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It's a shame that homosexuals hijacked the word 'gay' though. It cannot be used in its original form now.
The primary meaning of the word gay changed during the 20th century. The earlier primary usage, "carefree," "happy," or "bright and showy," derives via the Old French gai, most likely from a Germanic source.[3] "Gay" was very commonly used with this meaning in speech and literature. For example, the 1938 ballet aptly named Gaîté Parisienne ("Parisian Gaiety"), a patchwork compiled from Jacques Offenbach's operettas, illustrates this connotation. The optimistic 1890s are still often referred to as the Gay Nineties.Gradually, by the 1990s, "gay" became rarely used for its older meanings, and if it was so used, seemed either dubiously innocent or charmingly antiquated.The derived abstract noun gaiety remains largely free of connotations of sexuality. But "Gaiety" was also a common name for places of entertainment. One of Oscar Wilde's favourite venues in Dublin was the Gaiety Theatre.SexualizationThe word started to acquire sexual connotations in the late 17th century, being used with meaning "addicted to pleasures and dissipations." This was by extension from the primary meaning of "carefree": implying "uninhibited by moral constraints." A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man a womanizer and a gay house a brothel[4].The use of gay to mean "homosexual" was in origin merely an extension of the word's sexualised connotation of "carefree and uninhibited," which implied a willingness to disregard conventional or respectable sexual mores. Such usage is documented as early as the 1920s. It was initially more commonly used to imply heterosexually unconstrained lifestyles, as for example in the once-common phrase "gay Lothario,"[5] or in the title of the book and film The Gay Falcon (1941), which concerns a womanizing detective whose first name is "Gay." Well into the mid 20th century a middle-aged bachelor could be described as "gay" without any implication of homosexuality. This usage could apply to women too. The British comic strip Jane was first published in the 1930s and described the adventures of Jane Gay. Far from implying homosexuality, it referred to her freewheeling lifestyle with plenty of boyfriends (while also punning on Lady Jane Grey).A passage from Gertrude Stein's Miss Furr & Miss Skeene (1922) is possibly the first traceable published use of the word to refer to a homosexual relationship, though it is not altogether clear whether she uses the word to mean lesbianism or happiness:“ They were ...gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, ... they were quite regularly gay. ” —Gertrude Stein, 1922
