I always thought that the 1969 comedy The Gay Deceivers (about two guys trying to avoid the draft by posing as gay) had a lot to do with cementing the newer meaning of the word in the public consciousness.
I know at least a dozen people, all older than 50, who reflexively say something to the effect of “That used to be a perfectly nice word, before they took it over” whenever the word gay is used. What does this mean? No clue. Maybe it means I hang around with a lot of people from Chuck Berry’s generation.
While we’re at it, has there been a more recent, partial, shift (perhaps in the 90’s) from gay denoting homosexuality in general to indicating male homosexuality exclusively. Commonly, in contexts like “Yesterday there was a rally for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered rights”. Presumably, lesbian in such a context is redundant if gay means both genders.
It was also (probably rarely) a guy’s name. A notable car service station busincess in my hometown was named after its founder, Gay Johnson. He was alive through the 1970s, making commercials for his business.
An old joke to pull there was to drive up to the full service island, and when the attendant came out, you asked him, “Are you Gay?”
Gay Talese, author of some of the most popular “sociological” porn of the late 70s/early 80s (the books were packaged as serious sociological studies of the sexual fantasies of men and women…but I doubt I’m unique in having used them as fool-the-parents-with-innocuous-looking-covers jackoff manuals).
It means your friends have poor vocabularies.
I’m quite sure the original lyrics in the Flintstones had the word “gay.” I definitely recall this, and I’ve not watched the show in 40 years. These sites agree
http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/televisiontvthemelyrics-kidsshows/theflintstones.htm
http://bedrock.deadsquid.com/information/lyrics.php
http://www.metrolyrics.com/meet-the-flintstones-lyrics-the-b52s.html
I stopped checking after 4 but didn’t find any using “great” or “grand”.
I was all set to say “Jesus, dude, of course I did; why the attitude?”, but then I rechecked, and somehow, I had missed the entire last section of your post. Sorry about that. :smack:
That having been said, I don’t find most of your reasoning for why it can’t have been an urban legend of some sort convincing. It’s not like such things were unknown until recently, and they can spread by word of mouth just as well as by the Internet or whatever else. Your claims to have heard it personally are more convincing, though of course we all know how fallible memory can be for such things.
Anyway, what time period are those memories from?
The friends complaining about it, early 80s.
I was born in 1975, loved the Flintstones and always sniggered at ‘gay old time.’ The homosexual meaning was totally cemented by then.
FWIW, Gay Byrne is still extremely famous in Ireland, and yes, Byrne is pronounced burn. 
(He is male despite the middle name Mary - that’s an Irish thing). Gay being short for Gabriel, of course.
Did you mean to phrase it that way? It looks like you’re saying that, in the nineties, gay stopped meaning homosexual at all and only meant ‘lame,’ but that doesn’t seem likely since you described yourself as gay. Course, you could just be really self-deprecating.
The Online Etymology Dictionary says that the OED says 1951 so this would have been the earliest verifiable date in print when the OED was working on words starting with the letter ‘g’. Since the advent of scanning print and using search engines and the like one might be able to find what the OED would call an “antedate”.
Berry said “that word used to mean what it means” which isn’t far from what your friends say (though a bit earlier.) When I was growing up in the '50s I never heard gay having a homosexual connotation, though I don’t doubt it did in certain circles. But Lenny Bruce had a bit, in the Carnegie Hall concert, about a gay friend (not the word Lenny used) whose old mother was totally oblivious to his massive flamingness.
However, in the Father Flotsky routine, one of the inmates demands a gay bar, so that sets the meaning to the early '60s at least.
For some reason, this made me think of the Far Side cartoon where the elephant sits down at the table, looks around, sees what’s on everyone else’s table, and suddenly realizes he’s in a hay bar.
Given that the OP asked about when the transition completed–in other words, when did gay stop having any other meaning in normal conversation–I would aim for just before 1980. Both the loud complaints of Anita Bryant in the mid-1970s, (echoed by various curmudgeons over the years), followed by Billy Crystal’s Jodie Dallas character on Soap from 1977 - 1981, would have given that particular meaning such wide distribution that it became almost normative.
The word was used increasingly through the 1960s and 1970s, but I don’t think that it could be considered to have made the transition among the general populace until the end of the 1970s.
I remember seeing The Flintstones a few years earlier than the OP. Being a youngster I was oblivious to any sexual-orientation-related meaning of the word gay, but even so it wasn’t a word you’d expect to hear in everyday conversation meaning cheerful or happy. It sounded a bit old fashioned, like “fisticuffs”. Used to mean cheerful it seemed to me to have a vaguely feminine air in the sense that you would sooner expect to hear it used by a woman than a man, and the woman using it would probably be a character in an old novel or film.
Be that as it may, the word has gone through some interesting changes. At various times, it has denoted bawdiness, devotion to pleasure, and undue lack of reserve in behavior. To “get gay” could mean starting fights or otherwise making trouble in a dance hall or nightclub. To Quakers, it could mean turning worldly.
Because you were already working and probably out of school in the early 80s, it is likely you just weren’t exposed to it, or maybe this usage didn’t spread to the area where you lived. To expound on my original anecdote, I clearly remember going to my cousins house to play on their new Commodore 64 when I was about 7-8 years old. The Commodore 64 came out in 1982. Every other statement by my cousin’s friends was about how “gay” everything was. That was the first time I heard the usage, and it prompted me to ask my Mom what “gay” meant.
By the way, I am gay also, not that it makes a difference in the fact that this usage of gay = lame (and as a general, homophobic put-down) was clearly already in use in the early 80s. At this point in time, the anti-gay connotations were pretty evident as well. I noticed that this usage of the word “gay” became less frequent among my classmates in the later 80s. I think the usage almost disappeared until it reached epic proportion in the late 90s, probably due to crude and juvenile shows like South Park which “legitimized” its popular use in this manner.
Here’s a snippet from Wikipedia: Gay - Wikipedia
I recommend this link, as it gives a great answer to the OP’s original question.
The Flintstone Comedy Hour (1972–73) changed “we’ll have a gay old time” to “we’ll have a groovy time”. Unfortunately, “groovy” was just as outdated by then as “gay” (in the lighthearted sense).
From a letter to the “Dear Ann Landers” syndicated newspaper column, 1963:
Time magazine, 1965, on a psychiatrist’s therapy:
That’s the general timeframe I assumed (1977 - 1981). I still can’t personally place it though. Just ‘around that time’.
Now that you mention it, I do seem to recall ‘groovy time’.
The first time I saw the “grand old time” lyric in the Flintstones theme was when Denny’s was giving away promotional Fred, Dino, and Baby Puss stuffed toys around 1989. The lyrics of the song were printed on the menu, and I noted the “politically correct” rewording. I’ve never seen any of the specials which used “grand”, although I do remember the “groovy time” of the Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show.