You know the story, right? “Gay” means “happy” or “carefree.” It’s a happy word! Homosexuals took on a happy word to describe themselves, and it was the Public Relations Coup of the Century. Yeah, ask a homosexual who’s been beaten up outside a gay bar how much the word “gay” saved him.
Actually, the word has a far more complex, and interesting, history. It’s a story I love, because it really illustrates the crazywonderful, fluid creativity of language.
Here’s the skinny:
In it’s original meanings, “gay” meant “happy,” “carefree,” or “bright and showy;” but starting in the 17th century, the meaning started to shift to include the idea of sexual immorality (a meaning that can be traced at least as far back as 1637)(1). The word, in that usage, played off the “carefree” meaning and implied an addiction to pleasures, specifically of the carnal sort. As such, it became a word associated with “loose” heterosexual behavior. In the 1890s, the word implied promiscuity(1). The spin on the phrase “The Gay ’90s” leans towards that idea: it was a decade looked upon as decadent and libertine by later generations, who coined the term.
When did it start to be used to refer to homosexuals? There it gets confusing. It may actually go back to the 19th century. There is evidence of homosexuals using it to describe themselves as early as 1920 (1). Earlier, we have evidence of the use in the term “gay cat” or “gey cat,” which goes back as far as 1893, and meant a young hobo who was the companion of an older hobo, with obvious connotations(1).
The word as an adjective for homosexuals, though, was mostly underground. The result is that it becomes difficult to ascertain which meaning is being used in some popular contexts. The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical The Gay Divorcee is easy — it means carefree, but probably has some of that heterosexual, hey-hey meaning at work. Cary Grant’s famous “Because I just went gay — all of a sudden!” in Bringing up Baby is a bit harder to read. Gertrude Stein’s use of the word in Miss Furr and Miss Skeene may refer to homosexuality. Noel Coward, too, possibly used it so in Bittersweet. The word was filled with meanings and connotations and layers — many a good writer was no doubt working that ambiguity in their work. (2)
What’s really clear, though, is that when homosexuals started using the term, the sexual meanings of the word that had grown out of the “carefree” definition were dominate in popular culture and imagination. The word is often pointing to “illicit” things — not with a heavy censoring, to be sure, but with a certain wink wink, nudge nudge feel. It’s pointing to counterculture, a world outside of the “respectable.” The nice meanings, of course, are bonus: they allowed plausible deniability at a time when defying convention could be dangerous. The important thing, however, is that homosexuals used a word that was not, precisely, “nice.” We see, in the use of the word “gay,” an quiet intimation of the later loud, uncompromising attitude of the modern gay liberation movement.
The big lesson I want my fellow atheists to take away is this: words are fluid works of creativity. We may be handed a word, but we can work it like clay. People who were sexually unrespectable took on the word “gay,” and its connotations of promiscuity and illicit sexuality, and thumbed their noses at it all. Homosexuals did, to be sure, have an advantage that we don’t — the word they had to work with was much easier, overall, one with a good sense of fun. Then again, all the fun of the word “gay” doesn’t stop it from being a hateful term when used by a homophobe. If we’re doomed to be called atheists anyway, we might as well decide for ourselves what that is going to mean, have fun with it, and be loud and defiant so that folks take notice.
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Sources
(1) Online Etymology Dictionary: Gay
(2) Gay — Wikipedia
