Beats the Hell out of me.

In the poll, 59 percent say they now support allowing “homosexuals” to serve in the U.S. military, including 34 percent who say they strongly favor that. Ten percent say they somewhat oppose it and 19 percent say they strongly oppose it.

But the numbers differ when the question is changed to whether Americans support “gay men and lesbians” serving in the military. When the question is asked that way, 70 percent of Americans say they support gay men and lesbians serving in the military, including 19 percent who say they somewhat favor it. Seven percent somewhat oppose it, and 12 percent strongly oppose it.

We’re okay with gay and lesbian people, just not homosexual people.
Are people reading odd quirks and qualities of “fey”ness and “queens” into the word “homosexual” where we aren’t “gay and lesbian”?

Okay, I turn to this history lesson for answers.

Generally, the terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ are seen as being less laden with negative implications than ‘homosexual’. The term ‘gay’ is used to describe both homosexual men and lesbian women but has become particularly associated with homosexual men. Its derivation is unclear but may come from the nineteenth century French slang for a homosexual man ‘gaie’. Throughout the last century it has been used as a sort of code word between homosexual men.

However, in the late fifties and sixties it came into everyday use in association with the struggle for gay rights. In this context the word ‘gay’ came to represent, as it does now, a word with no negative connotations but associated with a positive and proud sense of identity. Nowadays, the term ‘lesbian’ is used in relation to homosexual women and is derived from Lesbos, the name of the Greek island on which the lesbian poet Sappho lived in antiquity. In the past homosexual women have been called ‘Sapphist’ (again after Sappho).³ ‘Straight’ is used to describe heterosexual people and is an equivalent term to ‘gay’.⁴

Hm.  So some people might think of “gay” people as actually being unironically happy in disposition — no thoughts on sexual orientation.   Can we get this thing cut into age groups to see if the variance amongst older age groups is greater than the variance within younger age groups?

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