The term gay originally means “merry, lively” and “bright or showy’. But it’s majorly used as sexual identity of LGBTQIA community- gay.
What it means- Gay means of, relating to, or exhibiting sexual desire or behavior directed toward people of one's own sex or gender.
History - The word gay had various senses since the 17th century. A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man - a womanizer, a gay house a brothel. After World War II, as social attitudes toward sexuality began to change, gay was applied openly by gay men to themselves, first as an adjective and later as a noun. It is no longer considered slang.
“Gay” emerged as an underground term in the early-twentieth century and came into popular usage in the 1960s. Though today “gay” typically refers to men who are attracted to men, it was historically used as a broad term that encompassed the entirety of the modern LGBTQ initialism. For example, in the 1970s, activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson often spoke of “gay rights” or “gay power” in reference to their liberation as street queens of color (who today we would refer to as transgender). The pair founded the organization STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) as a way to organize homeless trans street youth. “STAR was for the street gay people, the street homeless people, and anybody that needed help at that time,” Rivera said.
The Australian Psychological Society states that being same-sex attracted is as natural as being opposite-sex attracted, and that it’s not possible to force someone to change their sexuality through any psychological or medical means.
Lots of people identify themselves as same-sex attracted – in fact, about one in ten.
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