[Vol. 17] Taking Back "Gay"
The story behind the word "gay", from an LGBTQ+ label to a playground putdown.
At the pace at which language is evolving these days, words lose and pick up new meanings all the time. Words that mean nothing to us in one moment could suddenly be peppered in every one of our sentences the next.
And we’re not very patient with history. Long, dull lectures about colonial America in Middle School and even longer, duller nights spent hunched over an AP U.S. History textbook haven’t exactly inspired most of us to be dedicated historians.
So if language mutates like a virus and we avoid history like the plague, it’s not surprising that we lose control of words.
Take the word “gay”, for example. Where did that word come from and how did we end up using it to describe same-sex love? Beyond that, when did it become something we used as an insult or joke?
I didn’t choose the title That’s Gay for this newsletter just because … well, I write about gay things (although it does help bring the point across). I chose That’s Gay because it was a phrase I’d heard (and said) a thousand and one times growing up.
When something was stupid, lame, or dumb, it was gay. If you think about it, it was actually super convenient from a vocab standpoint. I mean, why waste valuable time and brain power coming up with all these other fancy adjectives when you can just default to a simple three-letter word?
If only it weren’t so devastating to gay kids.
How could you want to be gay if gay was dumb, lame, or stupid?
I think I was introduced to the word “gay” as an insult before I even learned it referred to gay people. That’s pretty messed up if you ask me.
So I chose That’s Gay as the title that would sit on top of every one of my newsletters, every single week, because I wanted to reclaim the phrase – not just for gay people, but for every queer person under the LGBTQ+ umbrella that had their identities lumped in with that classic insult, "that’s soo gay!”.
Today, I’m going to honor that purpose and give “gay” its due time.
When did we start using it to refer to people that were into people of the same sex? When did “that’s gay” become a playground putdown and a thing gamers shout at each other through their headsets? Can these two states of “gay” coexist?
Let’s find out, shall we?
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Honestly, when I first thought about writing on the history of the word “gay”, I figured I’d probably already know most of it. It started as a word for joyful and happy and now it either means you’ve come out of the closet or you’re a middle schooler getting roasted by your friends.
Turns out, there’s a lot more to it than that.
First of all, did you know “homosexual” is listed by GLAAD, a non-profit LGBTQ+ focused media monitoring organization, as an offensive term to avoid? I had no idea. According to GLAAD, the term “homosexual” was “aggressively used by anti-gay extremists to suggest that gay people are somehow diseased or psychologically/emotionally disordered” and so, to avoid that connotation, you should use “gay person/people” instead.
Honestly, good riddance, I always thought “homosexual” made it all sound so clinical anyway.
The downfall of homosexuality and the rise of gayness.
So why bring up the word “homosexual” and its spot on GLAAD’s blacklist? Well, as it turns out, it was the weaponizing of that very-clinical sounding word in the scientific and political spheres that pushed “gay” into the in-crowd.
According to the PBS sponsored YouTube video series, Origin of Everything, which produced a video that stole my idea for this newsletter (albeit over two years ago), it was in the mid 20th century that “gay” started to become more common practice to describe same-sex sexuality (often, but not exclusively, for men at first). Although “gay” can be traced back all the way to the 1920s to mean “Yep, I’m a man that has sex with other men”, apparently it wasn’t until the 50s that it was invited into the mainstream.
And boy did it blow up from there.
Gay liberation = the liberation of the word “gay”.
It was the Stonewall Riots, or the Stonewall Uprising, on June 28, 1969 that sparked the birth of the first Gay Liberation Front (GLF). In the early mornings of that summer day at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, police came to raid the bar. As was so casually believed at the time, the gathering of that many gay people in one space was “disorderly”.
So the raid itself was nothing new, but the response was.
Marsha P. Johnson, a black trans woman and gay rights activist, threw the first brick. From there, the protests lasted 6 entire days, with violent clashes between LGBTQ+ people/allies and the police spilling onto Christopher Street.
And it kept spilling from there – downtown, uptown, and across the nation.
The heat garnered by groups organizing under the Gay Liberation Front after the Stonewall Riots catapulted the term “gay” into its current meaning. Once the world saw huge crowds completely enveloped by “gay pride”, “gay is good” and “gay liberation front” banners march through their cities and right onto the morning news, there was really no way you could see the word and not think same-sex couples.
“Gay is good”.
More than just cementing the word’s association with same-sex love though, the gay rights movement made it clear that the word “gay” could be used as a positive self-identifier - a label you could be proud to wear.
So, with all that revolutionary history in mind – with the rise of gay pride and the downfall of the criminalization of LGBTQ+ people – how and when did “gay” become a playground and cafeteria jab?
In looking for the answer to that question, I found a BBC article, How 'gay' became children's insult of choice, that’s like a perfect little time capsule.
The rise of “the gay = lame age”.
Published in 2008, when I was 10-years-old and probably just starting to hear “that’s gay” all around me, the article is kind of the perfect reference for the rise of the “gay = lame” age.
According to a survey conducted by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), a UK-based teacher’s union referenced in the article, “gay” ranked as the most popular playground putdown of the time (right above bitch, and, a UK classic, slag*).
*Can you imagine a ten-year old calling someone a slag on the playground? Not sure why that’s so funny to me. Anyways, besides the point.
In the article, slang lexicographer Tony Thorne is quoted as saying that he’d only noticed the word “gay” come into popularity as an insult or tease “in the last four years”, meaning around the early 2000s-era. Checks out with my own timeline.
So, where the kids of the early 2000s homophobic?
Well, you could argue that every kid raised in this world today is indoctrinated with some level of homophobia, but that’s a topic for another time.
In this case, Thorne says no. Children he interviewed that used the word casually were adamant, he said, that they weren’t using it in a homophobic way. "It is nearly always used in contexts where sexual orientation and sexuality are completely irrelevant," Thorne told the BBC.
The problem with that statement though, is that words hold a different power for different people. Sure, kids that dropped “that’s so gay” as casually as they dropped their bags in their rooms after a long school day may not have been using it maliciously, but in this fight, good intentions are no match for the power that words carry.
In a time when gay could refer to same-sex love just as easily as it could to being lame, what were us gay kids supposed to think?
How could we convince ourselves it was ok to be gay if we’d just used the same word to make fun of a friend’s new hat?
Regardless of whether you associated “gay” with same-sex sexuality, or even knew that that’s what it meant, when I was growing up it was not something you wanted to be described as. In a world that’s homophobic-leaning as it is already, we don’t need to be introduced to the term we’ll later use to describe our sexualities with as a playground insult.
With this newsletter, I hope to do my small part in making “gay” something you could associate positively – or, even better, proudly.
At the very least, “that’s gay” will pop up so many times in your email inbox that soon enough it’ll lose all meaning. I’ll take that.
Today’s discussion Q:
How can we stop identifiers like “gay” from being popularized as insults or jokes in the future? Was the popularization of the word “gay” as an insult inevitable, or was it just a product of its time?
I have my answer. Let me know yours in the comments below! As always, I’ll be reading/responding to all.
And that was That’s Gay, Volume 17. See you in Volume 18, folks!
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