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Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'. [1]While scant usage referring to male homosexuality dates to the late 19th century, that meaning became increasingly common by the mid-20th century. [2]
Societal attitudes towards same-sex relationships have varied over time and place. Attitudes to male homosexuality have varied from requiring males to engage in same-sex relationships to casual integration, through acceptance, to seeing the practice as a minor sin, repressing it through law enforcement and judicial mechanisms, and to proscribing it under penalty of death.
Karl-Maria Kertbeny coined the word homosexual in this 1868 letter. The word homosexual translates literally as "of the same sex", being a hybrid of the Greek prefix homo-meaning 'same' (as distinguished from the Latin root homo meaning 'human') and the Latin root sex meaning 'sex'.
"Contrary sexual feeling",Edsall 2003, pp. 127–52 [page needed] as Westphal's phrased it, and the word "homosexual" itself made their way into the Western lexicons. Homosexuality had a name aside from the ambiguous term "sodomy" and the elusive "abomination".
The word homosexual is a Greek and Latin hybrid, with the first element derived from Greek ὁμός homos, "same" (not related to the Latin homo, "man", as in Homo sapiens), thus connoting sexual acts and affections between members of the same sex, including lesbianism.
The first homosexual movement invented the concept of biologically based homosexuality and developed tactics deployed by later activists, such as the assertion of respectable citizenship. Later activists had to deal with similar dilemmas such as compromising over claims to public space. [ 265 ]
This makes Ulrichs quite distinct from any other writer on the subject at that time and for some time after. In 1868, the Austrian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny coined the word "homosexual" in a letter to Ulrichs, and from the 1870s the subject of sexual orientation (in modern words) began to be widely discussed. [11] [12]
Gay men, he said, were not by nature effeminate, and he pointed out that many of the great heroes of history were gay. With Heinrich Hössli and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, he was among the first writers to put those now-familiar arguments before the public. First use of the words Monosexual, Homosexual, and Heterosexual in a letter written on 6 May ...