Leslie Howard and the "gay doorman"

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:09 AM -0500 11/10/04, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>I see from the archives that there has been extensive discussion on the
>shifting senses of the term "gay" in the first half of the 20th century.
>Quoting a 1999 post from Ron Butters:
>
>      I have found that most such uses of GAY before the
>      earlier 1940s mean 'homosexual' only to latter-day
>      viewers but did not mean 'homosexual' to the person
>      using the term at the time (though in the late 1930s
>      GAY probably did have a queer-subculture meaning as
>      'homosexual' for a coterie in New York and perhaps
>      other big cities in the US).
>
>So I was surprised to see the following in a recent Entertainment Weekly
>review of the new _Gone With the Wind_ DVD:
>
>      http://www.ew.com/ew/article/review/dvd/0,6115,767420_2_0_,00.html
>      Also included are historian Rudy Behlmer's exhaustive
>      commentary track and the 1989 doc "The Making of a
>      Legend," which showcases hilarious Scarlett wannabe
>      screen tests (pip-squeaky Jean Arthur was a finalist?)
>      and costume fittings for miserable costars Gable and
>      Leslie Howard — at one point Howard supposedly bemoaned
>      looking like a "gay doorman up at the Beverly Wilshire."
>
>I'd imagine that the documentary is quoting the reminiscences of a costume
>designer well after the fact, so this isn't the most reliable source.  But
>could Leslie Howard have been familiar with the subcultural sense of "gay"
>in the late '30s?  Or is it possible that Howard simply meant that the
>doorman in question was 'decadent and fashion-conscious', as "gay" was
>often construed to mean in the '20s and '30s?
>
My money would be on Leslie Howard having bemoaned the possibility of
looking like "a [gay] doorman up at the Beverly Wilshire", with some
other adjective actually used--the occurrence of "gay" in the quote
being transparent or de re rather than verbatim.

Larry