GAY
Having or showing a merry lively mood.
Bright or showy
Given to or abounding in social pleasures
Licentious dissipated wanton
Apparently all the way back to the 17th century gay had a sexual connotation.
A GAY WOMAN was a prostitue
A GAY MAN was a womanizer
A GAY HOUSE was a brothel
Now we hear "gay" and it has only one meaning. No one is going to say "I saw a gay movie". Or "I attended a gay play"
Weird how words get co-opted and used for whatever the human mind can ascribe to them. I remember as a kid I read a book called THE GAY CHARIOT. At least I think it was. I doubt anyone puts "gay" in any title today unless he/she is specifically referring to LGBTQ. There ya go. Words are just words until homo saps get their hands on them and turn them into slang or pollute them with prejudice hate bias. That's homo saps for ya.
A head is a toilet. So is a throne. Weird.
The word may have started to acquire associations of immorality as early as the 14th century, but had certainly acquired them by the 17th.[2] By the late 17th century, it had acquired the specific meaning of "addicted to pleasures and dissipations",[12] an extension of its primary meaning of "carefree" implying "uninhibited by moral constraints". A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man a womanizer, and a gay house a brothel.[2] An example is a letter read to a London court in 1885 during the prosecution of brothel madam and procuress Mary Jeffries that had been written by a girl while slaved to a French brothel:
"I write to tell you it is a gay house...Some captains came in the other night, and the mistress wanted us to sleep with them."[13]
The use of gay to mean "homosexual" was often an extension of its application to prostitution: a gay boy was a young man or boy serving male clients.[14]
Similarly, a gay cat was a young male apprenticed to an older hobo and commonly exchanging sex and other services for protection and tutelage.[2] The application to homosexuality was also an extension of the word's sexualized connotation of "carefree and uninhibited", which implied a willingness to disregard conventional or respectable sexual mores. Such usage, documented as early as the 1920s, was likely present before the 20th century,[2] although it was initially more commonly used to imply heterosexually unconstrained lifestyles, as in the once-common phrase "gay Lothario",[15] or in the title of the book and film The Gay Falcon (1941), which concerns a womanizing detective whose first name is "Gay". Similarly, Fred Gilbert and G. H. MacDermott's music hall song of the 1880s, "Charlie Dilke Upset the Milk" – "Master Dilke upset the milk, when taking it home to Chelsea; the papers say that Charlie's gay, rather a wilful wag!" – referred to Sir Charles Dilke's alleged heterosexual impropriety.[16] Giving testimony in court in 1889, the prostitute John Saul stated: "I occasionally do odd-jobs for different gay people."[17]
Well into the mid 20th century a middle-aged bachelor could be described as "gay", indicating that he was unattached and therefore free, without any implication of homosexuality. This usage could apply to women too. The British comic strip Jane, first published in the 1930s, described the adventures of Jane Gay. Far from implying homosexuality, it referred to her free-wheeling lifestyle with plenty of boyfriends (while also punning on Lady Jane Grey).
A passage from Gertrude Stein's Miss Furr & Miss Skeene (1922) is possibly the first traceable published use of the word to refer to a homosexual relationship. According to Linda Wagner-Martin (Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and her Family, 1995) the portrait "featured the sly repetition of the word gay, used with sexual intent for one of the first times in linguistic history," and Edmund Wilson (1951, quoted by James Mellow in Charmed Circle, 1974) agreed.[18] For example:
They were ... gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, ... they were quite regularly gay.
— Gertrude Stein, 1922
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.
Bringing Up Baby (1938) was the first film to use the word gay in an apparent reference to homosexuality. In a scene in which Cary Grant's 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."[19]
In 1950, the earliest reference found to date for the word gay as a self-described name for homosexuals came from Alfred A. Gross, executive secretary for the George W. Henry Foundation, who said in the June 1950 issue of SIR magazine: "I have yet to meet a happy homosexual. They have a way of describing themselves as gay but the term is a misnomer. Those who are habitues of the bars frequented by others of the kind, are about the saddest people I’ve ever seen."[20]
