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meaning - Is calling a homosexual person “gay” offensive?


My native language is German but I’ve been watching a lot of TV in English. During a conversation about the English language, a question about the term gay came up. Is calling a homosexual person gay offensive?


Meaning, using "gay" - not in a general contents (as asked in other questions) but to describe the sexual orientation when using it in a sentence like:




  1. Talking about someone: He/she is "gay" [...]




  2. Talking to someone: I didn't know that you're "gay" [...]





Answer



The adjective gay is the most common term, at least in the U.S., and is not offensive on its own. (It can be used offensively, of course, by using it as an insult, or even as a generic pejorative — "my English class is so gay!" — but then the offensiveness is in the implication that gayness is an insult, rather than in the choice of gay as the word for gayness. It can also be used offensively in more subtle ways, such as consistently describing someone as "my gay friend", but again, that's not tied to the specific word gay at all.)


The noun "gay", however, is generally used only in the plural (e.g., "allowing gays to serve in the military"); use in the singular is very rare, and it's hard to guess whether someone would take ?"he's a gay" to be offensive. (The same is true of many other adjectives, such as "white" and "black"; "American blacks" is fine, ?"she's a black" is not.)


Incidentally, although homosexual is a more formal term, it may actually be more likely to be offensive; for example, if you compare the Google-search results for "gay rights groups" to those for "homosexual rights groups", you'll see that the latter has a much higher proportion of disparaging uses from the right wing (though this is far from categorical). I think this may have something to do with the history of homosexual as a clinical term for a putative mental illness.


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