I don’t know if any of you saw Safire’s column about whether or not the word “gay” covers gay men and lesbians anymore (it doesn’t, not really), but this was my favorite part:
Diane Anderson-Minshall, executive editor of Curve, a lesbian magazine in San Francisco, agrees that the one-word adjective was expanded to set homosexual women apart: “When, in the queer world, you say ‘the gay community,’ the majority of the time that conjures up San Francisco’s largely male Castro District, or West Hollywood or ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,’ so interjecting the word lesbian into the mix is a necessary reminder that we — gay women — are not simply a subset of that larger male world but rather our own distinct community of individuals.” The editor freely uses “queer,” formerly a slur, to include not only lesbians but “bisexual women and lesbian-identified transgender women.” This leads to the initialese L.G.B.T., standing for “Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender,” as well as its gay-first G.L.B.T. (emphasis mine)
Diane Anderson-Minshall is not just the editor of Curve (as if that’s not enough) but a trans partner, which just goes to show, once again, that we make damned good ambassadors for y’all.