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Denneny's First Proposition: the Definition of "Gay"

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Ninja_monkey:
Karel Ulrichs (1825-1895) & Karel Benkert (1824-1882):


--- Quote ---Yet it isn`t more than one hundred fifty years ago the very first proud gay in the heart of Europe was known by name and nickname. The credit for this goes to the German Karel Ulrichs (1825-1895). The word homosexuality hadn`t been coined yet. Men doing it with men were simply pederasts, sodomites or queers. Ulrichs was just such a sodomite. He loved men and liked getting it up the ass. And precisely that was punishable in Prussia. That`s why he fabricated his own coming out at 37. Instead of remaining a secret sodomite, from 1862 on he began to call himself openly a Uranian, a person of the third gender". He came up with these new names to describe men with a male body but of feminine character.

 In August 1865 Ulrichs considered it was time for an emancipation society for equal rights, the Society of Uranians. It didn`t get past an attempt. So in 1867 on his own he attended the yearly meeting of the German lawyers union in Munich with an open protest against Uranians discrimination. The attempt failed and he landed in jail for a couple of months. Nevertheless Karel Ulrichs is the first who told the world loud and clear he was a Uranian, that he was of sound masculine ànd feminine character and abone all considered this completely normal. Karel Ulrichs was such a loud proud Uranian, that a contemporary of his, Karel Benkert (1824-1882) didn`t dare call himself one. The eternal bachelor Benkert prefered to stay anonymous (he even changed his last name to Kertbeny), didn`t want to have anything to do with effeminate men (on the day he died his lips were still sealed when it came to his own sex life) and thought a separate third gender" was nonsense (he thought himself completely normal). Kertneby would rather be caught dead than call himself a Uranian and in his turn came up with his own terminology.

So on Wednesday May 6, 1868, as the first man ever, Karel Kertbeny wrote down the words homosexual" and heterosexual" in an anonymous letter to Karel Ulrichs. Today the word homosexual is 132 years old and has been invented by a secret queen who came up with it so as not to have to belong to those Uranians, a bit like calling yourself gay these days.
--- End quote ---

K6:

--- Quote from: Feral on Tue, Jan 17, 2006, 09:15 ---I was completely unaware of that, K6. Thankyou. That would tend to contradict the bizarre notion that gays, in the sense of a gay identity, did not exist prior to the twentieth century.

--- End quote ---

A gay identity prior to the 20th century ? Would be difficult to confirm.But I think that it existed,only that it left little or no trace.Probably the
same with the idea of a gay country,which could have appeared at the same time the concept of the nation-state became an accepted geopolitical idea among heterosexuals.The word gay is now,as far as I know,used and understood worldwide,with slight variations in writing or pronunciation.In Poland,for example,they say "gej" (pronounce geh-i).

K6

Feral:
I was completely unaware of that, K6. Thankyou. That would tend to contradict the bizarre notion that gays, in the sense of a gay identity, did not exist prior to the twentieth century.

K6:
The word "gai" (gay in English,same meaning as in French) was apparently in use and in its current acceptance (for us) in the 17th century and
in France.

K6

Feral:
What exactly does the word "Gay" mean, anyway? For many it is simply a euphemism for "homosexual," a word that, for no apparent reason, lacks the sting of the more clinical terminology. One might, if pressed, trace the origins of this usage to British Palare slang. Indeed, a remarkable number of Palare words seemed to have seeped into common English usage. So today everyone knows that "gay" means "homosexual" just as everyone knows what is meant by checking one's "basket." This is the common, everyday use of the word, but not too long ago it meant something rather different.

In 1981 Michael Denneny wrote an essay entitled "Gay Politics: Sixteen Propositions." Originally published in the magazine Christopher Street, it was later re-published in the Christopher Street Reader (a book which can often be found quite inexpensively at second-hand book dealers).

Denneny's first proposition is as follows: "Homosexuality and gay are not the same thing: gay is when you decide to make an issue of it."

In other words, there are men (perhaps you have encountered one or two of them) for whom what they do in bed is quite secondary, even irrelevant, to who they are as a person. These are men who happen to be homosexuals. There are also men (I happily count myself among them) for whom being being gay is a defining, central part of their identities. They are gay men, not men who are gay. Denneny put it this way:

"Whether or not being gay is a central part of one’s identity — one’s felt sense of self in everyday life, who I am — is not a theoretical question. It is a fact and can be ascertained by fairly elemental self-reflection. There are Jews for whom that fact is an accident of birth and nothing more; blacks for whom the most monstrous aspect of racism is its bewildering irrelevance to who they are. But there are also gays, Jews, and blacks who know themselves as this particular gay man, this particular Jew, this particular black. Such people experience their humanness through being gay, Jewish, or black; they do not experience their humanity apart from its concrete manifestation in the world. The following analogy can illustrate, not prove, this position: one can be an athlete through being a pole-vaulter, football player, or swimmer; one cannot be simply an athlete without taking part in some sport."

"One can argue about whether one should gain a significant part of one’s identity in this way; whether one actually does, however, is a fact. Facts, of course, can change. Eight years ago I did not experience myself primarily as a gay man; today, if I spend more than four days in a totally straight environment, I feel like climbing the walls. I experience myself as a fish out of water, as a “homosexual alien,” in the words of the Immigration Service."

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