There Was A Time When Gay Meant Something Else
As a kid, going to school in the seventies and early eighties, I always remember the word gay to mean happy. I remember reading several British poets who agreed with this meaning and in fact led me to believe in that interpretation of the word.
I remember that when I was in the fourth grade, I wrote a poem that began with, “I want to be happy and gay.” In my mind I was using tautology, not that I knew about that figure of speech at that point of time.
Then suddenly something happened and the word gay started to mean homosexual. I do not know what causes this shift. Was it that homosexuals were inherently happier than straight people? I do not know if there was, in fact, any correlation with the word gay and happy anymore.
To stretch this line of thinking further, I must also admit that somehow the word gay seemed to mean not just a homosexual, but a male homosexual. Much later, I was informed that was not the case and gay meant exactly the same as the word homo-sexual.
So what is going on here? When I tautologically wrote, ” I want to be happy and gay,” I did not mean that I want to be attracted to the same gender. In fact, I wonder whether I knew about sexual attraction at all at that point of time, regardless of the target gender.
Why this is worrying is that tomorrow, another word might get shifted in meaning. Say, I write on my blog that, I really like intense people, and then the word intense starts to mean people who have sex with animals!
Sounds ridiculous, right? I agree! In fact, I would go to the extent of saying that this is how ridiculous I found the altered meaning of the word, gay.
So, please stop changing the meanings of words. Who am I talking to? Well, you know who you are. Sitting there on your high-perched ivory tower, deciding the fate of words and of the people who use those words.
On a more serious note, I think that languaging has a significant impact on the way we think. Probably there was no popular word for homosexual, because the very act of same gender intimacy was unacceptable.
As gay relationships gained increased acceptance, there started developing an entire vocabulary around such relationships.
Probably that is where the word gay came from. Of course, it has to also be about the fact that there is a perceived stereotype that homosexuals exist in a state of gay abandon, but that sounds like a pun.
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