Gay & Queer

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Thanks for pointing me towards Cory; maybe I dismissed him too quickly when I
started researching QUEER vs. GAY a few years ago. All I know right now is
that "Donald Webster Cory" is a pseudonym (for just whom I can't remember),
and THE HOMOSEXUAL IN AMERICA, A SUBJECTIVE APPROACH, though apparently
written c.1951, was not published until a decade later in any of the texts
that I have seen (though I haven't seen them all). The authoritativeness of
the book, then, would seen to depend primarily on the reliability of Cory's
personal observations, which are more than a little hard to judge, given that
he is pseudonymous. Suppose (as seems likely) that he was born between 1920
and 1930; this would give him first-hand knowledge of the adult language
around him beginning no earlier than, say, 1937 and perhaps as late as 1945
or so. My research tells me that this was exactly the period when the term
GAY was gaining cult prominence in homosexual circles in big cities and
beginning to move out into the rest of the USA.

At any rate, Cory is no linguist, and his unnamed "experts" are not in print
anywhere that I have found. I can't say anything about the French, but I
don't put much stock in the putative influence of French slang on American
homosexuals. Particularly inaccurate--at least I have been able to find NO
evidence in the printed record anywhere that would support such a
statement--is Cory's assertion that "certainly by the nineteen-thirties it
was the most common word in use among homosexuals themselves." Again, it is
unlikely that "Cory" was an adult in the 1930s, at least not in queer
circles. The evidence is overwhelming that, in the 1930s, QUEER was the most
common word of self-reference (followed by FAIRY). It wasn't really replaced
by GAY until the 1960s. The statement that "in the decade following America's
entry into the Second World War I find [the word to have been in use among
not only] magazine writers and gossip columnists, but even radio announcers"
also strikes me as a little misleading in its emphasis. Yes, GAY 'homosexual'
was used increasingly throughout the 1950s, particularly in big cities, and
became more and more known to the general public during that decade. But it
wasn't until the 1960s that mainstream culture began to notice the new
meaning so much that they began to complain very loudly that GAY was being
usurped.

The subculture gay literature of the 1920s and 1930s is not easy to come by,
but that which I have been able to examine is remarkably missing GAY in the
sense of 'homosexual'; the word does occur occasionally in its primary slang
sense of 'fun' or 'frivolous' or 'cheeky', and it is tempting to
anachronistically project a homosexual reading back onto the earlier texts,
but I don't think it is justified.

Further research certainly might turn up additional evidence, particularly in
the rare and unpublished texts that you mention. Much of what I have
concluded comes about because I HAVE looked at some of the novels, and I have
also relied on George Chauncey's remarkable archive work in the 1930s&1940s
New York City police interrogation records (see his book, IN GAY NEW YORK).
Meanwhile, I have tried to document all the available sources in my
DICTIONARIES article in 1998, and I will be happy to send you a copy of the
article if you would like to see it.


In a message dated 8/25/99 9:06:47 AM, jdespres at MAIL.M-W.COM writes:

<< Donald Webster Cory offers the following account of the semantic
genesis of GAY in his book The Homosexual in America (1951), pp.
107-08):

How, when, and where this word originated, I am unable to say.  I
have been told by experts that it came from the French, and that in
France as early as the sixteenth century the homosexual was called
"gaie."  Significantly enough, the feminine form was used to describe
the male.  The word made its way to England and America, and was used
in print in some of the more pornographic literature soon after the
First World War.  Psychoanalysts have informed me that their
homosexual patients were calling themselves "gay" in the
nineteen-twenties, and certainly by the nineteen-thirties it was the
most common word in use among homosexuals themselves.  It was not
until after Pearl Harbor that it became a magic by-word in
practically every corner of the United States where homosexual might
gather, and in the decade following America's entry into the Second
World War I find [the word to have been in use among not only]
magazine writers and gossip columnists, but even radio announcers.

I've checked the French dictionaries we have on hand (including
Littre, Godefroi, and Tresor de la langue francaise) and
(unsurprisingly) haven't found a trace of a "homosexual" sense of
gai/e.  Maybe one of us needs to root around in the gay/lesbian
archives at the NYPL or in the papers of some early twentieth-century
psychoanalysts for early evidence of the word?

Joanne Despres
Merriam-Webster
 >>