Alphabet Soup

My online pal John Aravosis (AMERICAblog) tries to sort out who put the T got into LGBT: Like an ever-expanding mushroom cloud of diversity, every few years America's gay leaders and activists welcome a new category of member to the community. In simpler times we were all gay. But then the word "gay" started to mean "gay men" more than women, so we switched to the more inclusive "gay and lesbian." Bisexuals, who were only part-time gays, insisted that we add them too, so we did (not without some protest), and by the early 1990s we were the lesbian, gay and bisexual, or LGB community. Sometime in the late '90s, a few gay rights groups and activists started using a new acronym, LGBT -- adding T for transgender/transsexual. And that's when today's trouble started ... (Salon)