Coincides with my experience. Preppie was around back when I was in HS, first heard “yuppie” while myself in college in the early 80s.
I’m skeptical. This assumes gay people open enough in east Texas to br identifiable. Wasn’t that time when gays still hid?
I remember hearing the term in the early 1980s.
Early eighties. I distinctly remember being on a Blue Line El train in Chicago at the Irving Park Station reading about it in the Tribune. I can’t recall the exact year.
As I recall, the term yuppie had a close association with young prosperous Reaganites, which was newsworthy because young people were supposedly becoming Republicans instead of leaning lefty. The Alex Keaton phenomenon, if you will.
Yuppie has always had a pejorative tang to it.
(Off-topic: Did you guys know that I’ve been spelling pejorative wrong all these years? I always thought it was prejorative, as in prejudice. Huh.)
Mid-late eighties. Thinkpieces about the show Thirtysomething, and also that episode of Cheers in which Norm pretends to be a gay interior decorator to gain favor with a pair of yuppies.
You and puzzlegal are right, it was preppies not yuppies. My memory must be fading as well.
The first specific recollection of hearing the term that I recall was during a radio advertisement for a high end apartment. Maybe 1984-ish? Where the announcer was describing the squash courts, gyms, swimming pool, private parking, and other amenities they offered and the announcer said "even though I hate the term, I guess you could call me a “yuppie”.
Early 80s. It could be that the first time I heard it, it was as an acronym. Maybe I read it in a magazine article, rather than hearing it “on the street”.
Preppies are another kettle of fish. I first became aware of them in 1980, in college. I thought it was a new thing. So I find it interesting to watch older TV shows and see the preppie uniform was in place long before us hick farmers ever heard of it. Culture used to take a while to seep to the midwest.
As a kid around 1983 or '84, although I didn’t hear it, I read it in the paper and promptly asked my parents, “Aunt R. and Uncle G. are sort of yuppies, right?” They informed me that there was no “sort of” about it 
The first reference I found in our local newspaper archive was 1984. That’s about the time I probably first heard it. (We’re always a little behind the times.)
Mid to early 80s. I think I first noticed the word in a magazine article about the preppie generation becoming the yuppie generation.
And from a cursory glance thru some newspaper archives, it really started picking up steam and gaining some currency in 1982–at least in the printed word.
Here’s Amazon’s listing for The Yuppie Handbook from 1984. By then, the term must have been familiar enough to be a punchline, but still novel enough to be a clever punchline.
“Preppie” is what the protagonist’s girlfriend calls him in Erich Segal’s Love Story which came out in 1970. So the term had probably been in use for some years before that.
Ha ha, I would love to say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s it!’. But I must fess up to the truth that I was mis-remembering. I bow to the consensus.
Oops, that was my intent, sorry… and thanks.
It assumes nothing of the kind. They are a bit homophobic and slightly racist as well, but they do have a couple of television sets and thus have a working knowledge of the world.
This has got to be the weirdest reason I’ve been accused of lying. Why in the world would I lie about having homophobic relatives. I’m about as far from that as possible, in fact my own daughter is gay. It’s one of the main reasons I don’t associate with that branch of the family tree.
Not suggesting that you’re lying but that you may be mixing up different memories.
Would there have been gay yuppies shown on television then?
And actually wasn’t Billy Crystal’s character of Jody one of the first gay characters on television? I think that started in 1977.
I remember the salary minimum to qualify as a Yuppie in 1984: $40K
By 1985, the term was known enough to inspire the song Yuppiedrone by The Pheromones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg2iKxbeucQ
Well first of all, as I mentioned, the people he referred to probably weren’t actually gay - he just used that pejorative term for the yuppie lifestyle. And of course, culturally, they would have been on TV. There would have also been news, news shows and variety shows. Lots of Yuppies on TV.
My memory of that is clear. My memory of when it was, not so much.