Gay Is Not a Dirty Word

There was a time when saying "I'm gay" was itself an act of clarity. It meant something specific: attraction to the same sex, a shared history, a community you could find by name. It wasn't a mood or a theory. It was just true.

That word — along with lesbian and bisexual — is the one chanted at Stonewall, printed on the earliest protest signs, spoken quietly in hospital rooms during the AIDS crisis, and whispered by teenagers working up the nerve to come out. Nobody handed it to us. We fought for it, defined it ourselves, and built decades of culture and politics on top of it.

So it's a strange moment we're living through, where using that word without qualification can get you corrected.

The quiet swap

Over the last several years, a lot of institutions — universities, newsrooms, even LGBTQ+ organizations themselves — have started treating "queer" as the more current, more sophisticated term, the one "gay," "lesbian," and "bisexual" are supposed to be graduating into. People who simply want to be called what they've always called themselves increasingly find that preference treated as outdated, or worse, as a problem to be gently corrected.

We think that gets things backwards. Being told what to call yourself isn't liberation just because the people doing the telling mean well. It's still someone else deciding your language for you.

This site exists for every lesbian, gay man, and bisexual person who's felt that pressure and wants to say, plainly: I already know what I am. I don't need a new word for it.

This isn't erasure — it's the opposite

We hear the counterargument, and we take it seriously rather than waving it off: doesn't rejecting "queer" mean rejecting inclusivity itself?

We don't think so, and the history matters here. "Queer" started as a slur. Its reclamation in the 1990s wasn't just a change in vocabulary — it was a specific political project, one built to dissolve the line between sexual orientation and gender identity, and often to fold in broader arguments about monogamy, marriage, and gender norms along the way. That's a legitimate thing for people to choose. But it was never a universal upgrade for "gay," "lesbian," or "bisexual" — and plenty of people who lived through the years when "queer" was thrown at them as an insult never made peace with it, and don't owe anyone that peace now.

Insisting that every same-sex-attracted person falls under "queer" doesn't expand the tent. It erases specific identities that took generations to name and defend. Being lesbian, gay, or bisexual is about who you love. It doesn't require a theory, a stance on gender categories, or agreement on politics or lifestyle. You can be gay and conservative, gay and religious, gay and monogamous, gay and married, gay and about as gender-conventional as it gets — or none of those things. The word describes an orientation. It was never asking to describe an ideology.

No, this isn't about being anti-trans

We hear this one often enough to say it directly: preferring "lesbian," "gay," and "bisexual" over "queer" is not trans-hostile, and it's not "heteronormative" in the way that's usually meant as an insult.

You can support the dignity, safety, and rights of transgender people while also holding that sexual orientation and gender identity are two different things, worth naming as two different things. Plenty of people do exactly that, every day, without contradiction. This site isn't telling anyone what to call themselves. It's asking for the same courtesy in return — that lesbians, gays, and bisexuals get to use their own words without being corrected out of them.

As for wanting things like marriage and mainstream acceptance — call that heteronormative if you like. Marriage equality was never a request for a new, separate institution designed just for us. It was a request for the same one straight couples already had: the same protections, the same obligations, nothing extra, nothing different. That was always the point of equality — not a new lane, but full access to the one that already exists. Wanting ordinary things is not a betrayal of what earlier generations fought for. It's one legitimate outcome of that fight, alongside every other way people choose to live.

What we're actually saying

None of this requires cruelty, and it doesn't require anyone to deny another person's right to live with dignity, on their own terms, using their own words.

It just requires a little honesty: that "gay" and "queer" aren't interchangeable, that lesbians get to talk about their own boundaries without being talked out of them, that gay men get to notice when their community is being redefined around them, that bisexual people get to describe attraction to more than one sex without being edited into different language.

And it requires rejecting one specific idea that's crept into a lot of these conversations: that disagreement is itself a form of harm. It isn't. A healthy community can hold a plain disagreement about language without anyone needing to be denounced for it.

Looking ahead

This is the inaugural post, so let's be precise about what we're building.

This isn't a site that excludes anyone from participating, and it isn't a statement against transgender people or their politics. It's a site with a specific focus: a space for lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people who experience their sexual orientation as its own thing — not a subset of a broader "queer" identity, and not a category that comes bundled by default with a particular set of positions on gender politics. Plenty of LGB people hold those broader positions too, and nothing here argues against that choice. Itis simply for the ones who don't, and who have had a hard time finding a space that says so plainly.

We're organized around same-sex attraction, described in the words that have described it for decades, without a requirement to sign onto anything else to belong.

If that's the specific thing you've been looking for, sign up here.