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"He who is penetrated is gay" is obvious to humanity in the general case.
You do see where the folks penetrating fellows can also be called gay?
Not so simple; again, see Catullus 56 where bisexuality, at the least, is not something shameful so long as you are the older, dominant, male:
O, Cato, what an absurdly funny thing,
worthy for you to hear and laugh at!
Laugh, as much as you love Catullus, Cato.
The thing is too absurd and funny.
I just found a young boy having sex with a girl:
May it please Diona, I attacked him
with my rigid thing, using it as a spear.
I fail to see what relevance a definition of 'shame' is to my definition of 'gay'.
Because “gay” doesn’t really mean “male who fucks males”, but rather “male who is fucked by males”. For further reference, compare the coordinate terms poof, sissy, and faggot.
Leviticus and Romans disagree with you, and most of the civilized world is downstream of that.
"Just say no to pederasty" is fundamental to the value proposition of Abrahamic religion.
The condemnation of active homosexual behavior is fundamentally removed from contempt towards gayness, as defined in my reply to @AmericanSaxeCoburgGothic above. The charge placed against the erastes isn't that he is personally weak or incapable, but that he defiles and corrupts the vulnerable; he may be a predator, but he's not a bitch.
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You're assuming a lot here. Do you have any sources from this century? Wikipedia has gay is synonymous with homosexual.
I'm not talking about the technical, sterile definition of the word "gay", but rather the broader memetic associations that the word carries which everyone intuitively understands.
Consider this scenario: your sports team played against their rivals in the big game and utterly crushed them. In your celebration, you might say that your team fucked them, or blew them out, or made them your bitch. When one refers to a male as a "faggot", or by other coordinate terms, it degrades by asserting effeminacy—a proclamation that they are beneath you.
Per this association, mere homosexual behavior, or even a corresponding aversion to heterosexual behavior, is not "gay" per se. Gayness/faggotry, as a phenomenon with the above associations, is thus a particular subset of homosexual behavior which reflects a typically feminine constitution, including weakness and passivity unbecoming of a more capable type.
Please correct me where I'm wrong in summarizing your beliefs:
In usages such as gay marriage, gay rights; a gay pride festival, men who top men are expected/allowed to be included in this grouping.
However in most other usages, the word gay is so infused with the negative connotations of being a bottom, that its known you can't call a man who tops men gay.
So if I'm following your reasoning, a man who tops men could be in a gay marriage, but it would incorrect to call him gay? And you believe, this is common-knowledge obvious, per your flair, that really doesn't need to rely on evidence to be stated as fact.
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I think the memetic baggage for the word gay is gone. The language and understanding from our playground days has evolved. Gay is now synonymous with homosexual. The phrase its not gay for a guy to have sex with dudes isn't coherent with the way the word is currently used. I have never seen it used with the caveat just meaning bottoms.
Perhaps on a surface level, but even in the most progressive milieus "getting fucked" is understood as something to be suffered. The association of being sexually penetrated/femininity/weakness/inferiority still holds, just in a sublimated form.
See my flair.
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Unless being gay is considered shameful, there's no reason to differentiate between "fucking girls and young women" and "fucking boys still young enough to not have adult male characteristics". If they're pretty enough and in an inferior enough position (younger, lower social class, slave, foreigner) then so long as it's you sticking your dick into an orifice, you're still fully masculine and male by the standards of your society, not a repulsive cinaedus/pathicus.
Are you serious? Heterosexual sex can lead to pregnancy. And if there is no shame, why not call dudes who penetrate dudes also gay? Why the gatekeeping on the word gay? The year is 2025, I'm providing a definition for gay, I do not understand what relevance your descriptions of ancient Roman pedastry have here.
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In a modern context that had to come up with a way to divorce identity from action to convince the [US] Christian-leaning folks of the time to let them do it because their culture was more receptive to claims it was an in-built identity rather than just something you do? Yes, tautologically.
However, outside of that very specific context, I don't feel that's a good use of the term, no. There's a very good reason the medical field says 'men who have sex with men', not 'gay'; it's a tacit admission that the category is bad since if it were any better it would have been adopted universally.
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There’s a lot of truth there, historically;
“The penetrated” are practically always Gay™;
“The penetrators” can often get a lot more leeway than a strict gender/sex binarist might expect.
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