Why is there no word for gay men

It’s no wonder, then, that by the s, gay men and lesbians were eager to shake off the word “homosexual” and replace it with a label of their own choosing. The above quote was taken from an extremely popular radio comedy programme in the s called Round the Horne, which featured a pair of camp characters called Julian and Sandy played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams. They used a secret gay form of language called Polari. Gay people used this language up until around the s as a way of conducting conversations in public spaces or just to have a camp laugh with each other.

By , the word gay now officially acquired the new added definition of meaning homosexual males. Gay men themselves seem to have been behind the driving thrust for this new definition as they felt (and many still do), that “homosexual” is much too clinical, sounding like a disorder. About two years ago I switched to cocaine because I could work the next day. Jeremy is telling me this from a hospital bed, six stories above Seattle. Jeremy is not the friend I was expecting to have this conversation with.

"Gay" began as a male-only word, the way that "Lesbian" is female-only. But like many words in the English language, the 'male only' term began to become the 'gender neutral' term. Think about how 'actor' can be used to describe women, or 'chairman' can be used for a woman. For centuries, gay was used commonly in speech and literature to mean happy, carefree, bright and showy, and did not take on any sexual meaning until the s. At that time the meaning of gay as carefree evolved to imply that a person was unrestrained by morals and prone to decadence and promiscuity. This latter use suggests that the younger man was in a sexually submissive role and may be among the first times that gay was used implying a homosexual relationship.

The range of acceptable use for these terms depends on the context and speaker. [45] Conversely, gay, a word originally embraced by homosexual men and women as a positive, affirmative term (as in gay liberation and gay rights), [46] came into widespread pejorative use among young people in the early s. [47]. But it was not an easy topic to research. And taboo subjects are very often under-researched, sometimes because people have a hard time gaining access, gaining that trust, but also because, even if people gain that access, there could be significant repercussions for themselves as researchers, or for the people who are the research participants. Secrecy is often the norm, but the field was familiar to us, through previous visits and research projects.