A chain of online events put a fire under publisher Merriam-Webster to pull its online thesaurus database, after complaints were made about certain synonyms listed for the word homosexual.
The company announced Monday that it plans to have its revised thesauruses up and running, without a listing for homosexual, on the two sites where it is usually found -- its own and America Online -- by next week.
The print version of its thesaurus, which is a duplicate of the online version, will be changed with the next printing.
"We made a mistake, and we are very sorry," said Deborah Burns, director of marketing for Merriam-Webster. "It is our policy not to have entries for racial or ethnic minorities such as Jews, blacks, or Hispanics. We should have also included sexual minorities in that category."
"We have editorial filter and database filters that are supposed to prevent such things from happening. In this case it was an editorial -- a human -- error," she said.
Until 15 January, the thesaurus had the following synonyms associated with the entry for homosexual: fag, faggot, fruit, homo, invert, queer, uranian, uranist. Under related words, there were listed: transvestite, fairy, nance, nancy, pansy, queen, swish, dyke, lesbian, sapphist, pederast, sodomite.
The controversy arose last Thursday, when a listener called to complain about the contents of the thesaurus to a gay radio show hosted by the GAYBC network in Seattle.
GAYBC president John McMullen contacted Merriam-Webster and was assured that night that the database would be amended.
McMullen made the point that reference works that have expunged derogatory terms for other minorities still include anti-gay slurs.
"This is an institutional problem," McMullen said. "It's not just this one instance."
McMullen tapped John Aravosis, a Washington-based Internet political consultant who hosts a site called Wired Strategies, to help spread the word in the online world.
"John has shown the ability to draw public attention to important gay issues like the Tim McVeigh case," McMullen said.
Aravosis also heavily promoted his site as a central resource for online activists following the killing of Matthew Shepard.
Aravosis issued a press statement condemning Merriam-Webster. Aravosis' updates, circulated to thousands of gay journalists on Rex Wockner's influential mailing list, also took AOL and Merriam-Webster to task for linking the word bisexual with lower animals. The definition of bisexual in the online thesaurus, however, was probably not a biased definition, but an outdated one. In scientific terminology no longer in wide usage, bisexual meant possessing the sex organs of both genders -- a characteristic of "lower animals" such as earthworms and hydra.
"When a tag-team like [AOL and Merriam-Webster] broadcasts to the world that gays are fags and possibly child molesters, the dehumanizing impact is overwhelming," Aravosis wrote.
Soon, the thesaurus controversy had spread to gay newsgroups and Web sites and was picked up by the Associated Press -- leading to the impression that Merriam-Webster had responded to a groundswell of objections by pulling its database.
According to McMullen, Merriam-Webster was contacted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1997 about the use of the word nigger in its online thesaurus. McMullen says it took about a year for the word to be removed.
"Part of this story is how online activism was used to bring about immediate results in a situation involving hate speech and misrepresentation of gays and lesbians," said McMullen.
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation agreed that there should be changes to the thesaurus, but took a somewhat milder tone.
"We're not ones to yell and scream before we can sit down and figure this out," said Cathy Renna, a spokesperson for GLAAD. "This is about language as a living thing. These words that were listed are mostly historically correct; they just need some context," Renna said.
Some other online thesauruses, like Roget's, have seemingly avoided the charged territory altogether by not having a listing for homosexual.
Burns said that while the current plan is to remove the listing of homosexual from their thesaurus, Merriam-Webster will continue to list the word in its dictionary, along with others that describe minority groups.
"The dictionary will continue to define words that reflect a comprehensive use and understanding of the language as it is used today," said Burns.
Renna agreed with this, but hoped that derogatory words will be put into context. "People should understand that words like nigger and fag do exist, but it should be clearly indicated that they are derogatory terms," she said.
