Queerphobes love denying, erasing, and re-writing history to suit their queerphobic aims. Gay was a slur long, long before queer:
...around the early parts of the 17th century, the word [gay] began to be associated with immorality.  By the mid 17th century, according to an Oxford dictionary definition at the time, the meaning of the word had changed to mean  âaddicted to pleasures and dissipations.  Often euphemistically: Of loose and immoral lifeâ.  This is an extension of one of the original meanings of âcarefreeâ, meaning more or less uninhibited.
Fast-forward to the 19th century and the word gay referred to a woman who was a prostitute and a gay man was someone who slept with a lot of women (ironically enough), often prostitutes. Also at this time, the phrase âgay itâ meant to have sex.
The word queer, meanwhile, wasnât associated with homosexuality until the late 19th century.Â
By the late 19th century, queer was beginning to gain a connotation of sexual deviance, used to refer to feminine men or men who were thought to have engaged in same-sex relationships. An early recorded usage of the word in this sense was in an 1894 letter by John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry.
Before that, queer was simply an adjective, meaning eccentric.Â
Neither word started out as a slur.Â
Both became slurs, and then were reclaimed, and then became slurs again, and then were reclaimed again, etc. Gay was a particularly popular slur throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and some homophobes continue to use it as a slur to this day.
All of the terms we have for defining marginalized sexualities and genders have a fraught history.
If a group of people is marginalized, the terms used to define that group will be weaponized against them. Thatâs just how marginalization works.
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