Gay & Lesbian Erasure

Erasure has a history

The old erasure was straightforward: don't let them be named. Oscar Wilde's love was "the love that dare not speak its name." Hollywood's Hays Code (1934–1968) banned the depiction of "sex perversion," keeping gay lives off American screens for a generation. Biographers straightened the record for centuries — Sappho was given a husband, Michelangelo's love poems to men had their pronouns changed in translation, and "close lifelong companions" populated the footnotes of history. Lesbians were erased with special thoroughness: when Britain criminalized male homosexuality, lesbianism was left unmentioned — by some accounts because legislators preferred not to acknowledge it existed at all. Invisibility wasn't an accident of that era; it was the mechanism.

The gay movement's answer was to insist on names. "Gay is good," coined by Frank Kameny in 1968, was a naming act. Coming out — the movement's central political strategy, pressed by Harvey Milk in the 1970s — was a naming act. The quilt, the marches, the "lesbian and gay" organizations of the 1980s and 90s: all of it was a refusal to be unnamed again.

The new erasure is politer

Nobody bans the words now. They just quietly stop using them. University programs founded as "lesbian and gay studies" are renamed "queer studies." Community centers, festivals, and media style sheets swap "lesbian, gay, and bisexual" for a single umbrella adjective. Stonewall — a riot led and fought by people who called themselves gay men, lesbians, and drag queens — is routinely rebranded in retrospect as a "queer uprising," a word most of its participants never used for themselves. The AIDS activism of the 1980s, organized overwhelmingly under "gay" and "lesbian," gets the same retroactive relabeling.

When every institution replaces your name with an umbrella, the umbrella hasn't included you. It has replaced you.

Each substitution looks small and well-meaning. The cumulative effect is that a specific people — with a specific history, specific health needs, and a specific civil-rights record — becomes progressively harder to see, count, or cite.

Data erasure: when categories collapse, knowledge collapses

This isn't only symbolic. Public health depends on categories. HIV surveillance, cancer screening disparities, mental-health research, and anti-discrimination enforcement all rely on knowing who is lesbian, gay, or bisexual — as distinct populations with distinct outcomes. When surveys and institutional forms collapse orientation into an open-ended "queer" or a single LGBTQ+ checkbox, comparability with decades of prior data breaks, sample sizes for specific groups shrink, and real disparities disappear into an average. Lesbian health research — already chronically underfunded — is hit hardest by the blur. Precision in language is precision in evidence; you cannot serve a population you've stopped measuring.

Lesbian erasure, specifically

Lesbians sit at the intersection of two erasures — as gay people and as women — and the losses are concrete. Lesbian bars in the United States declined from roughly two hundred in the 1980s to a few dozen today, a far steeper fall than gay men's spaces. The word "lesbian" itself is under quiet pressure: institutions increasingly prefer "queer women" or "sapphic," and young women who love women report being told the word is exclusionary, clinical, or outdated. A word women fought to say aloud for a century is being edged out of fashion within a generation — and with it, the specific culture, spaces, and history it named.

Bisexual erasure

Bisexual people know this problem from both directions: presumed straight with an opposite-sex partner, presumed gay with a same-sex one, and statistically the largest group in the LGB population while remaining the least visible in leadership and media. The umbrella was supposed to fix that; in practice, "queer" hides bisexuality as effectively as "gay" ever did — the specific experience of loving more than one sex vanishes into vagueness either way. Naming it is the fix: "bisexual" has been in the acronym from the start because bisexual activists put it there and refused to be a footnote.

What preserving specificity looks like

None of this requires taking anything from anyone else. Trans visibility, nonbinary visibility, and queer-identifying visibility can all coexist with — and are arguably strengthened by — LGB specificity, because coalitions are legible only when their parts are. What we practice, and ask of institutions, is simple: use "lesbian," "gay," and "bisexual" when that's who you mean; keep the categories in your data; teach the history in the words its makers used; and reserve "queer" for people who claim it. Visibility was never won as an umbrella. It was won name by name.

Keep reading

Where the umbrella word came from: The History of the Word "Queer". Why precise categories matter beyond identity: Why Language Matters. And what we make of the "assimilation" charge: Just Like Everyone Else.