When did you grow up?
Bringing Up Baby (1938) was the first film to use the word
gay in apparent reference to homosexuality. In a scene in which the
Cary Grant character's clothes have been sent to the cleaners, he is forced to wear a woman’s feather-trimmed robe. When another character asks about his robe, he responds, "Because I just went
gay all of a sudden!" Since this was a mainstream film at a time when the use of the word to refer to
cross-dressing (and, by extension, homosexuality) would still be unfamiliar to most film-goers, the line can also be interpreted to mean, "I just decided to do something frivolous."
[14]
The word continued to be used with the dominant meaning of "carefree", as evidenced by the title of
The Gay Divorcee (1934), a musical film about a heterosexual couple.
Shift to homosexual
By the mid-20th century,
gay was well established in reference to hedonistic and uninhibited lifestyles
[9] and its antonym
straight, which had long had connotations of seriousness, respectability, and conventionality, had now acquired specific connotations of heterosexuality.
[15] In the case of
gay, other connotations of frivolousness and showiness in dress ("gay apparel") led to association with
camp and
effeminacy. This association no doubt helped the gradual narrowing in scope of the term towards its current dominant meaning, which was at first confined to subcultures.
Gay was the preferred term since other terms, such as
queer, were felt to be derogatory.
[16] Homosexual is perceived as excessively clinical,
[17][18][19] since the sexual orientation now commonly referred to as "homosexuality" was at that time a mental illness diagnosis in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
In mid-20th century Britain, where male homosexuality was illegal until the
Sexual Offences Act 1967, to openly identify someone as homosexual was considered very offensive and an accusation of serious criminal activity. Additionally, none of the words describing any aspect of homosexuality were considered suitable for polite society. Consequently, a number of euphemisms were used to hint at suspected homosexuality. Examples include "sporty" girls and "artistic" boys,
[20] all with the stress deliberately on the otherwise completely innocent adjective.
The sixties marked the transition in the predominant meaning of the word gay from that of "carefree" to the current "homosexual".
In the British comedy-drama film
Light Up the Sky! (1960), directed by
Lewis Gilbert, about the antics of a British Army searchlight squad during World War II, there is a scene in the mess hut where the character played by
Benny Hill proposes an after-dinner toast. He begins, "I'd like to propose..." at which point a fellow diner, played by
Sidney Tafler, interjects "Who to?", suggesting a proposal of marriage. The Benny Hill character responds, "Not to you for start, you ain't my type". He then adds in mock doubt, "Oh, I don't know, you're rather gay on the quiet."
By 1963, a new sense of the word
gay was known well enough to be used by
Albert Ellis in his book
The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Man-Hunting. Similarly,
Hubert Selby, Jr. in his 1964 novel
Last Exit to Brooklyn, could write that a character "took pride in being a homosexual by feeling intellectually and esthetically superior to those (especially women) who weren't gay...."
[21] Later examples of the original meaning of the word being used in popular culture include the theme song to the 1960–1966 animated TV series
The Flintstones, whereby viewers are assured that they will "have a gay old time." Similarly, the 1966
Herman's Hermits song "
No Milk Today", which became a Top 10 hit in the UK and a
Top 40 hit in the U.S., included the lyric "No milk today, it was not always so /
The company was gay, we'd turn night into day."
[22] In June 1967, the headline of the review of the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album in the British daily newspaper
The Times stated, "The Beatles revive hopes of progress in pop music with their gay new LP".
[23] Yet in the same year,
The Kinks recorded "David Watts".
[24] Ostensibly about schoolboy envy, the song also operated as an in-joke, as related in Jon Savage's "The Kinks: The Official Biography", because the song took its name from a homosexual promoter they'd encountered who'd had romantic designs on songwriter
Ray Davies' teenage brother; and the lines "he is so gay and fancy free" attest to the ambiguity of the word's meaning at that time, with the second meaning evident only for those in the know.
[25] As late as 1970, the first episode of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show has the demonstrably straight Mary Richards' downstairs neighbor, Phyllis, breezily declaiming that Mary is, at age 30, still "young and gay."
There is little doubt that the homosexual sense is a development of the word's traditional meaning, as described above. It has nevertheless been claimed that
gay stands for "Good As You", but there is no evidence for this: it is a
backronym created as
popular etymology.
[26]
