I'm not surprised
Feb. 12th, 2010 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitThe New York Times discusses a new poll about repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". When the poll was worded as asking whether "gay men and lesbians" should be allowed to serve in the U.S. military, support for repeal was over 10% higher than when the wording was whether "homosexuals" should be allowed to serve.
"Homosexual" has long been a problematic word due to its association with medical discourse that categorized same-sex desire as deviance and sickness.1 At this point, I think it's become something very like a slur. Anti-gay folks make a point of using the term "homosexual" instead of "lesbian and gay." Some of you may remember a story in which a news service associated with the American Family Association renamed athlete Tyson Gay as "Tyson Homosexual" because the site's filtering software automatically changed the word "gay."
My own least favorite use of "homosexual" has long been as what I've nicknamed the pejorative of specification. As in, "Mary then began a homosexual relationship with Lisa." There's no need for the adjective "homosexual" (it's obvious that the relationship is between two people of the same sex) except to imply that it's not quite the same thing as a real relationship. Just like, say, a "woman doctor" isn't quite a proper doctor.
1In the first draft of this post I said the word originated in medical discourse, but I had the nagging feeling that was wrong. Double-checking on Wikipedia reminded me that the first known use of "homosexuality" occurred in an 1869 German pamphlet protesting an anti-sodomy law. So it began as a term some LGB people picked for themselves, but was appropriated by medicine and psychiatry for purposes that were often virulently homophobic.
"Homosexual" has long been a problematic word due to its association with medical discourse that categorized same-sex desire as deviance and sickness.1 At this point, I think it's become something very like a slur. Anti-gay folks make a point of using the term "homosexual" instead of "lesbian and gay." Some of you may remember a story in which a news service associated with the American Family Association renamed athlete Tyson Gay as "Tyson Homosexual" because the site's filtering software automatically changed the word "gay."
My own least favorite use of "homosexual" has long been as what I've nicknamed the pejorative of specification. As in, "Mary then began a homosexual relationship with Lisa." There's no need for the adjective "homosexual" (it's obvious that the relationship is between two people of the same sex) except to imply that it's not quite the same thing as a real relationship. Just like, say, a "woman doctor" isn't quite a proper doctor.
1In the first draft of this post I said the word originated in medical discourse, but I had the nagging feeling that was wrong. Double-checking on Wikipedia reminded me that the first known use of "homosexuality" occurred in an 1869 German pamphlet protesting an anti-sodomy law. So it began as a term some LGB people picked for themselves, but was appropriated by medicine and psychiatry for purposes that were often virulently homophobic.
