CAN ONE BE YOUNG AND THE OLD 'GAY'?

As I began shaving this morning, Paul Robeson’s bass baritone boomed into my mind singing ‘Old Black Joe’ with the lines ‘Gone are the days, when my heart was young and gay’. Then I thought, maybe I can work on feeling young at heart but, hey, what about ‘gay’? 

This word which is believed to have originated in the 12th century from Anglo-French and Germanic languages, used to mean joyous, lively, merry, happy, carefree, etc. and only that. There is an Australian nursery rhyme which the venerable Father Mackessack taught me to sing in school,              ‘Kookaburra sits on an old gum tree,                                                                                                        Merry merry king of the bush is he,                                                                                                        Laugh, Kookaburra laugh, Kookaburra gay your life must be’.                                                                  Poor bird, today it would probably get askance looks from the orthodox and the conservative!

Through the years till my younger days, many popular songs used the word ‘gay’ in its original context. ‘Old Black Joe’ is an 1860 song. To mention a few others, in 1945 a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “State Fair” won the best original song award for a song with the lyrics ‘But I feel so gay, it might as well be spring’. In the 1960s, the musical “West Side Story” has a song that goes, ‘I feel pretty, oh so pretty, I feel pretty and witty and gay’. The theme song of the movie “Around the World in 80 Days” sings praises of ‘gay Paree’ and in “The Last Time I Saw Paris”, ‘her heart was warm and gay’.

In Hank Williams’ ‘Jambalaya’, ‘Pick guitar, fill fruit jar and be gay-oh, Son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou’. And in the evergreen Dean Martin’s ‘That’s Amore’, ‘Hearts will play tippy-tippy-tay, tippy-tippy-tay, like a gay tarantella’ which is a fast tempo Italian folk dance.

As late as 1997, Bob Dylan sang ‘I’m strummin’ on my gay guitar’ and the most recent use of the word in the old sense that I could find was in the 2007 Disney movie ‘Enchanted’ in the lyrics ‘To the gay refrain of a happy song’. 

Its use in literature is illustrated by this quote from the famous Pearl S. Buck in her 1948 novel, ‘The Big wave’, in which she writes, ‘Setsu grew into a gay, wilful, pretty girl’. Its spoken and written usage has been commonplace as in ‘gay abandon’, ‘gay laughter’, ‘gay tune’, ‘gayest of the spring flowers’ and ‘a bird’s gay spring song’.

The word is a name too as in the English poet John Gay. And the Boeing B-29 bomber which was the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in the closing stages of World War II was named 'The Enola Gay' after the mother of the pilot, Colonel Tibbets. Can you imagine even a remote homosexual connection there!

Somewhere in the 1950s, the word underwent a transformation and became a convenient one to use instead of homosexual. Today that has become its primary meaning pushing the merrymaking and happiness context to near obscurity. When someone says 'gay', one immediately identifies it with homosexuality never imagining he could be meaning 'happiness'. It is now part of LGBT.

I can try to feel young but have no desire to be gay. Or be content remembering the song sung by Maurice Chevalier in Gigi, “I’m glad I’m not young anymore’!

I often wonder if there is any other word in the English language which has been subjected to such a metamorphosis as the word 'gay'.