Discover Why It Is The Word Homosexuality And Not The Actions Causing All The Hate

A lot of people who have a thing, or two, or three, or four, against homosexuality will tell you it’s all about the actual activity, you know the getting it on, the bedroom action. For them it’s just wrong. It disgusts them and they’d rather it didn’t happen. The reality though is that they’re fooling themselves if they think they’re coming to that assumption all by themselves, because the reality is much of the problem with homosexuality has a lot less to do with the activity itself, but the way they’ve been effectively indoctrinated to believe certain things via the language that’s been used.

Doesn’t sound very realistic does it, but let me try and prove it to you by taking a time travel trip back to the early 1800s. Back then, as McWilliams highlights in his “Ain’t Nobody Business If You Do’” book, no concept of homosexuality. If you walked up to someone in the street and said “What is homosexuality?” they’d have looked at you like you’d say “What is obbedlygoodedo?” because it would have mean nothing to them. That didn’t mean though there wasn’t any man on man / woman on woman action going on. Of course there was. What was different was no-one had  acted to define it and therefore act to construct it to mean something. It was only when that happened that things began to change.

And it wasn’t for the better. When wider society decided to recognize homosexuality as existing they needed to define it in some way. The most inclusive way to do that would have just been able to recognize it as another form of sexuality. The problem is though that this has never  really been the way that language  is constructed.  When language is formed it tends to be in comparison to something else. “War”, for example, is constructed in opposition to “Peace” and therefore in a more negative and undesirable light.  Now that definition is far enough, none of us want to live in a continuous time zone. When it isn’t so far though is when it concerns defining things that aren’t in reality a negative, like homosexuality.

But that is exactly what happened. It is always the most powerful in society who will be at the centre of constructing meaning for things, and so when homosexuality began to recognized as an alternative sexuality, it was largely the heterosexual community who would act to define what that meant, and seeing as this was something that many of them didn’t understand or were fearful of,  homosexuality quickly went from one day being an activity that went on unnoticed behind closed doors (which meant people had no interest or repulsion to), to the next being widely criticised and vilifed by society as a whole. And the only thing that had changed in this equation? A group of powerful people had acted to define a word.

Now I realise that does sound a little far-fetched. Can language really have that much impact on how we think about things? Can we really be convinced to think something is better than something else just by how something is defined as opposed to the activity itself? Well yes, and I can prove it to you with an issue that’s very close to our hearts – Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Deciding they wanted to find out the impact that wording had on people and their support for the military serving in the Army, CBS News /New York Times did something a little bit clever. They surveyed Americans asking them the question “Do you favor or oppose _________” serving in the military?” using the word “homosexuals” in some cases and “gay men and lesbians” in the others.

Now you, I and hopefully everyone else in the world actually know that these two things are exactly the same so that should mean the results give or take a few percentages would come out the same right? Wrong in a very big way. Look at the results:

Yes you read that right, a whole 17% more people think that gay men and lesbians should be allowed to serve in the military than homosexuals should even though they’re exactly the same thing. And why is that? Because homosexuality isn’t just a word describing a form of sexuality. Homosexuality has become something inextricably linked with what the negative connotations of being a homosexual / gay / lesbian are. Think about it, whenever you hear someone speak out about the evils of being a gay or lesbian, that’s not what they say. They talk about the evils of homosexuality and the homosexuals who perform these acts. The word gay on the other hand is something for the wider community that has become far more linked with the entertainment industry and it’s glitz, glamour, dancing and humor meaning when someone is asked a question with that as the central word their immediate reaction is going to be something far more positive.

Is it wrong? Totally. Is it something that we can change? Yes. We can claim back homosexuality as our own word, and we can turn it from a negative to a positive, what though we can’t do, as is so often true with the fight for LGBT rights is do it quickly, but I, and I hope you agree it’s worth it.

Photo Credit: plentyofants