbians are often portrayed negatively in television, films, and other media. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation works with the media to help portray fair and accurate images of the gay community. Many large cities have gay and lesbian community centers. The Human Rights Campaign advocates for LGBT people on a wide range of issues.

Word origins

The word gay has had a sexual orientation meaning since at least the nineteenth century, and possibly earlier. Sometimes, specifically extracted histories of word origins are incomplete and not useful to communicating modern meanings of socioculturally potent words.

A quote from Gertrude Stein's Miss Furr & Mrs. Skeene (1922) is possibly the first traceable use of the word, although it is not altogether clear whether she uses the word to mean lesbianism or happiness.

They were ...gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, ... they were quite regularly gay.

Noel Coward's 1929 musical Bitter Sweet has the first uncontested use of the word: in the song "Green Carnation", four overdressed, 1890s dandies sing:

Pretty boys, witty boys, You may sneer

At our disintegration.

Haughty boys, naughty boys,

Dear, dear, dear!

Swooning with affectation...

And as we are the reason

For the "Nineties" being gay,

We all wear a green carnation.

Coward uses the "gay nineties" as a double entendre. The song title alludes to the gay playwright Oscar Wilde, who famously wore a green carnation himself.

The usage of any word changes dramatically as the culture in which it is embedded changes.

Gay can be used exclusively or inclusively. The exclusive meaning refers only to male homosexuals. The inclusive meaning refers at a minimum to homosexual men and lesbians, and arguably to bisexuals, and, when used in the phrase the Gay community it may include transgendered and transsexuals, and possibly intersexuals as well, though this is also a subject of some debate. See also: LGBT and queer

Gay originally was used purely as an adjective ("he is a gay man" or "he is gay"). Gay is now also used as a plural collective-like noun: "Gays are opposed to that policy" but rarely as a singular noun "he is a gay."

It has been claimed that "gay" was derived as an acronym for "Good As You", but this is a backronym (based on a fake etymology).

Another folk etymology accrues to Gay Street, a small street in New York's West Village—a nexus of homosexual culture. The term also seems, from documentary evidence, to have existed in New York as a code word in the 1940s, where the question, "Are you gay?" would denote more than it might have seemed to outsiders.

Terminology

When used as an adjective not describing a person who is part of the gay community, (e.g. "that hat is so gay"), the term "gay" is pejorative. The derogatory implication is that the object (or person) in question is inferior, weak, or effeminate. This usage is common among young people who may not link the term to homosexuality, much as some people may not link the term "Jew down" (to be talked down in price) to Jewish people, or "I was gypped" (I was cheated) to Gypsies. It may also be used in a slang sense without merely pragmatic semantics to describe something that is considered overly bright, colourful and/or festive (especially girlish).

Other spellings, "ghey" and "ghei", are sometimes found on the Internet and are supposedly used either to insult without reference to homosexuality or to bypass chat room censors. See also: fag.

According to the Safe Schools Coalition of Washington's Glossary for School Employees:

"Homosexual: Avoid this term; it is clinical, distancing and archaic. Sometimes appropriate in referring to behavior (although same-sex is the preferred adj.). When referring to people, as opposed to behavior, homosexual is considered derogatory and the terms gay and lesbian are preferred, at least in the Northwest."

However, some same-sex oriented persons actually prefer the term homosexual to gay, seeing the former as describing a sexual orientation and the latter as describing a cultural or socio-political group with which they do not identify .

In addition, it is important not to confuse "sexual preference" with "sexual orientation" when defining homosexuality. The word "preference" implies choice, which many LGBT people maintain they do not have regarding their sexuality.

In a non-political, non-cultural sense, it is also refered to as and .

See also

• List of gay-related topics
• Queer
• lesbian
• homosexuality
• bisexuality
• coming out
• gay rights
• civil rights

External links

• Scientific Gay Scientific Eye for the Queer Guy
• GayCrawler.com Directory of gay and lesbian websites.
• Gay Health
• The World History of Male Love
• 365 Gay The daily gay newspaper online
• Good As You - GLSBT activism using humor and irreverence rather than anger and protests

• Sexual orientation and identity
• LGBT