The “G” Word February 26, 2009
Posted by Jakeb in Blogs by Cate.Tags: Bush, Cate Gary, gay, your mom
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I consider myself a left-wing liberal. I support universal healthcare. I protested against Proposition 8. Hell, I voted Democrat before it was cool. So imagine my surprise when a friend accused me of being a homophobe. Apparently, my use of the word “gay” to describe the last episode of Heroes was a smear against the entire gay community (as if Heroes wasn’t bad enough!). I later found out there’s a whole PSA campaign to get people to stop saying things are gay unless they mean happy or homosexual. I don’t want to be a dick unnecessarily, so I tuned in to see what all the fuss is about.
You know you’re in trouble when Wanda Sykes has a point.
Ok, I get it: using “gay” to say that something is stupid, ridiculous, or, well, gay is offensive. But here’s the problem: I like calling things gay. “Gay” gets across a whole host of connotations, and the open “-ay” sound at the end has tons of potential for humor if delivered with enough enthusiasm. There’s something delightfully juvenile about the word. Anything can be gay. Uggs? Gay. The cotton gin? Gay. Going to the Renaissance faire? Gaye gaye gaye. It doesn’t make any sense, and that’s the point. “Gay” is the go-to filler for situations when “your mom” and “that’s what she said” just won’t do. In fact, you can have a pretty meaningful conversation with just a middle-school vocabulary.
“You’re gay.”
“Your mom’s gay.”
“That’s what she said.”
“Wait, your mom says she’s gay?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s so gay.”
“That’s what she said!”
I’ve been calling things gay since 1989, before I even knew how babies were made (or not made). I had no idea people were walking around calling themselves gay. When I found out that was happening, I figured it was like women calling themselves “bitch” or white men calling themselves “Republican”—someone would write a song about taking the word back and then we’d return to normal. Losing “gay” feels like I’m losing part of my adolescence, but I guess it’s the price you pay to make Chris Crocker shut up.
I need an alternative. I need a pithy, monosyllabic word that tells people the noun it’s modifying is painfully lame, comically incompetent, and fingernails-on-a-chalkboard annoying. And then it hit me: Bush!
Black socks with sandals? That’s bush. Going to see a Coldplay concert? Way to go, bushlord! Assless chaps? Burning bush. I’ll make you a deal, gay community: I’ll stop using the word “gay” if you’ll help me get “bush” into circulation. We can make sure that years from now, when the Republican Party is just a ghost story to scare small children, people far and wide will still use the word “bush” as the default insult for Babylon 5 conventions and over-exuberant facial hair. Can we do it? Yes we can!
Wait, what about white socks with sandals?
I would just like to post here to let you know I left a multi-paragraph comment but it got erased due to me not entering my email address.
The gist:
Language has left middle-aged gay people behind, the same way it’s left 65 year-old people behind who make jokes about “japs” and “coons”.
Gay means something different now. Time to deal with it.
Last comment- you guys really need to get rid of all the garbage HTML tag characters or whatever that appear at the beginning of every article when viewed with IE. Not sure what the remedy is for that, but it would really help.
Also, change default font color to black.
Geordie: I 100% agree that “gay” means something different, but I don’t think it’s just the old gay people taking offense. My 19-year-old sister-in-law (not gay) refuses to use the word “gay” because college kids are super PC nowadays. In fact, they won’t even say “retard” (that’s officially the “r” word now). I’m not saying I won’t ever use the word again, but it does piss people off, so I’ll be looking over my shoulder for sure.
Tim: White socks with sandals are totally gay.
I must admit, as much as I love to fucking swear, I am looking closer at what I’m saying now. Us arguing to be able to use the word gay or retarded makes us look like the kid from the Pretty Fly for a White Guy music video making an argument on why it’s ok for him to say nigga.
While I, along with the rest of our generation, understand that the word gay has changed and saying that something is retarded isn’t to say it’s mentally challenged, but rather unfair or illogical, it’s really hard to make a good argument for it when it’s really just us being lazy and refusing to do anything to monitor our speech. And yes, I get the fucking irony of me saying that I’m trying to monitor my speech.
Ultimately, I think that perpetuating the use of gay as a slang creates a culture where it’s easier and more acceptable for homophobic kids to grow up to be shithead republicans that take away peoples’ rights. So it begs the question, why are we so excited about keeping a word around when we lose nothing by switching to another word, but can possibly do damage by not doing so. Ultimately, the use of the word comes about from us growing up in a homophobic culture that thought it was ok to use the slang for a minority as a derogatory term for something. Kind of like they use the word nigger in the south (Which I’ve heard people try to justify as a word you use for a certain type of black person…so glad I don’t live in NC anymore, lol). Linguistically, I get it, but intellectually and morally speaking, I can’t really make a good argument for keeping them around as filler words anymore than I can make the argument for someone who might say they got jewed in a transaction.