"Historically, gay represented both homosexual men and women and technically still does," says Chris Crain, editor of the gay weeklies The Washington Blade and The New York Blade, "but a number of gay women felt that gay was too male-associated and pressed to have lesbians separately identified so they weren't lost in the gay-male image." That led to such names as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. (The Washington Blade began in 1969 as The Gay Blade, a play on an old expression about a gallant.)Safire thus explains the usage. He doesn't opine about whether the wordy phrase should be the norm. I tend to think simpler is better, but it's helpful to have a good grasp of the origin of the longer phrase and the feelings it expresses.
Diane Anderson-Minshall, executive editor of Curve, a lesbian magazine in San Francisco, agrees that the one-word adjective was expanded to set homosexual women apart: "When, in the queer world, you say 'the gay community,' the majority of the time that conjures up San Francisco's largely male Castro District, or West Hollywood or 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,' so interjecting the word lesbian into the mix is a necessary reminder that we — gay women — are not simply a subset of that larger male world but rather our own distinct community of individuals."
A whole separate question -- which I'm just going to guess Safire has already written about -- is: when should people with a particular characteristic be called a "community"?
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I've heard lots of debate over the years about using the word "community" to describe a group or class of people.
The gay community, in distinction to what, "the straight community"? The black community as opposed to "the white community"?
It's absurd to lump together all straight people into "a community". So why lump all gays together in one? What's served by constellating people together in a community?
In the 80s people started using the word queer for the whole LGBT evertyhing. Although it was convenient to have one word, it made some people uncomfortable.
Speaking for myself and my circle of friends, we use gay for both men and women.
Being a member of this "community" (the gay male one) I have to say how much I've always distrusted this tendency. There was a period in my late teens when I went to gay pride marches and pasted rainbow flags on my possessions, but this was short-lived. Being an introvert (re your post yesterday) I could never shake the distrust I had of groups and the individual-dissolving tendencies of groups. This led me to examine what it was I had in common with other homosexuals, and I could never arrive at a set of cohesive principles that could justify thinking of gay people as a community. As I developed my conservative libertarian philosophy, I became increasingly distrustful of all essentialist tribalism, whether it be race, gender, sexual orientation, religious... I've come to see this human tendency to form non-reasoned "tribal" bonds to be a vestige of our more barbarous past and one of the primary causes of misery in the world. I am less distrusting of social bonds that people choose reasonably, and of course all of the unthinking "tribalisms" I listed above can easily fit into this category as well, it's just a matter of viewpoint. But the minute someone tries to co-opt me into a group based on some essentialist argument, I turn and run in the opposite direction. (I've had people who refused to accept that I voted for Bush for any other reason than that I'm "dealing with self-hatred" because it must be pathological to vote other than left, right?)
I think some gay people feel less isolated and less vulnerable to think of themselves as part of a "community", and I can understand that. But I believe maturity and perspective often reveals these bonds to be illusory. The gay "community" as a political entity suffers from the same problem as "peace" marches and the Democratic party: mission creep. Go to any anti-war rally or gay pride parade and you will see dozens of causes airing their grievances, from the "Free Mumia" people to S&M liberation. At some point you need to ask yourself if you want to align yourself with all of these groups, and whether the fluidity of what is considered the gay community is really evidence of the fact that there's really no bonding principle there besides the fact that we all sleep with people of our gender (and given the prevalence of "straight queers" and celibate bisexuals and "de-gendered heterosexuals" and furry-lovers at these events, it's not even clear we have this most basic bond).
I always say to my friends, I'm not a member of a group, the groups are members of me.
As to the semiotics of sexual orientation distinctions, it's a pretty old convention to separate gay and lesbian, and even in the early days of the gay rights movement, there were often separate groups for men and women (the Mattachine Society in New York for men and the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco for women). It's still fairly uncommon for gay men and lesbians to be close friends. I once had a lesbian friend (actually she preferred "dyke") who asserted that gay and lesbian were actually different things, that the values of men and the values of women were so fundamentally different that there could be no common description of the two groups. This sort of reminds me of your post weeks ago about the woman interviewing with the group of students who stated their "pronoun". I think this distortion of language can really step over into absurdity very quickly. You almost never see gay this-or-that anymore. It's now G,L,B,TS,TG,Q... Like a very bad hand of Scrabble. I hope to see the day when there are finally so many categories added to this that it actually encompasses all of humanity and therefore disappears.
chuck writes:
It's absurd to lump together all straight people into "a community". So why lump all gays together in one?
This doesn't really work. It is absurd to label "all American non-Methodists" a community, but it is not unreasonable to label "American Methodists" a community.
Mike asked, "The idea of 'community' requires an active interest, doesn't it?"
I'm not convinced that it does. "Community" is a catch-all that sweeps up everyone described by the adjective it serves. If you're gay, you're assumed to be part of the gay community. I don't think it matters whether you're apathetic about joining up or not.
On a practical level, I'm not sure that it makes any difference.
But as far as language goes, the word community evokes secondary notions of welcoming and mutual caring. Again, I'm not sure how many gay people feel esp welcomed or cared about by other gay people. Noone rolls out the red carpet when you come out of the closet.
And as for queer--yes, the adjective has certainly become less derogatory, but it's still a heavy word to throw around. I wouldn't feel comfortable using it in genteel, non-queer company.
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy doesn't even use the word to directly describe a person. There's a little bit of distance there.
Alkali wrote, "it is not unreasonable to label "American Methodists" a community."
True! Because you join the Methodist community when you elect to become a Methodist. There's a joining there, a signing up, so to speak. If you're born white, your not joining up.
I live in the Alt-house community. Come visit.
I think it was back in the early '80s, as "community" was being used to refer to more and more things, that I saw a reference to something like the
"non-reinforced concrete construction community."
It was a liberating moment. I realized that the word no longer had to refer to anything actually like a community. It had become just a way of saying "something in common."
The main problem with the new meaning(s) of "community" is that too often the word is used by some demagogue for political purposes, to claim knowledge of what a whole bunch of individuals think or want.
I can therefore see Brendan's point. It would be like me getting ticked off because someone called me an American instead of a Celtic American...I mean Irish American. Well, Irish-French-American.
In politics, conservatives prefer to emphasize individuality, not group identity. In rhetoric, maybe. It sure doesn't explain "Ditto, Rush!" Conservatism is as conformist as any ideology. There's plenty of twist to the rhetoric; conservatives may say they're all about individuality, but then they have to compunctions about supporting policies and laws that deny my rights based on my individual identity as a lesbian.
, I became increasingly distrustful of all essentialist tribalism, whether it be race, gender, sexual orientation, religious...
Good for you. I dislike "community" as a term for group, a lot.
There's only one community. And that's the community of all of us.
Cheers,
Victoria
It's now G,L,B,TS,TG,Q... Like a very bad hand of Scrabble.
*LOL*
BTW, the very expressive Brazilians have a dazzlingly funny word for those in the gayosphere, if you will.
They call them:
GLS
(pron. Eng. "zheh -- ELeh -- ESseh)
Gays, Lesbicas, e Simpatisantes.
Gays, Lesbians, and people partial to them.
They nailed it.
Cheers,
Victoria
My personal experience aligns with Ziemer's; all but one of the lesbians of my acquaintance seemed to harbor active predjudice against and dislike of men, including gay men, but gay men of my acquaintance do not seem to harbor the same dislike of women. It's an admittedly small sample set, but I suspect that's why lesbians demand to be set apart in terminology.
I don't know enough bisexuals of either gender to comment on them.
its that simple. gay is an inappropriate description of most lesbians.
What about queer?
They're queer ducks, right?
Cheers,
Victoria the Not-Serious, but Playing-Along Anyway
In the question of self-referential terms which were once considered epithets, Brazilians yet again add their quirky humour to the mix.
Their slang term for lesbian has been appropriated by the latter, quite normally.
Sapatão
Or "Big shoe". :)
It's like "Queer Studies" now. Bravo, I say.
I like people who don't take themselves all-that seriously, and don't cry in their beer about the dastardly unfairness of life.
Those people are winners.
Cheers,
Victoria
Me, I'm just back from attending an Episcopal Diocesan convention, one of the big issues of which was the Windsor report (which, to oversimplify, was the global Anglican Communion's reponse to the ECUSA's decision to install as Bishop a practicing--homosexual? gay? well, take your pick--man).
Thus, you can imagine there was a pervasive subtext about all the issues being discussed here--sexual orientation, "community," language use, and so forth.
What was interesting to me was that in the end, there was so much discussion about how to discuss the issues, that we never actually got around to discussing them (repetitive word choice is intentional).
For the second year in a row. With much frustration, tension, and hurt feelings all around.
Make of that what you will.
Victoria: You da BOMB! You are, by far, my favorite commenter in the Althouse community! Always generous and playful in nature, even when making a serious comment, and informative as all get out.
(I like your blog, too.)
What confuses the heck out of me is when I see "queer" used separately. For example, a local pride march referred to "gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer" people.
Ok... so, it doesn't mean homosexual, it doesn't mean bisexual, it doesn't mean heterosexual, and it doesn't refer to men who identify as women or vice-versa. So what's "queer"? Someone about whom Hank Hill would say "I tell ya, that boy ain't right"?
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