“What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” the lovely Juliet opines, in one of Shakespeare’s most-quoted conundrums.

But enter the question “What’s in a name?” on Google, and you’ll get 673,000 results, most of which appear to take strenuous exception to Juliet’s response. Apparently most people think the correct answer to the question is “absolutely everything.”

So, Juliet: What were you thinking?

Few topics generate as much emotion as the names we give ourselves, and the GLBT community is no exception. Or perhaps you prefer the letters LGBT? Then again, maybe GLBTQ better captures your reality. How about queer? If none of those do it for you, you may want to check out the LGBTQIA meeting every Monday night at UCSD.

What’s going on here? Dr. Delores Jacobs, chief executive officer of The Center, says all marginalized groups face this dilemma: “It’s a struggle to feel respected: to feel recognized; to feel included … to find a word people feel includes them and describes their experience.”

Does it matter? You bet it does, says Dr. William Leap, professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. “The process of coming out, of being able to deal with who we are as sexual persons, starts with giving a name to who we are,” he told the Gay & Lesbian Times in a recent interview. “The pivotal moment comes when people are able to say I have a word for who I am. Once there is a word, there is a possibility of grabbing hold of a kind of public identity that’s virtually impossible without one.”

Fair enough. But are GLBT and its many variations getting us there? Or does categorizing ourselves into ever-narrower subgroups serve more to fragment and divide us?

The Center’s Jacobs points out a practical problem: “Today more and more organizations add the letter Q at the end to include people who are questioning their sexuality, and still others add an ‘I’ which means intersex. Some people tell me, only half jokingly, ‘Oh my God, Delores, we’re going to end up with alphabet soup. Soon we’re going to use up all 26 letters in the alphabet and have to start using symbols. Can’t we find one word for everyone?’”

“I don’t think it’s possible or even desirable,” says Shaun Travers, director of the LGBT Resource Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). “I don’t think we’re ever going to stop calling ourselves lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders. The power of these words comes from their use in common parlance. As queer researchers do queer work, new terms that reflect a new understanding of self appear all the time, but I see them augmenting not replacing the old standards.”

“The more a person has to write out Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Questioning, the more likely that person is to pray (for the emergence) of a single word,” laughs Jacobs, although she quickly notes those prayers are unlikely to be answered. Think about what we’re asking for here, she suggests: A term that all of the members of our diverse community believe “includes them, represents them and describes their experience, and even as I say that, you and I both recognize that one word could never accomplish it. The challenge is to recognize and honor our differences while also celebrating our unity and community.”

The nominee you hear most often from those searching for a single term for the GLBT community is queer, the former locker room taunt American University’s Bill Leap says gays and lesbians “reclaimed” in the 1980s. The demonstrators who proclaimed “We’re here; we’re queer; get used to it,” he says, were labeling themselves as sexual persons not based on their bodies but on their location vis a vis the “structures of power in the political mainstream.” That’s when what Leap calls “linguistic bullying” stopped. “You’ve taken the power away from the person who’s throwing the word at you,” he says. “Now when he calls you queer he’s agreeing with you.”

Does that mean Leap thinks queer might become the overarching term for the entire GLBT community? Not likely, he says. “I think what we’re seeing in American culture writ large is a constant reinvention of sexuality and gender. I would predict as a linguist that we’re going to continue to see new words and phrases, like metrosexual, as people continue to redefine and reinvent themselves.”

“Many, but not all, youth would argue for the use of the word queer,” says Jacobs. “They believe it’s a much more inclusive word … and that the categories of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender impose an artificial segmentation.” She doubts, however, that the entire community will embrace it. “While young people may be comfortable with queer, other people associate the word with hate and contempt and can’t imagine using it.”

The words we use to describe ourselves are deeply personal to us, and thus they arouse energy and passion. Take the term LGBT. At some point in the past decade or so – scholars can’t say precisely when or where – LGBT replaced GLBT as the most commonly-used descriptor for our community. Thus we have the San Diego LGBT Community Center; the LGBT Resource Center at UCSD; the National LGBT Health Coalition and so on. This development is not without its critics.

“The word gay should be first,” Jay Murley, screenwriter and longtime community activist, told the Gay & Lesbian Times recently. Murley, who led the fight to gain recognition for gay student unions on 22 campuses across California, attributes the change to what he believes is an unreasonable accommodation to “feminists who decided that ‘lesbian’ had to come first.” For one thing, he says, “every survey, from Kinsey’s in the late 1940s to the 2003 San Diego County LGBT Senior Health Care Needs Assessment, shows that there are twice as many male homosexuals as females.”

Beyond that, says Murley, “LGBT is improper English.” The English language offers two options in this case, he says: Start with the shortest word and end with the longest, which would produce “GLBT”, or arrange the words alphabetically which would give you BGLT. “There is no grammatical excuse to use LGBT, nor is there any excuse based on the size of the populations served or the source of funding for most programs.”

Others have a different perspective. UCSD’s Travers says that while the order of the letters shouldn’t be “overemphasized or deconstructed,” using LGBT is an important political statement: “Given the history of sexism in our society, he says “putting women first says something very powerful about how we understand our community.”

But the act goes beyond symbolism, he suggests. “Here at UCSD before the LGBT Resource Center existed, the library of information about queer issues was physically located at the Women’s Center. The same thing was the case at my former institution, Texas A&M University: Their LGB services – this was before the T – were physically located within the Women’s Development Program.”

American University’s Bill Leap says he “very consciously” puts the L before the G for many of the same reasons Travers does.

“Of course there’s no rule,” he says, speaking in his academic capacity as an “observing linguist.” “I have some very political lesbian-identified colleagues who write GLBT with no problem.”

Jacobs says that when she writes an article, “sometimes I’ll put the G first and sometimes I’ll put the L first, unless I’m writing the precise name of a particular organization.” Even then, she says, editors sometimes change what she writes to conform to the stylistic standards of a particular publication. (Editor’s note: It is the policy of the Gay & Lesbian Times to use GLBT unless LBGT is part of a verbatim quote or the formal name of an organization.)

At 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday evening, Oct. 12, a GLBT student organization at UC Berkeley held a discussion about coming out. Well, that’s not precisely accurate. A “campus-based gender and sexuality group” at the university held a discussion about “sexual and gender fluidity in relation to ‘coming out.’ ”

The organization is called Fluid and its aim is to: “Provide a comfortable, safe space to talk for those who identify as queer, fluid, power queer, bi, gender queer, polyamorous, non-straight but non-lesbian, inter-gender, pansexual, heteroflexible, homoflexible, a-gendered, those who do not identify with any sexuality or gender boxes, and those who are questioning their sexuality or gender.”

If you were expecting the Gay & Lesbian Times to translate that last paragraph for you, dream on. Instead we would refer you to UCSD’s Travers who pointed us in this direction in the first place. Nor are we trying to provoke a chuckle, to make fun of the things those crazy folks at Berkeley say and do.

On the contrary, our point is that language, like sexual identity, is itself fluid. The words we use to describe ourselves and the world around us change over time and vary with context. We can talk about them, argue about them, laugh about them or ignore them, but, like the weather, there’s very little we can actually do about them. The bottom line is that the words that people use the most will become, well, the words that people use the most.

What if we had a choice in the matter? Who would you want to make the decision on your behalf?

“I would not want to be on the committee selected to come up with a universal name for us to go by,” San Diego Pride Executive Director Suanne Pauley told the Gay & Lesbian Times. “I think people should call themselves whatever they feel most comfortable with.”

Point well taken, Ms. Pauley. After all, they will anyway.