13
Being Two Spirit (in its traditional meaning) is more spiritual than physical. It used to mean taking up certain gender roles and had little to do with sexuality or even biology; it was more about how they functioned in the community. A man having sex with a Two Spirit man did not mean having sex with another man (same goes for Two Spirit women and non-Two Spirit women); it was not viewed as homosexuality or anything "out of the ordinary." To put it another way, the Two Spirit culture takes the binary variables of male or female and gay or straight, bends them, and turns them into a "circle." In Native American cultures the circle has always been an important symbol anyway; and this circle gives an infinite amount of choices when it comes to gender and sexuality.
Conversely, "gay" in the Western context is not based on the spiritual, but the physical. If we drew a Venn-diagram with the Native concept of Two Spirit, and the Western concept of being gay, the two sets would definitely overlap and intersect; however they would not be on top of each other. They share features, but they are not one and the same. However, today the term Two Spirit is also used as an umbrella term for all LGBT Native Americans.