Originally meant joyful, vibrant, and full of life.
Now it's used by ignorant (and often prejudiced) people to describe something that they don't like. It's especially common among teenage boys, who use it to look cool or to "hide" their insecurity about gay people.
Gay is now
slang for a homosexual person, that is, somebody who is attracted romantically and sexually to people of their own sex.
Gay men are known as gays, while gay
women are known as lesbians. And some bisexuals also identify as gay.
Up to 1 in every 10 adults is predominantly gay; everybody is somewhere in between the two extremes of heterosexual and homosexual.
Gay is sometimes, but not always:
-Living with
AIDS.
-Living a promiscuous life.
-Acting very much like the opposite
gender (very masculine
women and very feminine men.)(When people think of these stereotypes, they're usually thinking about transsexual people or transgender people instead. Most of these people are
straight and just happen to identify as the opposite
gender.)
-All about sex.
Gays are perfectly normal people. Their only "difference" is that they (romantically) love somebody of their own sex. Aside from the cruel prejudice that they face because of who they love, they usually are able to live wonderfully full, happy lives.
Often, gays have reclamed old derogatory terms for them as terms of affection:
fag and queen for the men,
dyke for the
women, etc... although they can still be used as insults by the bigoted.
Gays sometimes do imitate heterosexual gender roles (
butch and femme) in their marriages (in every other way if not legal), but most do not; plenty of femmes pair up with other femmes, butches with other butches, androgynous and so forth. It's often remarkable how much their unions resemble heterosexual unions.
A man can be highly flamboyant and act and dress quite feminine, but sleeping with men is the last thing on this mind. Likewise, a man can be incredibly butch and swaggering, and yet he likes to sleep with men; being gay has to do with who you are attracted to sexually, not how masculine or how feminine you are.
Gay is not all about sex. Most gays are happy doing other things than sex. And most gays loathe the idea of molesting a
child, contrary to the beliefs of ignorant people. (Almost all pedophiles are heterosexual)
And with
marriage ending in so many divorces, then those in favor of
marriage should be happy that there are people who want to get married and are willing to fight for that right. Gays have had to fight so much for the
basic rights that straights take for granted.
