The label "gay" was not always reserved for men who love men. What meanings have been attached to it and why have women lovers also been labelled with it?
Language, any language, evolves and changes, hand in hand with changes in society. It is not surprising, then, that some words also change their meanings in different ways during their existence. The term "gay" can serve as one of the examples of how a particular word can make a complete change of meaning. Nowadays, everyone certainly thinks they know exactly what it means. And perhaps they believe that men who find pleasure in other men have been referred to as gay since time immemorial. But - the mistake. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, traces the history of the word "gay" back to the French "gai", and Merriam Webster goes even further by linking it to the primordial Germanic "gāhi", which in translation refers to something quick or sudden. In summary, then, the English term "gay", the first records of which date from around the 13th century, is said to have been derived from the Old French word mentioned above, which in turn was derived from the Germanic term. And what was the dominant meaning? Happy, cheerful, excited, carefree...
From mirth to pleasure to vice.
But - you probably know it yourself - it's only a step from merriment and excitement to some kind of "perversion". So perhaps it's not surprising that as early as the 17th century, people who were considered to be addicted to sexual pleasure were labelled as gay. Perhaps this is why it seems quite logical that two centuries later the meaning of "gay" has only expanded - a "gay woman" was actually a prostitute, a "gay man" was a womanizer, and a "gay house" was simply and simply a public house (a brothel, if you will). And by the way, the phrase "gay it" at this time meant "having sex"...
Conversely, it may seem quite surprising that although the connotations attached to the word "gay" were obviously sexual in nature, it was still used in its original sense to refer to something/someone who was cheerful and happy (although... that's how people feel after sex, no?). However, a more radical change of meaning didn't come until the first half of the 20th century. Thus, the phrase "gay men" no longer referred only to men who enjoyed sex with many women, but also to men who did the same with men. In addition, by the 1930s, the term "gay cat" (gay was a Scottish variation of gay) was also used in the USA to refer to homosexuals or gay boys.
Being gay is better than being homosexual
Today's understanding of "gay" as referring to homosexuals is actually - in the perspective of the duration of human history - quite a novelty. Although it is possible to come across claims that the term "gay" was already in use by a given community at the beginning of the 20th century as a kind of "secret code", the majority consensus is rather that the term "gay" only began to appear in this context in the 1960s. "The Stonewall Riots (large-scale violent clashes between members of the LGBT community and the NYPD, which resulted in the formation of the first emancipation movements and are considered the beginning of the journey of LGBT people to equal rights, ed.) is the moment when the community began to use the word 'gay' to identify itself as such. In the beginning, the term was also an acronym for 'Good As You'," summarises Professor of English Raj Rao.
But apart from identification, former homosexuals had another reason for adopting the label 'gay' - they were trying to free themselves from a certain clinical connotation. Not surprisingly, according to The New England Journal of Medicine, homosexuality was not removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association until 1973! It was only thanks to this that the societal view that different sexual orientation is actually a behavioural disorder began to change... (Incidentally, since 1974, homosexuality was replaced by a new code for 'individuals afflicted by homosexuality' and 'anxiety' about homosexuality appeared in the manual until 2013, when it was finally removed).
Zdroj: Giphy
No wonder, then, that gay people were gay rather than people suffering from the disorder. "While homosexuality was a term referring to sexual preferences or tendencies and was also used pejoratively, gay is an identity. Since Stonewall, sexual politics also came into play and identifying as gay was a way for the community to be a part of that politics," Raoexplained, adding that gays had in effect appropriated the word and given it a whole new meaning. "While the conventional meaning of 'queer' is simply 'queer' and it is an inherently discriminatory term, the community today also uses it as a label for identity," he summed up.
Language, then, is organically mutable and malleable, and just as it can be discriminatory and hurtful, it can also serve to emancipate and express identity. This is evident precisely because of the many subcultures that have slowly been given, or are just beginning to be given, a voice. After all, trans people are still referred to by a significant part of the population with the clinical term 'transsexual', despite the fact that their identity has absolutely nothing to do with sexuality as such. That is why today they call themselves "trans people" or transgender. But that would be another terminological story...
