“‘Gay,’ however, made its first appearance in the late 1920s and, among homosexuals, had secured its meaning as we know it long before the beginning of World War II. The purposes the word served were many, its value inestimable. Straight society had plenty of terms to describe men who liked men, either emphasizing their gender-role deviance (birdie, buttercup, fairy, flit, flutterer, nancy, pansy, yoo-hoo) or aiming to be more general in its characterization and disgust (faggot, homo, queer). Homosexuals used some of these words themselves, particularly faggot, pansy, and queer. The advent of ‘gay’ was a step in a new direction. Homosexuals had appropriated an existent word that had proved especially malleable over the last hundred years. The ‘gay’ women of the nineteenth century were the fancy women, the fallen women, the terrors of the virtuous middle class. By the early 1920s, “gay” had evolved into a less charged adjective. Any fun-loving person might have a gay time at a party or on vacation. (‘gay’ tenaciously retained its sexual edge in other forms - falsies were ‘gay decievers’ and a ‘gay cat’ was a ladies’ man.) Conscious of their status as fallen men, of the view of their lives as barren and joyless, of the stereotype of flippancy and silliness that attached to pansy culture, homoseuals latched on to a word that played off all of these different ideas and the word’s own sly history. Best of all, it could pass undetected in its double meaning among heterosexuals. ‘Is he gay?’ or ‘Did you have a gay time?’ sounded like innocent questions to much of America before 1960. To homosexuals, they epitomized the power of coded language and effectively, or intermittently, moved away from the belligerence of ‘faggot’ and ‘queer’.”
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