To put a fine point on it, شاذ and لوطي should be considered as fag/faggot in English and are highly derogatory. To say that these are just the words people are used to and thus not the same is besides the point. They are offensive to Arab LGBTQ and thus derogatory. Many Arabs may not be familiar with the shorthand مثلي but مثلي الجنس should be understood everywhere and these are with should be used.
To clarify my point a little:
That said, it's hard to pinpoint just how derogatory the term شاذ is a given speaker intends to be when they use the term شاذ
My original phrasing of this sentence was poor as it implied that the term itself might not be derogatory, which is not my position at all, as should be clear from my first post in the thread or the first paragraph from my second post. I agree with you that the term
should not be used by anyone.
To say that these are just the words people are used to and thus not the same is besides the point.
Besides what point, though? The original question was about the language people use, not what language we think they should use, and in that context a discussion about how offensive the terms are in their social context is quite relevant. Again, I agree that شاذ
should be the equivalent of "fag", but in reality, it's not. "Fag" is word widely recognized as a slur and profanity that will offend all kinds of people, homosexual or otherwise, when used in public. شاذ, on the other hand, is both a slur and the recognized, dominant label used for this group, and one that is so widely accepted outside of rights-minded circles that people sometimes use it without even realizing that it's a slur. For these reasons, there is no English equivalent. To a gay person, شاذ may be as offensive as "fag" (or even more so, given the denotative meaning), but most other people don't see it as profanity at all.
For Beaz069, I agree that he or she should obviously use مثلي unless the goal is to replicate how people actually speak (e.g. in the dialogue in a story).
What about the adjective لوطي is that admitted or is it also derogatory?
The closest literal translation is "Sodomite", so it's clear why the term is offensive.