The word "homosexual" (Was: the homosexual lobby and the right wing agenda)

[Carol]

Susan wrote:
> > h) Always, always always use the term homosexual...they hate that
 because it underlines the idea that they're really sexual. You know 
all they do is hop in and out of bed with each other like rabbits.
> 
Del replied:
> Oh O_O ! So *this* is why using the term homosexual is supposedly
offensive!? Nobody ever mentioned it to me. In fact, I was told
several times that *not* using "homosexual" was wrong, so now I'm
confused. Especially since for me "homosexual" doesn't mean "really
sexual" anymore than "heterosexual" does. To me, it's really just a
description of what type of sexuality people have, not of how much or
often they have sex.

Carol:
Etymology again. "Homosexual" means being attracted to people of the
same sex ("homo-" = "same"), whereas "heterosexual" means being
attracted to people of the opposite sex ("hetero-" = "other"). The
frequency of the person's sexual activity has no connection whatever
with the meaning of these terms. 

The problem, IMO, is that for many people, "sex" now means sexual
intercourse (which used to mean intercourse between the sexes, itself
a euphemism since "intercourse" meant "conversation"), and "sex"
(meaning biological sex, i.e., male or female) has been replaced in
the media and elsewhere by "gender" (actually a grammatical term for
masculine, feminine, and neuter parts of speech). I, for one, always
feel like writing "none" when a form asks me my "gender" because, last
time I checked, I was neither a noun nor a pronoun.

At any rate, to my knowledge, most people who use the term
"homosexual" do so with no intention of being offensive. They use it
because they believe it's the correct term and that "gay" is a
euphemism or colloquialism. A sociologist, for example, will probably
study the phenomenon of "homosexuality," not of "gayness." Other
people (including me) use the adjectives interchangeably, depending on
the context (formal vs. informal). After all, "gay" has been used
since the fourteenth century to mean "merry" or "happily excited" and
only since the mid-to-late twentieth century to mean what is generally
termed "homosexual," again meaning attracted to persons of one's own
sex, with no more stigma attached to the word than to its opposite,
"heterosexual." And why anyone would object to "homosexual" but not to
"bisexual" simply confuses me.

Carol, blaming semantics for this particular misunderstanding and
hoping that she's helping to make peace among the well-meaning,
good-hearted posters on this list