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Speaker 1: Hey, this is Annie and welcome to Stefan. Never told

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Speaker 1: your prediction of iHeartRadio, and yes I am solo today.

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Speaker 1: We are doing our audiobook recording this week and it's

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Speaker 1: just thrown a real wrench and in everything. But I

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Speaker 1: think it's going to sound really good, y'all. I think

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Speaker 1: it's going to sound really good. And we'll share more

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Speaker 1: about that whole process soon because we had a really

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Speaker 1: amazing team of women working on it. But in the meantime, yes,

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Speaker 1: I'm going to be doing this episode by myself. It's

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Speaker 1: a bit of a shorter one and content warning. We

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Speaker 1: are talking about a very very brief, very brief history

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Speaker 1: of kind of LGBTQ, just as like an acronym, and

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Speaker 1: I know that the history of that can be triggering,

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Speaker 1: and there has been a lot of damage done by

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Speaker 1: some of these terms historically, even as we reclaim them.

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Speaker 1: And also we're going to make this point more at

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Speaker 1: the end, or I'm going to make this point more

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Speaker 1: at the end. Not all of this is agreed upon

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Speaker 1: and continues to evolve, So just a note on that,

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Speaker 1: and also just another note, this is a very Eurocentric,

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Speaker 1: slash Western history of these terms, and it is missing

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Speaker 1: a lot, So we'll talk about that a little bit

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Speaker 1: more at the end as well. So all right. Activist

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Speaker 1: first adopted LGB in the nineteen nineties. Of these words,

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Speaker 1: lesbian came first. For centuries, people have associated the term

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Speaker 1: with a Greek woman named Sappho from the island of Lesbos,

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Speaker 1: whose poems often revolved around passionate same sex relationships. The

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Speaker 1: first known instance of the term goes back to the

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Speaker 1: seventeenth century, but in our more modern understanding usage it

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Speaker 1: first came into use after being used in medical text

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Speaker 1: in the eighteen nineties around sexuality and psychology. Women adopted

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Speaker 1: the term and secretly used it to describe themselves. A

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Speaker 1: nineteenth century German lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs is believed

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Speaker 1: to have been a gay man and to have been

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Speaker 1: the first to coin homosexuality, or at least partly, if

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Speaker 1: not the exact word so. In eighteen sixty two he wrote,

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Speaker 1: we earnings constitute a special class of human gender. We

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Speaker 1: are our own gender, a third sex. Earnings here was

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Speaker 1: the word he used to describe men attracted to other men.

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Speaker 1: The word was quickly replaced in eighteen sixty nine by

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Speaker 1: an Austro Prussian journalist named Kroli Maria kirt Benny. Kirkt

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Speaker 1: Benny had been in touch with Olrix, and when the

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Speaker 1: Prussian government floated the idea of adding language prohibiting sexual

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Speaker 1: activity between men, kurt Benny wrote an anonymous open letter

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Speaker 1: to the Prussian government calling it shocking nonsense, where he

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Speaker 1: used the term homosexuality, a word he'd first used in

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Speaker 1: his correspondence with Olris. He also gets the credit for

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Speaker 1: coining heterosexuality meaning people attracted to the opposite gender, and

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Speaker 1: bisexuality people attracted to both genders. And here we must

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Speaker 1: insert an important note as we as a society have

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Speaker 1: come to realize that sexuality and gender a spectrums. Bisexuality

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Speaker 1: has expanded in definition to mean someone attracted to any

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Speaker 1: gender identity, not just men or women, and you can

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Speaker 1: see our two part episode on bisexuality for more on that.

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Speaker 1: So in this letter, kurt Benny strongly claimed that homosexuality

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Speaker 1: was something people were born with, and he really pushed

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Speaker 1: back against the idea that it was something to be

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Speaker 1: ashamed of or an indication of something wrong in heavy quotes. Eventually,

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Speaker 1: those in the medical field, especially psychologists, started using these terms,

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Speaker 1: as did early gay rights groups. The etymology and origins

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Speaker 1: of the word gay are hard to bend down, but

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Speaker 1: at some point people started using it as a slur.

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Speaker 1: Sometime in the nineteen sixties, activists started to reclaim it,

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Speaker 1: with men in particular using it despite rampant homophobia and

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Speaker 1: laws against queer folks. It was a way to protest

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Speaker 1: and to express their love. The word homophile, meaning saying love,

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Speaker 1: was also used. Gay grew to encompass same gender love

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Speaker 1: or any non heterosexual love in the nineteen eighties, as

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Speaker 1: well as gender divergence, and then, as mentioned, LGB came

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Speaker 1: into use in the nineteen nineties as a way to

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Speaker 1: show solidarity, except it was leaving out transfolks. The term

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Speaker 1: transgender goes back to the nineteen sixties and medical text

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Speaker 1: and by activists who argued that sex and gender were

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Speaker 1: not the same thing. However, it wasn't until the two thousands,

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Speaker 1: when the word had largely replaced other outdated and offensive terms,

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Speaker 1: that it became more widespread. Then came the Q. Beginning

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Speaker 1: of the nineteen tens, queer was used as a slur

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Speaker 1: to other and attack those outside of the heteronormative community,

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Speaker 1: but also around the nineteen nineties people started to reclaim it.

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Speaker 1: At the time, it stood not only for queer but

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Speaker 1: also for questioning. In more recent times, a plus sign

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Speaker 1: has been added to be more inclusive and intersects a

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Speaker 1: sexual two spirit, which has a long often ignored history,

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Speaker 1: have also gotten in the mix, and there have been

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Speaker 1: a lot of critiques and attempts to make this more

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Speaker 1: inclusive and discussions around labels in general. It is not

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Speaker 1: at all agreed on or without its flaws and limits.

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Speaker 1: A lot of people argue that there's too many labels

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Speaker 1: and we can't put them in an acronym, or that

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Speaker 1: things are always changing and this doesn't encompass everything and

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Speaker 1: everyone and every identity. Others, and sometimes even the same

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Speaker 1: people argue that it's also important to have something like this.

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Speaker 1: But it is something that is a conversation that's ongoing,

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Speaker 1: and it's something that Samantha and I have heard from

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Speaker 1: you all about about your thoughts around all of this.

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Speaker 1: So definitely not finished the conversation around it, and uh,

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Speaker 1: definitely very important conversation to be had, But just write

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Speaker 1: in if you have thoughts let us know. Happy pride

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Speaker 1: as always, you can email us at Stephandia mom stephant

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Speaker 1: iHeartMedia dot com. You can find us on Twitter at

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Speaker 1: Mom Stuff podcast, or on Instagram and TikTok at Steffone

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Speaker 1: Never told You. We're also on YouTube. We have a

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Speaker 1: tea public store now. You should check it out. You

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Speaker 1: can also pre order our book at stuff you Should

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Speaker 1: read books dot com. Thanks as always to our super

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Speaker 1: producer Christina, our executive producer Maya, and Dark contributor Joey.

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Speaker 1: And thanks to you for listening Stephane never told you

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Speaker 1: his protection of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, you

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Speaker 1: can check out the art radio app, Apple Podcast, or

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Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah