Perhaps the importance of a standard, identifying order that would display solidarity among our ranks to the rest of the world, might outweigh politics and legitimate concerns about marginalization. Perhaps.
Just sharing a thought. Have a nice day.

It seems that mostly in the USA people use the “GLBT” acronym and in the UK it’s “LGBT”: the logic over here for putting the “L” first was that lesbians were more marginalised, due to sexism, than gay men.

Yet when we moved from talking about LG to LGB and then LGBT we put the other marginalised groups, which tend to have less financial muscle and support, smaller commercial scenes and smaller, less well-supported non-commercial scenes… down there at the end, where they can easily drop back off the acronym if you’re “in a hurry” or “everyone knows I mean bi and trans too”.

It was, only partly in jest, suggested that academics writing papers should pull the four letters out of a scrabble bag at the start of each project, and use them in whichever order they emerged for the duration!

The separation thing of lesbians and gay men not mixing is common here too. There are whole separate histories that only really started to come together when the government introduced the “Section 28″ law which attacked lesbians and gay men equally (and bis by implication) and created a sense of common cause.