Based on the recurring discourse about whether historical sources are using this or that bit of queer terminology "correctly", I get the distinct impression that a lot of us aren't aware of exactly how recent the settled definitions of much of the jargon we take for granted really are.
Let's take "bisexual", for example. That's a nice, straightforward term – surely it's meant more or less what it means now straight from the get-go, right?
In reality, over the course of its 250-year history, the word "bisexual" has variously meant what we would understand today from the words "crossdressing", "genderfluid", "nonbinary", "intersex", and several more besides. It didn't settle on its present definition in popular usage until the 1980s, and some queer publications continued to use it in older senses –sometimes in multiple senses within the same publication – well into the 2000s. There are intersex people alive today who still identify as "bisexual" because they grew up with one of the word's older definitions.
(Given the fandom-adjacency of this blog, I'm sure many folks reading this post have heard anecdotes about how Naoko Takeuchi allegedly accidentally made Sailor Uranus nonbinary because she was fuzzy on the distinction between being bisexual and being genderfluid; while this story is almost certainly apocryphal, it would have been a very understandable mistake to make, as an author writing in 1994 was probably working from sources that used the exact same terms to interchangeably describe both of those concepts!)
Like, I totally get being on edge about careless use of terminology, but for older media it can often pay to ask: "was there actually broad agreement even within queer communities about what this word means at the time this media was made?"; for anything that's more than about thirty years old, there's a reasonably good chance the answer is "no".
