Have you ever wondered where the term “gay” originally came from to refer to homosexuals? In this article we will explain everything about the origin of the word “Gay”! Check out!
Apparently, the word “gay” comes from English and derives from the French entry “gai” which, in turn, and curiously, seems to have come from a German word, although this is not proven. The meaning of the word originally was “joyful”, including in American English translation.
Over time, this word began to be used in other ways. Around the 17th century, “gay” began to be synonymous with “immorality”. The definition of the entry in the Oxford dictionary at the time was “Addicted to pleasures and fun. Often euphemistically: From the loose and immoral life.”
Some time later, in the 19th century, the word was used to refer to prostitutes and, when referring to men, it indicated someone who had already had sex with many women – this is curious. In the same period, “gay” was also synonymous with “having sex”.
During the 1920s and 1930s the word came to be used even more distinctly, and when someone said that a man was gay, they did not mean that he had sex with many women or anything like that, but that he had sex. sex with other men.
From 1955 onwards, the word was used mostly to refer to homosexual men. In practice, the idea was precisely to stop using the term “homosexual” so often – many gay men thought and still think that this is a very clinical and formal way of talking about an absolutely normal behavior, which happens in all species of the world. animal kingdom in nature.
Certainly, what many people may not realize is that the gay community itself seems to have interfered in this change of meanings, after all homosexuals already referred to themselves as gay in the 1920s. At that time, homosexual women were just called "lesbians". , not of “gays”, as is more common nowadays. In the past, claiming a woman was gay was tantamount to claiming she was a prostitute.
Thus, from the 1950s to the present, the word “gay” has been used to define mainly homosexual men. For this reason, when the idea is to talk about more than one gender, in order not to run the risk of leaving someone out of the LGBT community, it is worth using the terms “lesbian”, “transgender” and so on.
And you, what do you think about the origin of the word “Gay”? 🙂
