Lesbian pride flag being held up at a Louis Tomlinson concert, Chicago, IL. 2023 Mikayla Flanagan
LGBTQ+ is the most commonly used acronym for the Queer community, though this hasn’t always been the acronym.
First starting as GLB, it has had different iterations over the years but most people know it to have ‘L’ as the first letter. Despite the acronym recognized as LGBTQ+, there are still many people who refer to it as GLBTQ+ or use them interchangeably.
Like many communities and spaces in the world, the LGBTQ+ community has been home to sexism, despite the point of it to be inclusive.
The ‘L’ was moved to the front of the acronym for two main reasons: the first being to recognize women as equals to men. While women were, and still are, put after men in many aspects, putting the ‘L’ first was a way to acknowledge women as first-class citizens.
The second reason was because of the lesbians’ work during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s. Even with pushback from gay men, lesbians were diligent in providing medical help to men fighting AIDS. This period of time led to what some know as “gay/lesbian solidarity.”
So, with the help of feminist ideas, it was decided the ‘L’ would be placed before the ‘G’ in the official acronym.
Despite how much progress we’ve made, there are still very obvious issues of sexism and lesbophobia not just outside of the community, but inside of it as well.
To put it in perspective, in 2023 there were 803 gay bars in the United States compared to just 30 lesbian bars, according to the Lesbian Bar Project.
But it goes far beyond this when you consider media representation as well.
While there is a growing amount of gay movies and television shows, lesbians in movies and TV media are much harder to come across. Additionally, lesbian-centered productions are often canceled without reason or they end in gut-wrenching ways– usually with someone dead or the characters not being able to be together.
Yet, beyond media representation and speaking from my own experiences, I often hear people who are not women-loving-women (WLW) use the d-slur as if it were theirs to reclaim.
Something odd that I have also noticed is people’s lack of willingness to say the word “lesbian.” Even when someone openly identifies as a lesbian, more often than not I hear people refer to them as being “gay.” What is so scary about the ‘L’ word?
So, even knowing how poorly women, specifically lesbians, have been treated and the history of the acronym, why do people still ignorantly refer to it as GLBTQ+?
I don’t want to hear the arguments of “well that’s what it was when I was younger,” or “they’re the same thing,” because these are lazy excuses. If you can’t learn and adapt as things change with time, that sounds like a personal problem you should work on. And, if you think the order of the letters don’t matter, you need to learn more about history.
This isn’t a personal gripe I only have with people I’ve heard say GLBTQ+, because there are so many people who have spoken out against the sexism and lesbophobia perpetuated from the community and heads simply turn away from these issues.
It’s disheartening to hear people be so blatantly disrespectful, but it hurts even more to hear it from the community of people who are supposed to stand at our side the way we stand at theirs.
Education of LGBTQ+ history is so important because it reminds us of how much we have been through together, and that we have to continue to support one another. Our differences are what make us more similar.