It signaled factional inclusion to those inside the movement, and factional solidarity to those outside the movement. Bisexual people, concerned that their issues would be overlooked, also sought acknowledgment, and their initial was stapled in too.Īnd so the unwieldy four-letter acronym reigned. By 2007, when gay-rights advocates decided to make their support for a federal antidiscrimination bill conditional on the inclusion of protections for transgender people, it was clear that the gay-and-lesbian and trans movements had become politically joined at the hip including the T made undeniable sense. Meanwhile, as recognition grew that trans people faced discrimination and ignorance comparable to what homosexuals endured, the addition of T made gradual inroads. But no matter how many letters are added, one group is pointedly excluded. By the early 1990s, when some of us founded a group for homosexual journalists, we didn’t think twice about calling it the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. But the male and female homosexual populations differed in some ways, and so gay became gendered to complement lesbian. In Kameny’s heyday and my youth, that seemed just fine. Gay, by contrast, had a long linguistic history and no pseudoscientific baggage.
As gay people fought the stereotype of brokenness, homosexual came to be seen as clinical and pathologizing. Like a lot of historical wrong turns, LGBTQ means well. Read: The irrationally divided critics of Donald Trump It’s time to retire the term and find a replacement. The alphabet-soup designation for sexual minorities has become a synecdoche for the excesses of identity politics-excesses that have helped empower the likes of Donald Trump. In the past couple of years, however, I have come to believe, at long last, that Kameny was right. Later, when LGBT arrived, it seemed cumbersome and artificial, but its inclusive aspirations struck me as honorable. Human rights.Ī generation younger than Kameny, I came of age accustomed to the phrase gay and lesbian. Gay rights, to him, meant American rights.
He believed he was fighting for the values that define all Americans-the values he had fought for in combat during World War II. He didn’t mean that gay is good but lesbian, bisexual, and transgender are not. He wasn’t excluding anyone by using the word gay. Kameny especially prized, among his many accomplishments, his slogan “Gay is good!”-a proud claim that homosexuals are heterosexuals’ moral as well as legal equals. When it started in the ’80s with gay and lesbian, he correctly predicted that there would be no end of it.”
“He would use gay to cover the full range or gay and lesbian.” Another said: “Frank was quite indignant about the alphabet soup. “My recollection is LGBT or its derivatives were expressly disliked by Frank,” one of them told me. He had plenty of time to make peace with the term, but his friends say he abjured it. But he lived until 2011, well into the age of LGBTQ. This is partly because he was a creature of his era, born in the 1920s and active in an age when the whole argot was different. He did not use the term LGBTQ, or any of its variations.
But there is one thing he never did-at least to my own recollection and that of associates of his whom I consulted. He fought tirelessly against sodomy laws. He spearheaded the challenge to the psychiatric establishment’s categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness. He was the first openly gay congressional candidate. He led some of the first gay-rights demonstrations. Frank Kameny, the last century’s greatest gay-rights activist, filed the first-ever Supreme Court petition challenging discrimination against homosexuals.