I'd rather have sex than gender. (last word).

Sex. Good word. We should use it more often. Not just when we're referring to the act Shakespeare called "making the beast with two backs" but also when we're talking about the folks engaged in said act. Whether it's two men, two women, or one of each, they are sexes. That is, males and females, not genders, which, as I have said before, are masculine and feminine and should be reserved for nouns in romance languages. I get a lot of grief for my position on this, because it's obligatory nowadays to (mis)use the word gender when distinguishing men from women, and if you disagree with the language police on a matter of usage, people assume you're transphobic or heterosexist or worse.

Of course, that's not necessarily so. Quite the opposite, in fact. Etymologically, there's a good reason why sex is the preferable word here, and it's one that--believe it or not--harks back to a gay- and transsexual-friendly creation myth in Plato's Syraposium. If you saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Originally, Plato theorized, there were three sexes: man, woman and a union of the two--a hemmphrodite. Each had four legs and four arms and two faces and so on. They looked like two people fused back to back. They were powerful beings, these original humans, and in their arrogance they challenged the gods. As a way of humbling them, Zeus cut each in half, thereby forming separate men and women, all of them condemned to spend their life on earth looking for their other half, which wasn't necessarily the opposite sex.

My dictionary says that the original Latin word sexus may have derived from the Latin verb secare, to cut or to divide. Now, as we all learned in school, the Romans essentially co-opted most of Greek culture, changed a few names, and made it their own. So it shouldn't surprise us to learn that their notion of the origin of love as well as the origin of the two sexes might well have been borrowed from Plato.

For my money, Plato's is the best, most respectful and inclusive explanation for homosexuality in Western literature. When the separated sexes make love, or have sex, they reunite what was once whole, and thus it makes perfect sense that the Latin word for the whole (the sex act) and the parts (the people with genitals engaging in the sex act) should be the same. The whole is the sum of its parts. The sexes have sex. Gender has nothing to do with it.

There is another possible hidden meaning in the Latin root of the word sex, which, makes a good case for set:, not gender, as the mot juste. Sex also means six in Latin, which brings us to numerology, another Greek inheritance.

The ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who thought that the world was organized by and could be explained in terms of numbers, considered six to be the most perfect number. Astrological numerology, which derives from Pythagorean teachings, associates the number with the planet Venus, who was of course the Roman goddess of love. Biblical numerology, also Pythagorean, calls six the number of man and creation. According to Genesis, God created the world in six days.

Modern numerology, however, gets a little weird on this, reminding us that the atomic number of carbon, the building block of life on this planet is also, you guessed it, six, and that the time-honored euphemism for oral sex, "69," is just another way of drawing the ancient Chinese symbol for the codetermining feminine and masculine principles of the universe: yin and yang.

And there we ate, back again with the union of parts into wholes. The act of union and the parts uniting are the same; thus they have the same name.

Sex. Sex is the right word and, contrary to popular belief, the more progressive word for homos who want to make the case for their rightful place in the creation. Besides, when was the last time you had good gender?