Because gay was already a known adjective meaning joyful, it could be used as a way to communicate same-sex desires to others who were in the know.
Gays and lesbians adopted various terminology of their own, often code words in conversation with one another. In this class the word is gay or lesbian, and this is why.’ “ Let me give you a piece of vocabulary instruction. When Professor Leap’s students use the term, which they still do occasionally, he corrects them. As a matter of fact, I think I’m very good at it.” Studds, the first openly gay member of Congress, once recalled how someone confronted him about whether he was still a “practicing homosexual.” He shot back: “No. In the late 1970s, Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign was centered on the notion of “homosexual recruitment,” the belief that gays and lesbians tried to woo unsuspecting children into their ranks. The word’s power depends, of course, on who is using it. Perry, when Justice Antonin Scalia asked the lawyer Ted Olson, “When did it become unconstitutional to prohibit homosexuals from marrying?” it seemed to some that he was unable (or unwilling) to use the word gay. Broussard went on to discuss his conversations on the subject with a gay colleague, LZ Granderson, whom the writer noted is “a homosexual ESPN commentator.”ĭuring oral arguments last year in the Supreme Court case Hollingsworth v.
Limbaugh cited the work of the “homosexual lobby.”Īnd last year, when Jason Collins became one of the first professional male athletes to reveal he was gay, Chris Broussard, an ESPN commentator who has called homosexuality “that lifestyle” and condemned it as a sin, announced that he had “no problem with homosexuals.” Later, an article in The Christian Post described his comments, noting that Mr. Jan Brewer of Arizona faced pressure to veto a bill that would have allowed businesses to refuse service to gay and lesbian customers, Mr. “Now they’re encouraging this young man who’s announced he’s homosexual to go play, when Obama said he wouldn’t even let his own son play,” Rush Limbaugh said recently as he talked about Michael Sam, the college football player who recently came out. “Homosexual is a term that everybody knows.” “It’s not like ‘faggot,’ which is a negative term that could get somebody’s mother to slap their hand,” he said. “It already has all that clinical baggage heaped on it: that’s the legacy of the term now,” he said, adding that because of its use in a scientific way, many people do not realize how it can fall on gay and lesbian ears. William Leap, a professor of anthropology at American University who studies the field of “lavender linguistics,” which examines how gay people use certain words and phrases, said the offensiveness of the word stems from its medical history. That did not change until the association reversed itself in 1973. Historians believe the first use of “homosexual” was by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, a Hungarian journalist who wrote passionately in opposition to Germany’s anti-sodomy laws in the 19th century.īut by the 20th century, the word had taken on a definition associated with the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of same-sex attractions as a mental disorder. They want to say this is not normal sex, this is not normal family, it’s going against God.” “It also contains ‘homo,’ which is an old derogatory,” he added. What is most telling about substituting it for gay or lesbian are the images that homosexual tends to activate in the brain, he said. Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has looked at the way the term is used by those who try to portray gays and lesbians as deviant.
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or Glaad, has put “homosexual” on its list of offensive terms and in 2006 persuaded The Associated Press, whose stylebook is the widely used by many news organizations, to restrict use of the word. Some gay rights advocates have declared the term off limits.