Pride flag flying over San Francisco’s Castro district, 2010
11 December 2023
Gay traditionally meant joyful or light-hearted but in the last century came to mean homosexual. The word, in its various meanings, is of somewhat uncertain origin. We’ve got a pretty good, albeit by no means beyond doubt, idea where the word originally comes from, and there are several plausible suggestions for how the word became adopted by the queer community.
The English word comes from the Anglo-Norman gai, but where this French word comes from is in question. There are cognates in other Romance languages, notably Provencal, Old Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, but no likely Latin candidate for a root exists. The word is probably Germanic in origin, with the Old High German gāhi, fast or fleeting, suggested as a likely progenitor.
The Anglo-Norman word had multiple meanings which were carried over into English. It could mean happy or frolicsome, lighthearted or fickle, impetuous or reckless, attractive or amorous, or lascivious and lewd. As a noun, gai referred to a lewd person.
The first appearances of gay in the written record of English is in a marginal note to a copy of the Ancrene Riwle, a medieval guide for anchoresses. This particular copy dates to c. 1225. The line is written in pencil in the margin of one of the manuscripts by that manuscript’s original and primary scribe. It was apparently intended to be the heading of this section, but the scribe subsequently forgot to rubricate the pencil mark (i.e., copy over it in red ink):
Hwi þe Gay world is to fleon.
(Why one is to retreat from the gay world.)
The text to which this marginal note refers reads:
Nuȝe habbeð iherd mine leoue sustren
forbisne of þe alde laȝe & eken of þe ne
owe. hwi ȝe aȝen ane lif swiðe to luuien. ef
ter þe forðbisne hereð nu resuns. hwi me ach
fleo þe world achte.(Now my beloved sisters, you have heard examples of the old law & also of the new why you should love the solitary life so much. After these examples, now hear some reasons why one ought to retreat from the world.)
The meaning of gay here is not quite certain, but given that this is a very early use, it is probably being used in the original Anglo-Norman sense of lewd or lascivious, a description of the sinful world which the anchoress should shun.
By the late fourteenth century the sense of gay meaning light-hearted or carefree was well established in English, and this sense would remain the primary sense of the word until the late twentieth century. For example, Chaucer uses gay in this sense in the poem Troilus and Criseyde in a passage where Criseyde listens to a nightingale as she is falling asleep:
A nyghtyngale, upon a cedre grene,
Under the chambre wal ther as she ley,
Ful loude song ayein the moone shene,
Peraunter in his brides wise a lay
Of love, that made hire herte fressh and gay.
That herkned she so longe in good entente,
Til at the laste the dede slep hire hente.(A nightingale, upon a cedar green,
Under the chamber wall there where she lay,
Sang very loudly facing the moon’s sheen
Perhaps in its bird’s manner a lay
Of love, that made her heart fresh and gay.
She listened to that so long with good intent,
Till at the last the sleep of the dead took her.)
But gay meaning amorous or lascivious was also in use at this time, and this sense would also continue to the present day. In the late fourteenth century, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath uses this sense in describing her fifth husband, a passage that attests that the phenomenon of abused spouses refusing to leave their abusers is nothing new:
Now of my fifthe housbonde wol I telle.
God lete his soule nevere come in helle!
And yet was he to me the mooste shrewe;
That feele I on my ribbes al by rewe,
And evere shal unto myn endyng day.
But in oure bed he was so fressh and gay,
And therwithal so wel koude he me glose,
Whan that he wolde han my bele chose;
That thogh he hadde me bete on every bon,
He koude wynne agayn my love anon.(Now of my fifth husband I will tell.
God let his soul never go to hell!
And yet he was to the me the greatest rogue;
That I feel on my ribs, one by one,
And will ever until my dying day.
But in our bed he was so lively and gay,
And therefore he could deceive me so well,
When he would have my “pretty thing”;
That though he had beat me on every bone,
He could win back my love straightaway.)
By the end of the eighteenth century, this amorous sense of gay had developed another, more specific sense denoting prostitution. A place or house that was gay would be a brothel. We see it in Mary Robinson’s 1799 novel The False Friend:
It was in vain I assured the person who detained me that I did not legally owe Mrs. Blonzely the sum she demanded. The charge was made for board and lodging, for which I was informed that, though under age, I might be arrested. I pleaded inability to pay the sum; declared that the promissory note had been extorted from me, and that the whole transaction was nothing less than an infamous imposture.
“That you must prove and settle in a court of law,” said the bailiff. “We shall do our duty.”
“Who, and what is Mrs. Blonzely?” said Mr. Pew calmly.
“That is not my business,” replied the bailiff. “She keeps a gay house at the west end of the town. I dare say Miss can inform you for what purpose.” Mrs. Pew changed colour, and Mr. Paisley began to whistle. The two ruffians laughed, and I was near sinking on the floor with confusion.
And at some point, this amorous / promiscuous / prostitution sense developed into another sense denoting homosexuality. Exactly when this happened is difficult to pin down. It was clearly in place by the 1920s but is likely older in queer slang, a genre of speech that was unlikely to make it into publication at the time. The difficulty in pinning down the change in meaning is also due to the word’s multiple meanings and its use as a double entendre. It’s easy to read a queer meaning into a use that would not have been intended or received that way at the time.
Cover for the sheet music of Will S. Hays’s 1868 The Gay Young Clerk in the Dry Goods Store
A good example of the ambiguity of meaning and the potential for reading an anachronistic sense into a text is seen in the 1868 song by Will S. Hays The Gay Young Clerk in the Dry Goods Store:
It’s about a chap, perhaps you know,
I’m told he is ‘Nobody’s beau,’
But maybe you all knew that before,
He’s a lively clerk in a Dry-Goods Store.
O! Augustus Dolphus is his name,
From Skiddy-ma-dink they say he came,
He’s a handsome man and he’s proud and poor,
This gay young clerk in the Dry-Goods Store.
On its face, this use of gay would seem to be in the sense of happy, light-hearted. But the picture on the cover of Hays’s sheet music is clearly that of an effeminate—or perhaps metrosexual would be a better descriptor—man, and the fact that Dolphus is “nobody’s beau” hints at his being queer. It’s also claimed that Hays himself sometimes performed in drag. I have seen no evidence of this being true, but it wouldn’t be surprising or necessarily an indication of his sexual orientation. Drag performances were as common, if not more so, back then as they are today, and such performances were less likely to have been received as queer in the nineteenth century.
Furthermore, in the 1860s the comedic trope of the queer and effeminate male store clerk was common (and it still exists today). For example, there is this parody of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself that appears in the 17 March 1860 issue of Vanity Fair:
COUNTER-JUMPS.
A Poemettina.—After Walt WhitmanI am the Counter-jumper, weak and effeminate.
I love to loaf and lie about dry-goods.
I loaf and invite the Buyer.
I am the essence of retail. The sum and result of small profits and quick returns.
The Picayune is part of me, and so is the half cent, and the mill only arithmetically appreciable.
The shining, cheap-women sarsnet is of me, and I am of it.
And the white bobbinet,
And the moire antique, thickly webbed and strown with impossible flowers,
And the warm winter gloves lined with fur,
And the delicate summer gloves of silk threads,
And the intermediate ones built of the hide of the Swedish rat,
All these things are of me, and many more also.
For I am the shop, and the counter, and the till,
But particularly the last.
And I explore and rummage the till, and am at home in it.
And I am the shelves on which lie the damaged goods;
The damaged goods themselves I am,
And I ask what’s the damage?
I am the crate, and the hamper, and the yard-wand, and the box of silks fresh from France,
And when I came into the world I paid duty,
And I never did my duty,
And never intend to do it.
For I am the creature of weak depravities;
I am the Counter-jumper;
I sound my feeble yelp over the woofs of the World.
But even if the character of Hays’s Dolphus was understood to have been queer in 1868, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the word gay carried that meaning at that time.
Another early appearance that is of ambiguous meaning is from Gertrude Stein’s 1922 short story Miss Furr & Mrs. Skeene which appeared in the July 1923 issue of Vanity Fair. In the story Stein continually repeats the word gay. What Stein may have meant in using the word is polysemous and ambiguous, and given that it’s Stein, the meaning of the word is of less importance than the sound and the rhythm of the prose:
They stayed there and were gay there, not very gay there, just gay there. They were both gay there, they were regularly working there both of them cultivating their voices there, they were both gay there. Georgine Skeene was gay there and she was regular, regular in being gay, regular in not being gay, regular in being a gay one who was one not being gay longer than was needed to be one being quite a gay one. They were both gay then there and both working there then.
But by 1929 we have an obvious, albeit somewhat coded, use of gay to refer to homosexuality. It appears in a song titled “We All Wore a Green Carnation” from Noël Coward’s play Bitter Sweet. The green carnation alludes to the 1894 novel of that title by Robert Hitchens. The novel’s main character, loosely based on Lord Alfred Douglas, sports the green flower and is friends with a character loosely based on Oscar Wilde. Hitchens’s Green Carnation was published shortly before Wilde’s arrest and conviction for “gross indecency” and sold rather well as a result of the notoriety. While the flower was not a symbol of homosexuality in the novel or in real life, Coward’s use of the phrase would certainly evoke such an association from at least some of the audience. The song is sung by “four over-exquisitely dressed young men […] wear[ing] in their immaculate buttonholes green carnations.” The lyrics are:
Blasé boys are we,
Exquisitely free
From the dreary and quite absurd
Moral views of the common herd.We like porphyry bowls,
Chandeliers and stoles,
We’re most spirited,
Carefully filleted “souls.”Pretty boys, witty boys, too, too, too
Lazy to fight stagnation,
Haughty boys, naughty boys, all we do
Is to pursue sensation.
The portals of society
Are always open wide,
The world our eccentricity condones,
A note of quaint variety,
We’re certain to provide,
We dress in very decorative tones.
Faded boys, jaded boys, womankind’s
Gift to a bulldog nation,
In order to distinguish us from less enlightened minds,
We all wear a green carnation.We believe in Art,
Though we’re poles apart
From the fools who are thrilled by Greuze.
We like Beardsley and Green Chartreuse.
Women say we’re too
Bored to bill and coo,
We smile wearily,
It's so drearily true!Pretty boys, witty boys, you may sneer
At our disintegration,
Haughty boys, naughty boys, dear, dear, dear!
Swooning with affectation.
Our figures sleek and willowy,
Our lips incarnadine,
May worry the majority a bit.
But matrons rich and billowy
Invite us out to dine,
And revel in our phosphorescent wit,
Faded boys, jaded boys, come what may,
Art is our inspiration,
As as we are the reason for the “Nineties” being gay,
We all wear a green carnation.Pretty boys, witty boys, yearning for
Permanent adulation,
Haughty boys, naughty boys, every pore
Bursting with self-inflation.
We feel we’re rather Grecian,
As our manners indicate,
Our sense of moral values isn’t strong.
For ultimate completion
We shall have to wait
Until the Day of Judgment comes along.
Faded boys, jaded boys, each one craves
Some sort of soul salvation,
But when we rise reluctantly but gracefully from our graves,
We’ll all wear a green carnation.
So we can say that by the end of the 1920s, the use of gay within the queer community to refer to themselves was common and was just starting to appear as an obviously coded reference in mainstream culture. But the queer sense of gay would not become common in heteronormative discourse until the 1960s.
Cary Grant going “gay all of a sudden” in 1938’s Bringing Up Baby
The 1938 movie Bringing Up Baby, starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, is often cited as an early appearance of this sense of gay in heteronormative discourse. But again, this is coded reference. At one point in the film Grant, wearing a woman’s fur-trimmed dressing gown, answers the door, and when asked why he is wearing women’s clothing replies, “Because I just went gay all of a sudden.” Gay and to go gay had an established sense of becoming joyously uninhibited or flamboyant, so the line is a clearly a double entendre intended to slip past the censors.
We’ve established that gay had become an in-group term among the queer community by the 1920s, but how did that sense develop? There two leading possibilities. Either, or both, of which could be true. It may have developed from the sense of gay meaning uninhibited or flamboyant, with connotations of hedonism. Alternatively, it may have developed from the prostitution sense, becoming associated with male prostitutes and then to queer men more generally.
There are several other explanations that are commonly proffered that are less likely or even outright wrong.
One is that it developed from the term gay cat, a noun meaning a young tramp who has an older hobo as a mentor. Such relationships sometimes, but by no means always, involved the exchange of sexual favors. The problem is that this particular sense of gay cat does not appear until after the queer sense of gay was already established. Originally a gay cat was a tramp, often young or simply well dressed, who was willing (or unwilling, depending upon the source) to work for money. Early uses of the term vary in meaning. The earliest example of the term I’ve found is in the San Francisco Examiner of 1 October 1893:
The young man had thus given me a good idea of his plans and I told him that I wanted work, and that I would not refuse any kind of job. He then told me that if work was my “lay” I ought to see “the gang” at the park by the Courthouse the next day, and if I wanted to work the “dynamiters,” “gay cats” and “stiffs” could tell me where men were wanted. He promised to meet me at the Courthouse park the next day and aid me all he could. Before we parted I got him to explain that a “dynamiter” was at tramp who carried a blanket as a pretense that he was an honest laborer hunting for a job, but that he would not work longer than necessary to obtain money for a debauch; that a “gay cat” was a “foxy boy” who made great pretenses that he wanted a situation and told pathetic stories to people he was sure had nothing for any one to do, not leaving them until he got money, which he was sorry he could not do something for; that a “stiff” was a tramp would not work under any circumstances.
Here gay cat is associated with youth and an unwillingness to work, but there is no notion of mentorship by an older tramp. The use of foxy is apparently in the sense of sly or cunning, but the sexually attractive sense was current in the 1890s, so that’s a subtext.
And there’s this one from Wisconsin’s Racine Times of 3 August 1895 that says that a gay cat is simply a well-dressed tramp:
These tramps have a language of their own, or at least you might call it a language, as persons not familiar with their slang would be able to under stand hardly anything they said. For instance if a tramp should wish to send in the alarm that a policeman was coming, he would say: “Duck here comes de bull.” A well dressed tramp is called a “gay cat,” beer or whiskey “slops.” a drink “lickup,” a sleep “a flop,” arrest, “slow,” alcohol “white line,” begging “mocking” and there is a whole lot more expressions which are original with them which would fill a small sized book.
Attestations linking a young gay cat with an older tramp don’t appear until well into the twentieth century. In this case, it seems that gay in gay cat comes from wearing good clothes and later, once the queer sense of gay had been established, came to imply a homosexual relationship among tramps.
An incorrect etymology that is sometimes proffered is that the queer sense of gay is a borrowing from the French gaie, a feminine cognate of the English word that supposedly was used to describe queer men dating back to the sixteenth century, as opposed the masculine gai. But the queer sense of the French word does not date back nearly so far. It is a late twentieth-century borrowing from English, not the other way around.
And one that can be dismissed out of hand is that gay is an acronym for good as you. If the acronym was ever actually used, it was created after the queer sense of gay was well established and is not the origin of the word.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2008. s.v. gai1, adj. & n.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385). Stephen A Barney, ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006, 109, lines 2.918–24.
———. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” (c.1390). The Canterbury Tales, lines 3.503–12. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.
“Counter-Jumps.” Vanity Fair, 17 March 1860, 183. Alexander Street: Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines.
Coward, Noël. “We All Wore a Green Carnation” (1929). Collected Plays: Two. London: Methuen, 1986, 134–36. ProQuest.
Dobson, E.J., ed. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle. Early English Text Society 267. London: Oxford UP, 1972, 127. London, British Library, Cotton MS Cleopatra C.vi, fol. 68v.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. gay, adj. [Green’s citations in this entry should not be taken at face value. Many of the early ones are of ambiguous meaning, and at least one, the 1922 citation of Fred Fisher’s song Chicago is to 1970s-era lyrics sung by a drag performer, not a citation dating to 1922.]
“Haven for Tramps.” Racine Times (Wisconsin), 3 August 1895, 5/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Hays, William Shakespeare. The Gay Young Clerk in the Dry Goods Store (sheet music). New York: J. L. Peters, 1868. Johns Hopkins University: Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. gai, adj.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2022, s.v. gay, adj., adv., & n., gay cat, n.
Robinson, Mary. The False Friend, vol. 2 of 4. London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799, 2.292–93. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Stein, Gertrude. “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene.” Geography and Plays. Boston: Four Seas, 1922, 17–22 at 17. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Tramping with Tramps.” Examiner (San Francisco), 1 October 1893, 11/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Image credits: Pride flag—Benson Kua, 2010, Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license; Gay Young Clerk—J. L. Peters, 1868, public domain image; Bringing Up Baby—RKO Pictures, 1938, fair use of a single screenshot from the film to illustrate the topic under discussion.
