User:Robert M Dewey

Suggestions

GAY The title of the article might be effectively disambiguated by titling the article "Gay." Quotations are the standard punctuation marks used to indicate when a word is being used as a word.

The etymology of the word "gay" should be broken down into the use of the word geographically. Starting with what is now the almost exclusive use of the word in the United States -- "Gay" in America is (1) an adjective meaning homosexual (Gay Pride, Gay Rights, etc.) a usage beginning probably in the 1920s or (2) a noun meaning a gay man (useful, but it sounds an illiterate turning of an adjective into a noun -- ick!) which started in the 1970s when a number of lesbians chose not to identify themselves as gay women. The usage was then "gay men," which devolved into "gays."The Australian use can then be put under its own heading. Etc.

Right now, the "Gay" article and some of the LGBT articles seem intended to present four quite distinct groups of people gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transexuals as if we were a homogenous body of people calling ourselves LGBT. I believe it was E.M. Forster that our various groups (LGBT) may be different from one another but we all face a common oppressor and that makes us one.

I think that's true. So in our thinking about how to present ourselves to the world, perhaps when we talk about ourselves as a political force it is best to use "LGBT" since in that all four groups of us are united, but when we discuss our history we should recognize that each group has its own separate history. Gay men, for example, have a much more extensive history because men dominated the writing of books almost exculsively for millenia. That history should be clearly presented as the history of gay men. Just as we have distinct histories so we have distrinct literatures, proclivities, social norms (look how we squabble about parks -- gay men have been the fairies cruising through the parks since Athens. Men!) In thes areas where we differ we should have separate articles.

Robert M Dewey (talk) 18:54, 31 May 2010 (UTC) Robert M Dewey