To think gay is not a pejorative

[arthurfowlersallotment]

It makes me wince when I hear people say 'urgh that's gay' to indicate something negative. Especially when it's an adult.

My gay cousin and his partner are 53 and 56 and they both say it.

My 13yr old tells them to grow up

I doubt many straight people are going around feeling offended on behalf of random strangers, HOF. People find using gay as a pejorative offensive because

a. they live in an environment where it is so unacceptable it seems as if the other person is really mean spirited in general to be using such an offensive term.
b. It is a mean spirited way of viewing human sexuality, regardless of whether or not anybody there is actually gay, and people don't want their kids exposed to negative responses to sexuality in general.
c. They have gay friends/family members who they love and who would be upset by it.

But I doubt random strangers matter much in most people's thinking about negative remarks.

Arthur, I agree. I feel uncomfortable if people make xenophobic remarks against the French, who are hardly a minority group in need of any kind of defence! It is just uncomfortable to be around people who make negative remarks related to groups of people - it is like a constant low level form of aggression.

I think even the majority of straight people who use it won't actually be homophobic. It's mostly not even attached to an action that is remotely gay. I walked in on my parents having a romantic meal and told them they were so gay. They quickly pointed out 'we are quite the opposite, and who are you to talk?!' Touche..

And LMAO @houseofpain and well gay

Well yes, if you went around telling gay couples at their weddings that they were 'so gay' it would be a bit pointless. The point is that people say it about things that are not gay at all, but that they view as being very negative. Thereby marking themselves out as the kind of person who associates a human group with negative things for entertainment purposes.

I am aware of this, thanks. To be honest, I'm more concerned about my relatives who tell me I am going to hell, the neighbours I had who put various disgusting things through my door, the people protesting about my right to marry my partner and the people who tell me it's disgusting that my baby will have two mums than the use of a word.

I do hope it gets phased out as it is just stupid, and agree it shouldn't be tolerated in schools.

But, in short, I don't actually find it offensive.

(I'm still laughing at well gay.. )

Without wishing to sound really pretentious, the whole 'so gay' thing is a big post-modern ironic dilemma. It's as though in enlightened times the word gay got divorced from homosexuality and everything pregorative stuck with 'gay' and nothing pregorative went on with homosexuality. That's why it's sort of liberating to be able to use 'gay' like that. I think this meaning of the word has sufficiently changed from meaning 'about people who are homosexual'.

I just re-read that and want to point out that I meant that's why it's liberating for openly gay people to use it, not teen boys.

Or what Sundae said if you'd like something more eloquent

I did ask DS.

Me: Do you think it is okay for people to say that something they don't like is 'so gay.'
Him: No.
Me: why not?
Him: because it isn't bad to be gay.

So there may be lots of people who think it has two meanings that are completely divorced from each other, but there are other people who don't see the two things as divorced, and don't really get postmodern irony. We don't all think about language in the same way I suppose, especially when some of us are teenagers like DS who perhaps doesn't have the same grasp of using language in complex ways. But mostly I think it is just about different areas, schools, towns etc having different cultures of what is and is not acceptable.

YANBU.

It's nothing new, I heard people at school saying this in the 80s. Sad that it's still used even now in these supposedly more enlightened times!

houseofpain

I took ds (7) to task over this the other day. We were saying the Monday's child, Tuesday's child rhyme etc. we got to Sunday and he thought it was hilarious. I explained that in this case "Gay" meant happy, but even if it didn't, it wasn't anything to laugh at. Turns out he had no idea what gay meant, but the other boys at school use it as an insult apparently. Nice.

Well, the older generation use the word "gay" to mean light hearted, the middle-aged to mean homosexual, and teens to mean lame (no sexual connotations in its actual use).

It's a fascinating example of a multiply changing lexical item in such a short period.

As people say so often when to posters in Pedants' Corner when they argue for maintenance of standards "language changes, get over it'. As today's teens become tomorrow's middle aged, their view of language will dominate, and todays adults will be the elderly, and their usages may be as marginalised as those who miss the light hearted meaning.

When I heard it in the early 80s it was being used as a word for rubbish.

My DB is 29 and gay and he says it all the time. He refers to my DH as "so gay" every time he does something romantic for me.

I'm with jumping, usage changes, the teens and older that I know use it, some of them are gay, but they dont mean bad or crap, rather as none descript/lame. (See lame is another one ? )

Edith, if teens no longer use the word gay to mean homosexual, what word do homosexual teenagers use to describe their sexuality?

Because as far as I'm aware, gay still means homosexual to teenagers. It isn't some exclusively middle aged thing.

My DS said it last week. I don't like it. His reasoning was that it is a completely different use of the word. When they say wicked they don't mean evil. None of his friends have any problem with it and one of them is gay.

I think the worry is that he is defending it on the basis that he personally doesn't find it offensive, which is irrelevant. Plenty of people do find it offensive, and Stonewall are still having to try and educate teachers about it because some schools don't deal with it.

I think it resonates more with my age group (I'm 27) rather than with teens. Luckily teenagers today seem to be more open and accepting of sexuality. However when I was a teen I remember gay friends being victimised and bullied for it. So maybe I take it to mean more than it does.

One of my friends at university used to refer to things being 'as gay as a window'. I still have no idea what it's supposed to mean.

The Stonewall guide on tackling this language use by teens is here, for anybody who cares:

www.stonewall.org.uk/media/current_releases/3606.asp

95% of secondary school teachers here pupils saying 'that's so gay' but only 80% here pupils using 'poof, dyke and queer' as homophobic remarks.

So presumably in 15% of environments teens really are using 'so gay' in a fun, sexually liberated, accepting, post modern ironic sort of a way.

Hear, not here!

I'm gay, I don't use it in the sense of putting someone or something down by calling them or it gay. I find it offensive. If gay people use it, to me, it's a way of them reclaiming a word with a negative context. So if we take it back and "own" it, it doesn't have the same impact when someone says"that's so gay". It's like when a man calls a woman a name....like a "cunt" or another female related body part used in a way to demean, shame or hurt. Reclaiming a word used against you, negates the power people have over it. It's happened lots...see here..
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation