1888 Teen are describing joyfull things as “gay”.
I’m still trying to break the habit of using “Joe is gay for tennis” to mean Joe really loves tennis.
Ye should visit Ireland where they use ‘yer man’ to also refer to an acquaintance or somebody you have dealings with.
“Gay” as an insult was already falling out of favor around 1998. Source: I was there.
Well it was very much alive by 2008. Source: was a not straight teen in 2008.
Yeah, it was used inflationary around that time. I remember the parents of our friend group asking us to please not use the word in that way because it was so excessive.
Depends on where you were.
I was there too, it definitely wasn’t
“Wanna know how I know you’re gay?” And “gayyyyy!” from Community were like late 2000s
Guess I had a better friend group.
Guess your friend group lived under a rock lol
Or just location differences, but was absolutely a normalized thing to say when I grew up. Didn’t mean homosexual or anything, just anything that sucked was “gay”
“The 40 Year Old Virgin” came out in 2005 and one of the most memorable scenes in my opinion is two guys (Paul Rudd and somebody else) playing video games making gay jokes. “Do you know how I know you’re gay? You like Coldplay.”
If Hollywood was still doing it in the mid-00’s then you can bet it was still popular in highschools across the USA.
Friend group? Look at this guy. We used to hang around with people just because they lived in the same area.
Sadly it’s still very much used as an insult in some contexts. Source: I am here.
Maybe it was in 1998, but it’s still used as one in my queer daughter’s middle school today.
For real. I hear younger folks say “people didn’t know it wasn’t cool back then” – no, lots of people knew.
It really is a thing, too. Everything is gay with my kid’s friend group. And it’s a good thing, like “oh, I love this game” “me too!”, “yeah, it’s totally gay”.
I just shake my head and ignore it lol.
Wat? I’ve never heard it used like that… That said, I live in the UK so maybe it isn’t a thing here yet.
Yeah, it’s a serious thing.
I grew up in the eighties mostly (gen x), and both gay and queer were still used as insults.
But both have been reclaimed now, almost totally in the case of gay and totally in the case of queer.
My kid has in person friends here, and online friends across the world. They all use gay is a friendly and joking descriptor. It’s a term of endearment even. Canadians, Germans, British, French, and (of all bloody places) South Africa for sure have kids that actively use it as a positive indicator. It’s mostly a tween to teen thing though, the young adults are less prone to it.
Whats crazy to me is that kids from Texas use it that way. I mean, we live in the south, but Texas is actively anti lgbtq on an official level. But even the straight kids are using gay as a positive term for people and things.
She only has two friends from the UK on discord; one in London, one in Wales somewhere (he never has mentioned the town or city). Both of them use it that way. The guy is straight, and someone will tell him he’s super gay when he does something nice, and he’s just “yeah, I know”.
It’s a really cool thing to see happening, for me. Back in the nineties, I started being a fairly active gay rights advocate after seeing exactly how bad good people got treated for being gay. I was a bouncer for a while there, and seeing assholes try to hurt and kill patrons at the gay bars just for being gay pissed me off.
Seeing (or rather, hearing) gay not just turn into a neutral term for homosexual men, but into a slang term for something being cool makes my soul happy. Considering the original definition of the word, that means I’m gay as hell lol.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gay
They could be technically correct in a early 20th century kind of way…
Removed by mod
next on the chopping block should be the R slur, though unsure about reclamation
