Rename:: Hide Your Lesbians

Hide Your Gays currently redirects to Hide Your Lesbians. However, the article states that the trope can be used to apply to censoring male gay couples. If that's the case, I don't see why we're using a gender-specific term instead of one that can refer to homosexuals of both genders. It would make more sense if we had the actual article at Hide Your Gays and have Hide Your Lesbians be the redirect.

EDIT: Looking closer, it doesn't explicitystate in the main description that it can apply to either gender, but male examples are still given, and the idea of censoring or not giving attention to gay couples doesn't seem very gender-specific.

edited 22nd Feb '11 2:58:13 PM by MasterHand

It doesn't matter. It's just sometimes easier to use just one of the words for the sake of length, majority of examples or tradition. People put the other example in anyway and are cool with swapping words out in wicks.

I don't see why we should swap them or how making the name focus on men who like men instead of women who like women helps the name. We could rename it Hide Your LGBT Characters but that just sounds awkward. Both gay and lesbian are gendered.

"Gay", at least in what I've heard, isn't a gender-specific term - in fact, I've often heard male homosexuals referred to specifically as "gay men". I've heard female homosexuals refered to as "gay" before. "Lesbian" seems to be more commonly used, but a lesbian can be called "gay", and, as is important to this proposition, unlike "lesbian", "gay" can theoretically be used to describe both genders.

edited 22nd Feb '11 4:04:37 PM by MasterHand

I've only seen Gay used for men.

I've personally seen it used for both, but Hide Your Gays just flows better, anyway.

The important fact in this:

Hide Your Lesbians found in: 252 articles, excluding discussions.

This title has brought 1,511 people to the wiki from non-search engine links since 20th FEB '09.

Hide Your Gays found in: 48 articles, excluding discussions.

This title has brought 0 people to the wiki from non-search engine links since 20th FEB '09.

Hide Your Lesbians works better than Hide Your Gays.

That is probably because it is the main title, though. Anyway, it is not broken, so I am against the rename. Hide You Gays would be appropriate, but we wouldn't gain much changing, anyway.

Btw, I also have heard 'gay' to be used for woman.

Gay is definetly gender neutral

If it's already gender neutral, then why is it "LGBT" instead of just "GBT"?

Also, it looks like the lesbian version of the trope is more popular.

Hide Your Gays would be better. It can be gender-neutral, while Hide Your Lesbians can't.

Also, doesn't the ptitle replacement system make renames easier to do now?

edited 23rd Feb '11 6:03:56 AM by INUH

Limited usage of the redirect and not one inbound and flat out tons on the main name is a sign that the trope is fine as is.

edited 23rd Feb '11 6:21:00 AM by Raso

Hide Your Gays is certainly much less gender-specific than Hide Your Lesbians. (Of the current examples though, how many refer to male couples?)

But on another note, would the name Hide Your Gays increase confusion with Bury Your Gays (especially when the word "bury" could easily be interpreted to mean "hide" at first glance)?

edited 23rd Feb '11 6:11:05 AM by SeanMurrayI

@Inuh: My understanding is that the physical process of swapping a name is supposed to be easier now (though I'm still not clear how that works), but that the guidelines on whether or not to actually do a rename remain the same.

Pretty much what Meeble said. The replacement system pretty much means that "But it has punctuation!" isn't a viable reason not to use a name.

Re: The title- "Gay" is gender neutral, although it's more commonly used for men than women. Could be a regional thing, though. Anyway, against a rename- that's what redirects are for, after all.

Gay is gender neutral. The main reason for why we have the L in LGBT and LBGTQ is that society is focused on men. Or more to the point, many LGBTQ activists consider society to be patriarchal, androcentric, et cetera. (So lets not start an off-topic debate on whether or not society really is that way.)

The idea is that there's so much focus on the men, in this case the gay men, that we need to specifically underscore that the women are also included.

There's also another, more esoteric, reason for why lesbians should be mentioned separately in LGBTQ, although that reason is kinda off topic for this trope: The distinction that gays of both genders have a homosexual sexual orientation that they are (or consider themselves) born with, while some women define themselves as lesbians without having a sexual attraction towards women. These "political lesbians" actively chose a life without men for ideological reasons, and sexual attraction doesn't really come into it. Some of these political lesbians have a exclusively homosexual sexual orientation as well. Others are bisexual, asexual or even heterosexual, but actively stay away from The Unfair Sex.

Anyway, here in Sweden we don't use the LG, we simply call it HBTQ - Homosexual, Bisexual, Transsexual, Queer.

Hmm... Maybe veryone can agree that Hide Your Homosexuals would be an unambiguously neutral main title, using Hide Your Lesbians and Hide Your Gays as redirects? I'm fine with using Gays as main title as well, but sure, some people seem to consider it non-neutral while I'd have a hard time imagining anyone considering homosexual to be not gender neutral.

BTW, the Q is a good example of overlapping definitions.

Queer is usually defined as including everyone with a non-heteronormative lifestyle, including many LGBT individuals and also heterosexuals who are into polyamory or Casual Kink... while a Straight Gay who is heteronormative in everything except the partner's gender usually do not define themselves as queer - and thus shouldn't be defined as queer by others either.

...so y'all need to Hide Your Gays, Hide Your Lezz, Hide Your Gays, Hide Your Lezz, Hide Your Gays, Hide Your Lezz, and hide your bisexuals 'cause they rapin' everybody...

Both names make me think of the meme before anything else.

^What!?

"Bed Intruder Song" has become so popular that these "Hide Your X" tropes may make readers initially think it means something to do with the situation in the song.

Never heard of that meme.

Saw this had a TRS thread when it got an IP thread.

Anyone have anything to add?