Sexual orientation – gays and their life
January 16, 2008 on 7:01 am | In DatingSexual orientation, self-identification and behaviour aren’t necessarily aligned in a clear-cut fashion for a given individual. Most people consider gay and homosexual to be synonyms. However, some consider gay to be a matter of self-identification, while homosexual refers to sexual orientation. Indeed, the British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell has argued that the term gay is merely a cultural expression which reflects the current status of homosexuality within a given society, and claiming that “Queer, gay, homosexual … in the long view, they are all just temporary identities. One day, we won’t need them at all.”
The gays usually describes a person’s sexual orientation, being the standard term for homosexual. In earlier usage, the word meant “carefree”, “happy”, or “bright and showy”, though this usage is infrequent today. Gay sometimes also refers to commonalities shared by homosexual people, as in “gay history”, the ideological concept of gay culture as in “gay music” or “gay sensibility” which is neither definable or accurate. The word gay is sometimes used to refer to same-sex relationships more generally, as in “gay marriage”, although this usage is discouraged by some LGBT supporters: the rationale is that this usage is exclusive of not only bisexual and transgender people but also lesbians who generally reject labels of being a subset of men, even gay men. While gay applies in some contexts to all homosexual people, the term lesbian is sex-specific: it is used exclusively to describe gay women. Sometimes gay is used to refer only to men.