Does anyone else think the word gay sounds weird preceded by the indefinite article?
It sounds odd, but it is one of many examples of “politically correct” speech. Of course, you could say, “He’s gay”, but it is more difficult when making a lengthy statement about more than one gay person. It becomes redundant to have to keep saying “people who are gay”. The academic answer is to stick with “homosexuals”, as, I guess, we’ve established this word can be a noun. However, it gets snared up by “politically correct” language rules because, while it may be more literal and accurate, it focuses exclusively on sex and seems to neglect the culture, psychology, and relationships of “homosexuals”. This is also why people who do not speak Latin are called “Latinos”, why a person, rather than a word, can be said to have a gender, why Santa Clause is mute, why Counts came to be known as Earls, and why my essays have to sound like this: “The student who enrolls may find that he or she cannot take the class that he or she had hoped for, because he or she did not know that the class he
