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Women being gay - wicked. sinful.
Gay dudes throughout western history - lifelong bachelor. never married. lived with his "very close friend" until they both died.
I thought it was:
Women being gay: they were dear friends who lived together for the past 50 years, owned several cats together, never consorted with men, and are now being laid to rest under the same tombstone as it was their eternal wish never to part. What close roommates they were!
Men being gay: we sent him to jail but that wasn't enough so we cut off his balls.
Yeah that's far more like it.
That's pretty much exactly the opposite of how it worked in Britain from Victorian times through to the 90s
I mean there were women too, they were commonly called derogatory names like spinstress.
I didn't think Spinster was a derogatory term, it was literally a job title of something that women could do to achieve financial independence back in the days when men owned their wives.
I don’t think it started as a derogatory term, but it became so. People would use it to imply that someone was ugly or otherwise defective, so no husband would want them. A man unattached is still seen as more acceptable than a woman unattached even today.
In the same way that any word for an independent woman can be derogatory. It wasn't used in a negative way when I was growing up (in a deeply old-fashioned part if the UK), and as a kid before I knew that being a lesbian was possible I thought of it as aspirational