'Homosexual” (or “homosexualist”) has similar 19th-century origins and was originally coined in 1869 by a Hungarian doctor, Karoly Maria Benkert. “In the past one asked if a woman was 'gay,” much as today one might ask if she “swings,”“ wrote White. And “gay-house” was the term for a brothel.
Its pedigree is longer and according to Edmund White originally applied to women and meant loose or immoral, as in a prostitute. Let’s begin with the most common term, “gay”, which baby-boomer homosexuals appropriated for their liberationist cause in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But words used by others to define gay people can say a great deal more about them than us.
