ABSTRACT
The widespread use in anglophone countries of gay to refer to same-sex activity dates back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, and is associated with the emergence of the Gay liberation movement. Starting in 1969 in the USA, and rapidly spreading to most other Western countries, its defining characteristic was a rejection of the stigma and prejudice associated with Homosexuality, and a new willingness on the part of homosexual people to openly affirm their sexual identities. A new term was necessary for new times. The new movement consciously adopted the self-description of gay as a rejection both of the clinical and medicalized category of homosexual, and of the host of pejorative terms, especially the word Queer, which had been traditionally used to label and stigmatize homosexuality. The subsequent linkage of ‘gay and Lesbian’ was a powerful signal that the histories of male and female homosexuality were inextricably linked by a common institutionalized hostility, though it soon became obvious that the histories of lesbians and gay men were not the same (Weeks 1977).
