Gay  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

This page Gay is part of the queer series.
Illustration: Toulouse-Lautrec wearing Jane Avril's Feathered Hat and Boa (ca. 1892), photo Maurice Guibert.

Inversions, the first French gay journal is published between 1924 and 1926, it stopped publication after the French government charged the publishers with "Outrage aux bonnes mœurs". Its full title was Inversions ... in art, literature, philosophy and science. Sexual inversion was a term used by sexologists in the late 19th and early 20th century, to refer to homosexuality.

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In contemporary usage, the adjective gay usually describes a person's sexual orientation. In earlier usage, the word meant "carefree", "happy", or "bright and showy", though this usage is infrequent today. Gay sometimes also refers to the culture of homosexual individuals, as in "gay history", or to things perceived by others to be typical of gay people, as in "gay music". The word gay is sometimes used to refer to same-sex relationships more generally, as in "gay marriage", although this usage is discouraged by some LGBT supporters: the rationale is that this usage is exclusive of bisexual and transgendered people. While gay applies in some contexts to all homosexual people, the term lesbian is gender-specific: it is used exclusively to describe homosexual women. Sometimes gay is used to refer only to men.

Namesakes

• The Gay Science (1882) by Nietzsche

See also

• Deviance (sociology)
• Gay bashing
• Gender identity
• Gender identity disorder
• Hate speech
• Heterosexism
• Human male sexuality
• Labeling theory
• LGBT rights opposition
• LGBT themes in mythology
• List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people
• Religion and sexuality
• Sexuality and gender identity-based cultures
• Stigma

By medium

• Gay fiction
• Gay film
• Gay music