Terms and Labels Posted on January 16, 2008 Darrell P. Wheeler (bio) explains that language use can alter the effectiveness of the research process.

Why do we use terms like men who have sex with men? I mean it's a term that I've gotten to be very comfortable with over the years. It's a term that emerged through work with the Centers for Disease Control over the years because the term gay and bisexual was not working in work with non-white men. And so African- American particularly and Latino communities emerged and said, "Look, we need to have a different language.” But even that language doesn't meet the mark because men who have sex with men has itself become a label, and some people don't identify with that.

And so in our qualitative work, we have a whole litany of terms that people told us they use to describe themselves, and in a quantitative instrument that we use, we have a drop menu. I think it had 45 different things that you could call yourself. And so we have to go back and look and see how people have called themselves, but really I mean in terms of HIV prevention, the label may have some significance, but it's ultimately the behavior.

AIDS is transmitted through a behavior, not through a label. Maybe the label conscribes and contributes something. People like to think so. But it's still the behavior, and we're finding a lot of inconsistencies with labels. We have a lot of men who identified as gay who have primary female partners. We have a lot of men who identify as heterosexual who haven't had sex with a woman in four years.

So who is heterosexual and who is not becomes a real critical question. So the term men who have sex with men, MSM, we use as a broad label to capture the whole experience of the behavior, and not just the label.

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