When I was little, ‘gay’ meant ‘happy’. I remember watching The Flintstones on Saturday mornings (or maybe it was in the wee hours in the Summer before the regular programming started) and they had ‘a gay old time’. Even then (early-'70s), nobody said ‘We had a gay time at the park’ or ‘I’m feeling so gay!’ in normal conversation, but it didn’t carry the homosexual connotation. When I was a kid, the terms were ‘fag’ or ‘queer’ or ‘homo’. (Had I known they were pejorative terms, I wouldn’t have used them.) Somewhere along the line, ‘gay’ became to mean ‘homosexual’ and using ‘gay’ as ‘happy’ would elicit smirks. (Of course it was used in the homosexual sense before then. But it still had its former usage.)
The pop up (heh) ad I getting right now is two obviously happy mostly neked men laying on a bed telling me about a dream vacation I can win in Palm Springs California. I wonder if thats where Fred Flinstone lived?
Back to OP, I too can distinctly remember the Flinstone’s gay to happy wordage shift.
I recall an early 70’s sitcom scene in which a walk-on character announced he was gay and the reply was “Oh, we love happy people!”
I also recall children’s books from the late 60s and early 70s that used “gay” in the earlier sense of the word.
There was still a sizeable chunk of America in the 70s that didn’t understand “gay” to mean homosexual. Outside of urban areas, I’d say the point of saturation was sometime in the late 70s, probably coinciding with the airing of Soap, which featured Billy Crystal’s gay character.
In the 70s it moved into it’s final form where gay = homosexual.
I think Anita Bryant helped that a lot. Her protests moved homosexuality into mainstream and it became better to say “gay.”
I even recall when they started to make new Flintstone shows, in the mid and late 70s, they changed these to “We’ll have a grand (or great) old time”
I recall my mother commenting on that.
I remember when I heard Diana Ross was going to release “Why Do Fools Fall In Love,” (in the early 80s) asking myself, “I wonder if she’s gonna change the word gay?” She didn’t
Then AIDS totally cemented it. It was gay firmly after that. In fact AIDS was called GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) at first.
Then in the 90s gay stopped meaning “homosexual” totally and moved into gay = lame
Giving rise to the joke
Is that gay as in happy
Or gay as in lame
Or gay as in AIDS
I was born in late December of 1963. The day before, there was a tragic boat accident. A wedding reception was being held on a pleasure boat of some kind and it capsized and several people died. I know this because I have a copy of the L.A. Times from my birthday and one of the headlines is “Gay Wedding Party Turns Tragic.”
Given the caveat that memory can be fluid I will say this.
I distinctly remember the line “we will have a GAY old time” in the Flintstones intro song. I WANT to say I can remember the change myself…but of that I am not sure…however…
At some other point later in time I also distinctly remember a rather conservative/religious friend of mine (and or his father) complaining that gays/somebody had coopted the word gay because at the very least local the TV stations were now broadcasting something more along the lines of “we will have a GRAND old time”.
Keep in mind this was way before the days of internet, alternate TV stations, or even mass political mailings for that matter, so I doubt this was some “conspiracy theory” kind of thing this family was exposed to rather than something they observed for themselves. Maybe Paul Harvey or Andy Rooney had some rant that I missed though.
I would expect the change to be in the early 70s. The word meant “homosexual” since about the 1890s (or, rather, it meant “prostitute” – there were gay ladies and gay boys), but didn’t cross over into the mainstream until that time. I remember when I was getting married in 1977, my mother joked the “gay bachelor life” I was leaving was not what it used to be.
It probably started entering the mainstream just after the Stonewall riots in 1969, when the Gay Liberation and Gay Pride movements started coalescing. The first Gay Pride marches were in 1970, which got enough press for the meaning to cross over. Certainly by around 1975, the general public knew about the definition, and started using the word to mean homosexual exclusively.
Living languages have been changing for years, and this is just one example of that. This usage started to become mainstream in the 60’s, both senses were used in the 70’s (which made for some situation comedy jokes), and by the end of the 70’s & early 80’s this was the most common use.
An interesting phenomenon recently has been right-wing fundamentalists trying to ‘reclaim’ the word, by refusing to use it, and substituting ‘homosexual’. To the extent that if you see someone say ‘homosexual’ rather than gay nowadays, you can bet that they are a right-wing fundamentalist. (Just like some elderly racists I know that continue to use the obsolete term ‘negro’.)
This has led to some rather comical situations. For example, a Christian news service installed a computer program that changes the word ‘gay’ into ‘homosexual’ in all their news stories. So when sprinter Tyson Gay won at the finals for the Olympics, their story read “homosexual wins 100 meter final at Olympics”. I’m waiting to see if they have that old Christmas Carol about ‘don we now our homosexual attire’ …
Gay Liberation Marches in the early 70’s. The day of celebration was called “Gay Liberation Day”. That pretty much cemented the use of the word. Later the name changed to Gay Pride Marches.
A lot of words got hijacked in the 60’s. You had a tv show called Leave It to Beaver. Some of the men’s lodges were called Beaver Lodge. Out of nowhere, it suddenly became a word for the vulva. What the heck, happened?
If you do a Google search for “tyson gay homosexual onenewsnow”, there are many hits. Most of them at this point are blog posts from the time (Beijing Olympics in 2008), and OneNewsNow, the American Family Association’s news site that originally did it, changed all references to the sprinter’s name back to “Gay” within a day.
Here’s a blog post with a screen shot from OneNewsNow before they changed it.
Slight nitpick: Gay never really meant “happy.” it meant carefree and light-hearted and somewhat silly and not to be taken seriously. A party could be gay. A hat could be gay. A butterfly could be gay.
And yes, the stereotype of a homosexual man was “light in the loafers” . . . somewhat silly and not to be taken seriously. So the meaning didn’t actually change; it just became a little narrower . . . and then broadened to include all GLBT people.
That got started when a truck stop was trying to make money selling road kill and their free promotional bumper stickers they were giving out to truckers were tragically misinterpreted.
One data point. I have a tape of a poem read by Chuck Berry. I don’t know exactly when, but my tape is from 1972. The poem involves the main character leaving prison “so happy and so gay.” The audience cracks up, of course, and Berry, seemingly at least, is caught aback. I don’t think the recording was very old, but that clearly was at an inflection point, since Berry didn’t get it automatically.