AND ANOTHER THING
A poet could not but be gay in such a jocund company
PAUL JOHNSON
Now that the homosexual lobby, the most pushy and unscrupulous in our histo- ry, has split over Nazi-style outing, and so is temporarily on the defensive, is there any chance of restoring to normal usage that delightful word 'gay'?
A correspondent in Monday's Daily Tele- graph points out that the theft of this word by Californian sodomites, repeated by their brethren here and cravenly acquiesced in by lazy sub-editors and other linguistic monitors who should know better, means that many fine old songs are now complete- ly unperformable. He instances the roman- tic ballad 'I Surrender, Dear', which runs 'I may seem blythe, I may seem gay,/ It's just a pose, I'm not that way.' As he says, 'No singer can now attempt this with a straight face.'
Nor is this the only loss. 'Gay' was favoured by poets as well as song-writers: short, easily rhymed, instantly evocative, it is or was a word dear to the Muses. Now any line of poetry with the word in it, when read aloud in the classroom, gets a snigger, even from six- or seven-year-olds. No poet today would dream of using it in its original and proper meaning, and writers of prose, like myself, hesitate, even if there is no exact alternative.
Whatever else they are, homosexuals have certainly proved themselves dedicated enemies of the English language. To com- pound their felony over 'gay', they accuse anyone who has the courage to protest at their thieving of being 'homophobic', a bar- barous non-word which, if it means any- thing, signifies 'fear of the same', having nothing to do with sex at all. The mistake they made, in producing this abortion, was to confuse Latin with Greek — Latin homo, man, with the Greek homos, the same. The latter, of course, has a short 'o', something which very few homosexuals appear to realise. As I said to one of their lobbyists in a BBC studio, 'You might at least learn how to pronounce the name of your vice.'
Some homosexuals, defending their larceny, claim that 'gay' has a homosexual implication going back to the 18th century. I can find no evidence for this assertion. According to the OED, its primary meaning is 'full of joy and mirth — sportive, merry' etc.; also, 'airy, off-hand' and 'applied to women as a conventional epithet of praise'; it can also mean 'addicted to pleasure, bright, especially of colour, showy, brilliant' etc. In its slang sense 'a gay lady' meant a prostitute. The OED says gay was also applied, though rarely, to a 'gallant', but such a person was a male chaser of women not of boys. Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Historical Slang says gay applies, in its immoral sense, to women, 'leading an immoral or a harlot's life'; to 'turn gay is to become a prostitute', a 'gay bit' is 'a harlot', a 'gay girl' is 'a non-aristocratic prostitute', a 'gay house' is 'a brothel'. `Gaying it' meant sexual intercourse and to 'lead a gay life' was to live by prostitution. All these usages are 19th and early 20th century in origin and none has any reference to homo- sexuality. A 'gay tyke boy' was not a rent- boy but a dog-fancier.
Gay did not mean homosexual in the 18th century either. The most famous usage occurs in the 1703 play The Fair Penitent by Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718), which refers to `that haughty, gallant, gay Lothario'. A 'gay Lothario' is a male libertine, according to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a `seducer of women'. There is no instance of a Lothario being homosexual. Charles Churchill (1731-64) uses the phrase 'gay vil- lains' in his scurrilous attack on the Scots judge Alexander Wedderburn, Lord Loughborough, but the judge was certainly not a homosexual or Churchill would have said so. Samuel Johnson, who knew better than anyone else the meaning of 18th-cen- tury words, gives a straightforward render- ing in his Lives of the Poets; writing of John Gay's smash hit The Be xar's Opera: 'This play . . . was firs( offered to Cibber and his brethren in Drury Lane, and rejected; it being then carried to Rich had the effect, as was ludicrously said, of making Gay rich and Rich gay.' Equally, the phrase, 'gay deceiver', first used in the play Love Laughs at Locksmiths (1808) by George Colman, refers exclusively to -male seducers of women.
It could be that an association between gay and homosexuality began to form between the two world wars. Noel Cow- ard's 1932 song, 'Mad About the Boy', has the lines `1# has a gay appeal/That makes me feel/There may be something sad about the boy'. The song is sung by a girl of course. The possibility of a double entendre is obvious, though Coward was notoriously reluctant to use that kind of trick and would, I think, have deplored recent pro- ductions of his plays which imply otherwise. Openly and officially at least he kept his homosexuality to himself; to do otherwise was 'bad for business', as indeed it was in those days. But even if the misuse of gay was creeping in the 1930s, song-writers continued to use it in its traditional sense without the slightest sense of unease.
To give only one example, Oscar Ham- merstein, in his lyrics for Lady Be Good, written with Jerome Kern in 1941, pro- duced the famous song 'The last time I saw Paris' when, says he, 'her heart was young and gay'. I have an LP of the original pro- duction and there is absolutely no question of any sly joke in the singing: quite the con- trary . . . to jeer at Paris, then under the Nazi jackboot, would have been highly unpopular in showbiz circles or any other.
In short, there is no historical case for homosexual ownership of 'gay'. So can we have our word back, please? There are plenty of alternatives, by no means all of them pejorative, and many are short enough to keep the sub-editors happy. My own choice is to use glums, in the plural, which is certainly more accurate but may be thought offensive by some. The same objection, I suppose, applies to fag, though some American homosexuals want to go back to it, as do British ones to the good old queer. And what about camp or sod, both of which have a long literary lineage and no chance of ambiguity?
Within limits, homosexuals ought to be allowed to choose what to call themselves, and if they settle on something innocuous, we shall have no quarrel with them. But so long as they cling on to their stolen goods, those of us who cherish and wish to protect the English language will fight them to the last dyke.
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