On the Talking Point this week 'Gay's the Word - Or Is It?'I heard that tired old complaint the other day about how sad it was that that lovely word 'gay' had been 'stolen by the homosexuals'!
I'm not sure at which particular smash 'n' grab raid this shocking felony is imagined to have taken place, but I suspect it was more a case of a neglected and battered word having been hauled out of a skip in Dictionary Corner.
I'm not sure at which particular smash 'n' grab raid this shocking felony is imagined to have taken place, but I suspect it was more a case of a neglected and battered word having been hauled out of a skip in Dictionary Corner.
In its previous guise, 'gay' is a word I've most regularly associated with an era of 'bright young things' in the 20s and 30s. An age when young people were hellbent on being carefree and, as Noel Coward might have pirrupped, 'irreprehensibly irresponsible', as they sought to escape the heavy shadow of guilt cast by a generation wasted on the fields of the Somme or at Ypres. Glitter and be gay for tomorrow you might die, seemed to be their motto.
In time, a massive depression, another world war and the austerity of the 1950s eventually did for the word 'gay' and into the skip it went.
However, it's adoption by the early gay rights movement as early as the late 1960s draws close parallels with that earlier incarnation of the word.
Now, as then, there was another new and bright generation rebelling against the strictures of the past. Homosexual this time, as it happens, and no less determined to cast off a shadow. The shadow of repression that had seen them and their forebears closted for generations. A decisive moment to say to the world 'We're just gay. And that means as Good As You!'
So, gay is the word and it fits us very nicely, and anyway, the English language has got back the word 'queer', just about. SM/LG
