282 articles
Gay bathhouse
Gay bathhouse: commercial venue, also called baths, saunas, or sex clubs, where gay and bisexual men socialize and meet for sex. Traces Bérubé's four-phase history, the Continental Baths, 1984–85 AIDS-era closures, and HIV prevention roles.
Gay icon
Gay icon: a celebrity, usually a female star like Judy Garland, Madonna, or Lady Gaga, embraced by gay communities as a fantasy figure and shared subcultural reference, tied to camp aesthetics and a contested canon.
Gay liberation
Gay liberation: radical 1970s phase of LGBT rights activism launched after the June 1969 Stonewall uprising, organized through Gay Liberation Fronts in New York, London, and elsewhere, promoting coming out, anti-capitalist politics, and Pride marches.
Gay Liberation Front
Gay Liberation Front (GLF): radical LGBT organization founded in New York, July 1969, after Stonewall; name modeled on the Vietnamese NLF; organized the first Pride march (June 28, 1970); London branch founded October 1970 at LSE; active 1969–1972.
Gay men
Gay men are men whose primary attractions are toward other men. They reported more severe psychological distress than heterosexual men in 2013-2014, and 65 countries still criminalize same-sex relations.
Gay panic defense
The gay panic defense, also called the homosexual panic defense, is a courtroom strategy claiming a victim's sexual orientation or unwanted same-sex advance provoked violence.
Gay village
Gay village, also called gayborhood or gay enclave, an urban district with concentrated LGBTQ+ residents, businesses, and services; examples include the Castro, Greenwich Village, Soho, and Church Street, Toronto.
Gay-friendly
Gay-friendly describes businesses, destinations, policies, and spaces that welcome and protect LGBTQ people, from IGLTA-certified tourism and hotel certifications to workplace and healthcare inclusion, with pinkwashing as its main criticism.
Gaydar
Gaydar is the folk idea of detecting sexual orientation from subtle cues; research debates whether it is perception or stereotyping, and Gaydar is also an LGBTQ+ dating app.
Gender transition
Gender transition: the individualized process by which transgender people align life, body, and documents with gender identity, through social, medical (hormones, puberty blockers, surgery), and legal steps; medicalized since 1920s Berlin, adolescent care since the 1998 Dutch Protocol.
Georgie Stone
Georgie Stone is an Australian actress and transgender rights advocate who, as the youngest Australian granted pubertal suppression, helped change Family Court law on gender-affirming treatment, plays Mackenzie Hargreaves on Neighbours, and is the subject of the Netflix documentary The Dreamlife of Georgie Stone.
GLAAD
GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) is a 501(c)(3) LGBTQ media advocacy organization founded in New York in 1985, known for the GLAAD Media Awards and the Where We Are on TV and Studio Responsibility Index reports.
Gray asexuality
Gray asexuality (graysexual, Gray-A) is an ace-spectrum identity for people with rare, weak, or situational sexual attraction, between asexual and allosexual; coined on AVEN in 2006, about 10% of ace individuals identify with it.
Guy Strait
Guy Strait (Elmer Guy Strait, 1920-1987), "The Porno King," was a San Francisco gay activist and publisher who founded the League for Civil Education, launched the city's first gay newspaper LCE News in 1961, and was later imprisoned in Illinois in the 1970s on charges involving minors.
Handkerchief code
Handkerchief code, also called hanky code, bandana code, or flagging: a 1970s American gay leather subculture system of colored handkerchiefs in back pockets signaling sexual interests, left pocket for top, right for bottom, with no universal color list.
Harry Hay
Harry Hay (1912–2002), British-born American activist, Communist Party member, and founder of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950; later co-founded the Radical Faeries in 1979.
Heteroflexibility
Heteroflexibility (also heteroflexible) is occasional same-sex attraction or behavior in an otherwise heterosexual orientation. Coverage includes the term's origins, the M-SOCS four-class system, prevalence estimates, sex differences, and critiques.
Heteronormativity
Heteronormativity, coined by Michael Warner in 1991, is the assumption that heterosexuality and binary gender are the natural, normative standard. It differs from heterosexism (institutional privileging) and underlies health, education, and legal inequities for LGBTQ+ people.
Heterosexism
Heterosexism: ideological system denying and stigmatizing nonheterosexual behavior, identity, and relationships; analogous to sexism and racism; distinct from individual homophobia; also called institutional antigay prejudice.
History of Christianity and homosexuality
History of Christian attitudes toward homosexuality: patristic condemnation, Boswell's 1980 tolerance thesis and its critics, medieval law and adelphopoiesis, and modern denominational positions from Catholic doctrine to the 2024 United Methodist reversal.
History of homosexuality
History of homosexuality: the record of same-sex desire and relationships across cultures, from ancient Greece and imperial China to European criminalization, 19th-century sexology, Foucault's modern homosexual, DSM/ICD depathologization (1973, 1990), and global law reform.
History of lesbianism
The history of lesbianism, or lesbian history, covers erotic and romantic relationships between women from antiquity onward, including the changing terms, from tribade to a modern identity formed in the nineteenth century.
History of lesbianism in the United States
History of lesbianism in the United States: covers colonial sodomy laws, Daughters of Bilitis (1955), The Ladder, lesbian feminism, lesbian bar decline, DADT, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges.
Homophobia
Homophobia is prejudice, fear, or hostility toward lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, coined by George Weinberg and popularized in his 1972 book; distinguished from heterosexism and linked to measurable LGBTQ+ health harms.
Homosexuality
Homosexuality, also called same-sex sexuality, is sexual, romantic, or emotional attraction or activity between members of the same sex, known as being gay or lesbian.
Homosexuality and psychology
Homosexuality and psychology covers how psychology and psychiatry moved from classifying same-sex orientation as a DSM and ICD mental disorder (removed 1973 and 1990) to minority stress and affirmative care frameworks, and the evidence against conversion therapy.
Homosexuality and the Anglican Communion
Homosexuality and the Anglican Communion covers the dispute over same-sex relationships, from Lambeth I.10 (1998) and Gene Robinson (2003) through GAFCON, the Church of England's 2023 Prayers of Love and Faith, and the 2025 Global Anglican Communion schism.
Homosexuality in China
Homosexuality in mainland China: same-sex conduct legal since 1997, removed from mental disorder lists in 2001, but no same-sex marriage, adoption, or anti-discrimination protections under the Civil Code.
Homosexuality in India
Homosexuality in India: legal and social status of sexual minorities. Section 377 (IPC 1860, colonial) criminalized gay sex until the Supreme Court's unanimous 2018 Navtej Johar ruling; same-sex marriage was refused by the Court in 2023, left to Parliament.
Homosexuality in Japan
Homosexuality in Japan: same-sex desire from Heian and Tokugawa nanshoku/shudō traditions, the brief 1873–1882 keikan sodomy law, and today's marriage-equality litigation, with no national same-sex marriage or comprehensive anti-discrimination law.