GAY: Redux
I must preface the following by saying that I have many very good male friends, only one of which is not a total homosexual (in that he did experiment in college, I figure that gives him at least a tiny fraction).
That said, I present to you one of my favorite post-modern etymological phenomena: the abstractly derogatory adjective, gay.
Remember the school bus when you were say, seven (ca. 1985)? The fifth and sixth graders called anything and everything “gay”.
“I can’t come to your birthday party on Saturday because my Mom grounded me. She’s so gay.”
“Oh my god, she’s totally gay.”
Or:
“Nice K-mart Eastlands, Lydia, is your family too gay to shop at the mall?”
Or even, in the peculiar case of a girl talking to her popular female cohorts:
“Dirty David asked me if I wanted to be his girlfriend at recess today, during the kickball game. Could he even be any gayer?”
Well, yes, he could…as I would later find out. The men that would later come into my life tended to invite me to feel their freshly shaved perinea, ask me to buy them medicated enemas on my late-night trips to CVS (where I would typically just buy candy), and show me videos of themselves sucking huge cocks taken on their mobile phones earlier that day. I won’t even get into all of the tit-making and corset tugging I’ve been party to. Proof positive that little kickball David could indeed be way, way gayer.
At some point, after my brother and I adopted “gay” into our childish vocabularies (“mom, this casserole tastes gay”), my dad sat us down to explain that gay meant a man that liked other men, like cousin Jackie. This of course only led to Ted and I wanting to marry our respective best friends at the time.
When I was at college, the idea of gay meaning just homosexual was also threatened. It simply wasn’t exact enough. There were queers, twinks, womyn, daddys, bois, tops, bottoms, switch-hitters, femmes, bi-now-gay-laters—and an entire host of subdivisions clarified only by different colors of bandanas tucked into the back pockets of jeans.
Thus knowing that the word gay in its homosexual context was either too broad for our ultra-specifically compartmentalized times, or simply anachronistic, I managed to circumvent most of my guilt in bringing back an element of school bus “gay”.
Gay, of course, means happy or joyful, in its original form. The use of “gay” as a post-modern flavoring particle retains an element of this. Although difficult to define, something can basically be labeled “gay” when it tried to accomplish something positive, a purpose or end-effect, and fails in a rather silly manner.
For instance, I saw an opera a couple of nights ago. It opened with the entire chorus in modern dress (stovepipe hip-huggers, Freitag bags and all). Every few seconds a bright light would flash and they would all cower in various positions of mortal fear, owing to the brewing attacks facing the Venetian armada. As one could imagine, this very clear, deliberate attempt at bracing drama failed in the silliest of manners. I remember thinking to myself “Wow, this is pretty gay.” As the opera wore on, such failures ceased to be silly, and began offending my status as a human being with an IQ over seventy. Thus, the production was not “gay”, per se (cumulatively), rather, a total aesthetic abortion.
If a hard core, Wall Street businesswoman were to try to spice up her St. John’s suit with a rockabilly two-cherry brooch, it could also qualify, under the loose guidelines stated above, as “gay”. There was an obvious, even commendable attempt made…yet silliness was the end result.
“Gayness”, in this sense, rears its head relatively often in the ultra self-conscious world of avant-garde art and performance. “Yeah, I get what they were trying to do, but it really just came out pretty gay.”
I do actually use this term regularly, and apologize to any that might be offended by this fact. It has rubbed off on several people in my closest circle, including one of my best, actually gay male friends, Ralf.
“So, how are rehearsals for Le Coq d’Or going?
“Hmmm. It’s going to be pretty gay.”
And you know what, I went to the premiere, and it WAS! Postmodern re-re-re-assigned adjective correctly used. Way to go, Ralf!
When I was driving down to Stuttgart a few weeks ago, Tommy commented as we’d been stuck for forty-five minutes: “Fuck, this traffic is totally gay.”
NO! The traffic was shitty and fucking lame as shit, due to the scorching temperature…but it was in no way gay, as it didn’t try to accomplish anything positive, constitutionally. Incorrect use of re-re-re-assigned adjective.
“Gay” in the post-modern disassociative sense is a comment on failed whimsy, or a measure of ill-considered juxtaposition. Use it at your leisure, but I warn you, make sure you’re certain of the word’s appropriateness in the context of any given situation and moreover…
…make sure you carefully vet the company in which you choose to embark on your own little etymological experiment.
