This Book is Gay Read Free

you. Your identity is your business. It’s all gravy. In fact, pigeons and carrots with gravy sounds delish.
    Now that we’ve been label shopping, it’s worth noting that the one you bought has a return policy. Sexual preference and gender are fluid , meaning just because you feel one way now, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll feel the same way in five years’ time. Plenty of people change their sexual identity, and that’s fine.
    So if everything’s changeable, and if we all exist on a fluctuating, wibbly-wobbly spectrum of sexual desire (something very hard to define at the best of times), why do we bother with labels at all? Why don’t we all just skip around with flowers in our hair making out with the people we fancy, regardless of their gender?
    Well, probably because that’s quite hard to describe. At the end of the day, it’s easier to have a single word to use to define yourself when talking to other people. People will ask you how you identify and, although it’s tempting to launch into a tirade about the tyranny of labels, it’s far simpler to say, ‘Oh, I’m bi,’ and let that be it. Still, even that doesn’t mean you HAVE to adopt a label; plenty of people don’t.
    With this in mind let’s take a look at the most common labels on offer at the Identity Shop.
L IS FOR LESBIAN
    The word lesbian is derived from the name of the island of Lesbos, where a Greek poet called Sappho ran her own sixthcentury ÔÖversion of
The L Word
. She gathered a whole gang of girls in the sunshine and wrote poems about how hot they were. Fast forward twenty-five hundred years, to around the turn of the twentieth century, and women were seeking a name for a growing subculture that was gaining visibility and status. Until this point, historically, gay women were almost considered a myth – probably a sign of how little women were regarded or thought of as sexual creatures outside of marriage.

    But now, gay women, inspired by Sappho’s island of lusty ladies, coined the name ‘lesbian’, which before then had been used to describe anything ‘of Lesbos’.
    Today the word more or less means ‘a woman who has sex with women’. Some such women don’t like the word ‘lesbian’ and prefer ‘gay woman’.
    â€˜I prefer “gay” to “lesbian” – I think it’s something about the noun vs. adjective thing, i.e. “lesbian” sounds a bit more central and defining, whereas “gay” is just one of a number of adjectives that could be used to describe a person.’
    J , 28, Brighton.
    Now. You may have heard some people calling lesbians ‘dykes’. This is a touchy subject because it originated as an insulting term. Unless you identify as lesbian yourself, you should never use the word ‘dyke’ at all. The word is pejorative unless it’s being reclaimed as slang by gay women themselves.
G IS FOR GAY
    The word ‘gay’ started life meaning joyful, carefree, bright and showy, from the French term ‘gaiety’, which is still used. However, by the seventeenth century, the word had evolved: a ‘gay woman’ was a prostitute, a ‘gay man’ was promiscuous, and a ‘gay house’ was a brothel. Nice.
    So, by the mid-twentieth century, gay still meant ‘carefree’ – as opposed to those who were ‘straight’ or a little square – and started to take on its homosexual connotations. Given that at the time ‘homosexual’ was a clinical diagnosis, it’s no wonder that a term meaning ‘bright and showy’ ironically became shorthand for men who wished to exist in a secret subculture.
    By the 1990s, it was decided that ‘gay’ was the preferred and politically correct way to refer to men who have sex with men (and, of course, also women who have sex with women).
    Sadly, at about the same