To most ears, it probably sounds inoffensive. A little outdated and clinical, perhaps, but harmless enough: homosexual. But that five-syllable word has never been more loaded, more deliberately used and, to the ears of many gays and lesbians, more permissiveness.
Homosexual’ is the ring of ‘colored’ now, in the way your grandmother might have used that term, except that it hasn’t been recover in the same way. Consider the following phrases: homosexual community, homosexual activist, homosexual marriage. Substitute the word “gay” in any of those cases, and the terms suddenly become far less loaded, so that the ring of disapproval and judgment evaporates. Some gay rights advocates have declared the term off limits. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance against slander, or Glad, has put “homosexual” on its list of offensive terms and in 2006 persuaded The Associated Press, whose stylebook is the widely used by many news organizations, to restrict use of the word.
Miss Suhashini a, lecturer of Phycology Department at UTAR who was currently doing research about LGBT has looked at the way the term is used by those who try to portray gays and lesbians as deviant. What is most telling about substituting it for gay or lesbian are the images that homosexual tends to activate in the brain, she said. “Gay doesn’t use the word sex,” she said. “Lesbian doesn’t use the word sex. Homosexual does. ”It also contains ‘homo,’ which is an old derogatory,” she added. “They want to have that idea there.