Talk:Felicia Sanderson

"Gay" over "homosexual"

GLAAD advises that "gay" be used as an adjective instead of "homosexual" except in certain biological contexts. If we are describing a character as a person instead of as an animal like the Flood may be, I suggest we follow this. --Dragonclaws^(talk) 02:28, April 17, 2010 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure; that word has had three different meanings in only forty years. Why not lesbian? (please note: I haven't read this page and just found this talk on the Recent Changes, though I'm fairly sure this is the lesbian from "Dirt")-- Forerunner 02:48, April 17, 2010 (UTC)

Felicia is one of the two lesbian characters, yes. The relevant sentence describes her as a lesbian and the first openly "gay"/"homosexual" character. I would say that in modern society "gay" has the predominate meaning of being homosexual, and all main organizations representing such individuals use this term. They are gay rights organizations. GLAAD is the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. A popular acronym for the community is LGBT, which means Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transsexual. It is the anti-gay organizations who use primarily the term "homosexual", mainly as a way to depict such persons as having some form of illness. As there isn't any main Halo slang to replace "gay" (as with "sly" in Firefly), then I would suggest "gay" as the more appropriate one because it is more respectful in modern times. --Dragonclaws^(talk) 04:19, April 17, 2010 (UTC)

Good point but more people use the term 'gay' as an insult and rarely 'homosexual' so at least to me that 'homosexual' is more respectful.

But whatever dude, do what you gotta do. XRoAcH213 06:26, April 17, 2010 (UTC)

Well, straight people have always referred to gay people in a demeaning fashion. "Gay" has been reclaimed by the community to some extent. I might make a comparison to how the racial description "black" was reclaimed from a slur to what is now accepted as a respectful name. We've still a way to go on making people cut out the "that's so gay" language, which is homophobic, but "gay" is a term accepted by the gay community. "Homosexual" is often used by anti-gay activists as a way of making gay people seem mentally ill and/or to evoke the indecency of sex (i.e. sexual intercourse, which isn't quite what the "-sexual" means). --Dragonclaws^(talk) 06:59, April 17, 2010 (UTC)

More on this here, BTW. --Dragonclaws^(talk) 01:25, April 24, 2010 (UTC)