Gay

Until several decades ago, the word gay meant something like "jolly" or "mirthful", as in the French gai. In contemporary usage, however, that meaning is uncommon nowadays; the term is usually synonymous with "homosexual." When referring to a group of people, the term often means "male homosexual" — if gay women are referred to, the word "lesbian" is often used instead.

Word origins

Sometimes, histories of word origins are less than useful for communicating modern meanings of socioculturally potent words. Furthermore, the usage of any word changes dramatically as the culture in which it is embedded changes.

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The word gay has had a sexual orientation meaning since at least the nineteenth century, and possibly earlier.

Related Topics:
Sexual orientation - Nineteenth century

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A quote from Gertrude Stein's Miss Furr & Mrs. Skeene (1922) is possibly the first traceable use of the word, though it is not altogether clear whether she uses the word to mean lesbianism or happiness:

Related Topics:
Gertrude Stein - 1922

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:They were ...gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, ... they were quite regularly gay.

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Noel Coward's 1929 musical Bitter Sweet has the first uncontested use of the word: in the song "Green Carnation", four overdressed, 1890s dandies sing:

Related Topics:
Noel Coward - Bitter Sweet

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:Pretty boys, witty boys, You may sneer

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:At our disintegration.

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:Haughty boys, naughty boys,

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:Dear, dear, dear!

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:Swooning with affectation...

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:And as we are the reason

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:For the "Nineties" being gay,

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:We all wear a green carnation.

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Coward uses the "gay nineties" as a double entendre. The song title alludes to the gay playwright Oscar Wilde, who famously wore a green carnation himself.

Related Topics:
Double entendre - Oscar Wilde

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Bringing Up Baby (1938) was the first film to use the word "gay" in reference to homosexuality.

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Gay was originally used purely as an adjective ("he is a gay man" or "he is gay"). Gay can be also used as a plural collective-like noun: "Gays are opposed to that policy", but this use is rare and deprecated. It is rarely as a singular noun "he is a gay" and sounds unusual in this context, hence its use by the Little Britain comedy character Daffyd Thomas (a gay man who believes himself "the only gay in the village" despite abundant evidence to the contrary).

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By 1963, the word was known well enough by the straight community to be used by Albert Ellis in his book The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Man-Hunting.

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Folk etymologies

It has been claimed that "gay" was derived as an acronym for "Good As You", but this is a backronym (based on a fake etymology).

Related Topics:
Backronym - Fake etymology

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Another folk etymology accrues to Gay Street, a small street in New York's West Village—a nexus of homosexual culture. The term also seems, from documentary evidence, to have existed in New York as a code word in the 1940s, where the question, "Are you gay?" would denote more than it might have seemed to outsiders.

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