Definition Essay: Homosexuality

This paper is so gay. SO gay. Oh, and by gay, I mean stupid. Not like two dudes making out or anything like that. But, sure, it can theoretically mean that, too. Within the culture we find ourselves in currently, “gay” can often be associated with a sense of being lame or stupid unless, yes, two dudes are making out. So how does a word that used to mean happy, and then mean homosexual, become a word that means unfortunate? Or is it because identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community is still synonymous with being lesser? The sexuality “gay” is becoming more accepted, while the word itself “gay” has become more of a casual insult at the same time. In attempts to dissect the reasoning behind this, I hurled the remainder of my gay — sorry, lame

One is the slang word to describe homosexuality, the other used by adolescents to describe something that sucks, or the definition used by teenage boys to express something that seems to be overly effeminate. Of course, the one that most know as the outdated definition, is the one that means happy or joyful. You know, Deck The Halls! Don’t you remember giggling in middle school when the words “don we now our gay apparel” were sung on church Christmas carol night (MetroLyrics)? So how could all of these extremely varied definitions sprout from a single word? The word “gai” came from English descent and originally did mean joyful. However, come early and middle 1600s, the word developed a negative connotation and began to mean wicked and would describe an addiction to immoral pleasures. Ironically, in the 1800s, it began to describe a man who would have a bunch of sex with women. Eventually, though, come 1900s, it finally gained its homosexual connotation and referred to men having sex with other men

So the question stands, if youth are so influential, how come they are most often the ones using gay as an insult? I conducted a survey among my peers to try and reach conclusions about this troubling issue. 56.4% claims they have used the word in a derogatory way to insult someone. However, 100% claims that they know someone in the LGBTQ+ community, further proving my perplexing vindication. If every single person knew someone gay (used as an umbrella term), why would they still use the word as slander? Another interesting discovery that I made from my survey was that 88.9% of takers believed that males called each other gay more so than females. One person who took my survey had an interesting take on this. They stated that they’d “been around boys who use the word ‘gay’ as an insult, and who are very careful to not seem even remotely affectionate with other dudes because it would ‘be too gay’”. They went on to criticize these boys they’ve been around and provide an interesting juxtaposition of them. They claimed that, at home, these same boys are the ones who are “fetishiz[ing] lesbians - or any affection between girls in general - while they're in public with other girls, or when they're at home watching lesbian porn”