Gender neutral language

The other day, I was listening to a ghazal. I observed that both lover and lovee were males. I searched for articles on this. One view on this was that the intention was to make the poem universal and hence it's not masculine but gender neutral. So we should view them from gender neutral perspective and not from homosexuality angle. The other view was that, homosexuality was never a sin in Indian society hence poets wrote freely about their homosexual love. We can't view them from post-British anti-homosexual angle.

I'm in no place to analyze them, nevertheless, I'm interested in gender neutral language. I suppose not just in poems, we need gender neutral language in many places. Our attempt to achieve it, using he or she or singular they, looks very clumsy. The gendered language itself was an innovation in our speech once declensions started appearing (and sometimes disappearing at a later time). These innovations introduced new terms or affixes to the language. But what we are trying to do is to use the existing terms and try to give it a dual meaning or elaborating them. Why is it impossible to come up with new animate terms for gender neutral language? The gender neutral language might have started as a correction to patriarchy but now the lack of it looks more like a limitation.