There was a period in the 90s and 00s when gay meant lame. I’m sure many used it hatefully, but schoolboys were just using play yard lingo.
When gay began to mean GAY, people stopped using it to mean “lame”.
This poster is probably 30-50 years old and likely meant no harm. There’s an internet meme “fake and gay” which has nothing to do with homophobia but instead refers to the 90s usage.
I think everyone is aware of this. However the playground usage is based on homophobia. I can assure you (being 38 myself) that we schoolboys all knew roughly what being gay was and that it was something bad and shameful. I do not want to get overly bent out of shape about some idiot’s casual homophobia on a random corner of the internet, but let’s please not deny that it is casual homophobia.
> When gay began to mean GAY, people stopped using it to mean “lame”.
This is completely ahistorical. The ‘lame’ meaning came long after the ‘homosexual’ meaning.
I’ll speak for myself then. I had no concept of what homosexuality was when I was 9, but parroted speech I heard at school. By 13, I was aware of the people using “gay” to mean “homosexual” and I began confronting anyone saying it, and stopped saying it myself as an adjective to mean lame.
I truly didn’t know. There was no internet, so my only source of culture was media and school.
Sure, some individuals may not have known, but the usage is very obviously rooted in homophobia, and any present day adult should be able to see that. People can make thoughtless mistakes and I don’t think this person is the devil, but the comment is a very clear instance of casual homophobia.
Yeh, I raised it here in that same spirit of acknowledging and calling it out.
I'm in my 30's, very happy that I barely hear this kinda direct homophobia anymore. I've long been unpacking the personal repercussions of `gay === very bad` being deep set in my brain in those formative years.
People stopped using it because of enormous mounting social pressure and increasing awareness of its homophobic roots, not as some innate linguistic slide. The "fake and gay" meme comes from 4chan where it has persisted since "gay" was still a pervasive pejorative term, not as a winking post-modern reference to it. Your optimism about the banality of this history is whimsical and it'd be nice to live in that world, but the actual harm of that usage cannot be divorced from the term regardless of your individual intent.
When gay began to mean GAY, people stopped using it to mean “lame”.
This poster is probably 30-50 years old and likely meant no harm. There’s an internet meme “fake and gay” which has nothing to do with homophobia but instead refers to the 90s usage.