I have to admit, as long as I can remember I've thought the word "lesbian" had a humorous ring to it. Not because lesbians themselves are funny. I suspect their level of personal humor is about like everyone else: It depends on who you are.
Rather, it has more to do with my high school experience, where I had two marvelously humorous encounters with the word. None of them involved actual lesbians -- that I know of.
First, as a prolific member of the high school drama department, I was a thespian. That ignorant people constantly confused that term with "lesbian" just made my day. Indeed, when my drama buddies and I knew people were listening, we loved the stares we got whenever we talked about being practicing thespians every afternoon.
Second, I beat the school Scrabble champion in English class when I used all seven letters and spelled "lesbians." I still remember my foe looking the word up in the dictionary, convinced I misspelled "thespian." (He was not a theatre person.)
Given all these close encounters with the word, I long ago learned its origins. It stems from the island of Lesbos, a Greek isle in the northeastern Aegean Sea, the home of the poet Sappho. Known as a lyric whose romance and eroticism particularly entranced women, her home became the root of my first and last 50-point bonus ever in Scrabble.
By the end of the 19th century, Lesbianism was a common term, with the noun lesbian first recorded in 1925. Not that this was the first use of the word.
In the 1600s, there was what's known as "the lesbian rule," a mason's rule of lead, of a type used on Lesbos, which could be bent to fit the curves of a molding." Boring! (Unless you're a carpenter.) No wonder they gave it a new meaning.
Or did they?
As is so often the case with words associated with LGBTQ culture, there's more than a hint of prejudice in the choice of "lesbian" to represent women being attracted to women. For just as a mason's rule could be bent, so too were such women known to have "pliant morality or judgement."
It's like the word "gay" all over again. Maybe that's one the reasons the words are interchangeable to so many lesbians.
A few days ago I couldn't have said that.
For some reason I'd always thought there was some kind of cultural divide within the LGBTQ community over the use of the words "gay" and "lesbian." When talking to my lesbian friends, I'd always somehow avoid the word. At parties, this meant mumbling into glasses a lot, kind of like when you talk to someone but can never remember their name.
Operating under that thought, I dove into the internet to see why this divide existed. The first article I found: "10 Things You Should Never Say to a Lesbian," I knew would include the use of the word "gay."
Nope.
Mostly a list of insensitive things idiots say, many of them struck me as things you wouldn't ask anyone. Number one on the list, "Can I watch?" can and should get you punched in the schnoz by anyone, anywhere.
The next several links I found were from Yahoo Answers, which I hate. A place where people get together and discuss facts as if they were opinions, I avoid these sites like the plague.
So I went back to the internet... and found nothing. I posted questions to my Facebook page, and took the din of silence to mean no one really cared. (Yes, it could mean no one's actually reading, but my ego can't handle that.)
Grudgingly, I went back to Yahoo Answers, and started to read. For one thing, there were at least a half-dozen variations on the theme. From "Gay women/Lesbians, do you prefer to be called: a lesbian, or a gay woman?" to "Lesbians: Are you okay with being called 'gay'?" They were asking the exact same question I was.
Many of the answers were even semi-literate, "NIETHER! why so many f@#*!ng labels!!!" notwithstanding. (Bad spelling, no capitalization, fake swear words. Seriously, some people should limit their digits to texting and picking their nose.)
So I Googled "Yahoo Answers: Do Gay Women Prefer to be Called Lesbians" and read every answer I could that seemed to pertain to the question I was asking. In the end I came up with a half-dozen different related Yahoo Answer posts.Then, reading each response, I looked at those that claimed to be written by lesbians. There were 45 of them.
From there, I divided the answers up into four categories of what people prefered to be called: "Lesbian," "Gay," "Neutral" and "Neither." The answers were as average as the response to my question on Facebook -- which three people did finally answer. (For the record, three people is not -- technically -- nobody.) Out of the 48 responses I looked at:
* 23 percent prefer to be called lesbian
* 23 percent prefer to be called gay
* 51 percent don't really care one way or the other
* 3 percent don't like either one
What was just as interesting, however, was that even among those expressing a preference, only four people, 8 percent, said being called the term they didn't prefer upset them. In other words, I can stop mumbling into my glass.
I learned a lot from reading people's responses. First, that despite the insane number of syllables involved, one person wanted to be called a "homosexual female." One friend of mine said she liked gay, "because I consider gay an inclusive/umbrella term for sexual minorities -- I don't like the trend to slice the definitions ever finer!" Among those who prefer lesbian, they perceived the word as "Nice, powerful, full of femininity," and "empowering."
My favorite answer, however, was someone who didn't really care one way or the other, as long as "it's not in a hateful way. But hey, that's just me."
Me, too.