By Robert Nesti

Have you ever wondered: how did we got stuck with gay?

By we, the vast number who have been defined initially by their same-sex attraction since the term homosexual was devised some 150 years ago. Gay came into the lexicon, first as code then as a defining term, in the 20^th century. But why should a word that entered the language in the 13^th century meaning “happy” and “carefree,” only to become a defining term for an oppressed minority who were anything but throughout the 20^th century?

This question came to mind when on June 30, the last day of Pride Month, the New York Times published a guest essay by Matthew Vines — Christian activist and author of God and the Gay Christian — titled “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.” The piece argues that “gay” and “queer” are not interchangeable, and that the broader use of “queer” as a catch-all identity label has muddied what it means to be gay — and is actively contributing to declining support for LGBTQ+ rights. He quotes queer theorist David Halperin’s definition of the term from his 1995 book Saint Foucault: “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.” And from there he draws his battle lines:

“By that standard, same-sex relationships could be queer, but so could open marriages, prostitution and public sex, even when heterosexual.”

Vines spends a good deal of his essay defining and disputing “queer.” What he never does is define “gay,” or explain how a 50-year-old movement came to be saddled with that word in the first place. Had he looked, he might have discovered that “gay” is not the safe harbor he believes it to be. It is a word with a long, strange, morally murky history — and the idea that our political salvation lies in retreating to it is considerably harder to sustain once you know where it’s been.

To understand how “gay” won, you first have to understand what it replaced. For most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominant clinical word was “homosexual,” coined in 1868 by Hungarian journalist and activist Karl Maria Kertbeny in a private letter to German rights reformer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Kertbeny’s purpose was sympathetic: he was arguing against Prussian sodomy laws, and he wanted a neutral, scientific-sounding term to replace the moral language of “sodomite” and “pederast.” He believed same-sex attraction was inborn and unchangeable — the “born this way” argument, a century before Lady Gaga — and he thought clinical language might neutralize the condemnation.

Instead, the word he invented to defend us was almost immediately turned against us. The medical and psychiatric establishment seized “homosexual” and built a century of pathology around it. Richard von Krafft-Ebing called homosexuality a degenerative disorder. The American Psychiatric Association kept it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1973 — over a hundred years after Kertbeny coined the term. A word created to argue for our rights became, in medical hands, a clinical cage. This is the context in which any decision about vocabulary must be understood.

So where did “gay” come from? It arrived in English from Old French in the thirteenth century, meaning cheerful, bright, carefree. The Flintstones had a gay old time. Cole Porter rhymed it with “today.” For its first few centuries in English, it had nothing to do with sex. But by the seventeenth century it had accumulated a second, darker meaning: sexually uninhibited, morally loose, given to pleasure without restraint. A “gay woman” was a prostitute. A “gay house” was a brothel. A “gay man” was a womanizer. Carefree and morally unmoored collapsed into each other.

From that general looseness the word drifted toward specifically same-sex meaning, though the exact path is disputed. One route runs through early twentieth-century American hobo and prison slang: a “gaycat” or “gey cat” was a young male traveling with an older one in an arrangement understood to be sexually submissive. A 1935 handbook of underworld and prison language defines the term explicitly as “a homosexual boy.” Another route runs through late Victorian London, where male prostitutes facing police crackdowns after the Oscar Wilde scandal began adopting the phrase “gay ladies” for themselves.

The first traceable appearance of “gay” in print to mean a same-sex relationship is generally credited to Gertrude Stein’s story “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” published in 1922 and reprinted in Vanity Fair in 1923. The story is about two women who take up together, and Stein uses the word more than a hundred times in barely two thousand words as deliberate code — innocent on the surface, unmistakable to those who knew. It was in-group slang that worked precisely because it could pass undetected. The same quality that made it useful as cover in 1922 is now what Vines wants to present as the foundation of our political identity.

What turned in-group slang into a political banner was Stonewall. In the weeks following the June 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn, a core group of activists named themselves the Gay Liberation Front — deliberately invoking the Algerian and Vietnamese liberation fronts. The choice was a conscious political act: “gay” was selected in direct opposition to “homosexual” precisely because “homosexual” belonged to the medical profession, which had not been kind to us. To call yourself gay in 1969 was to refuse the clinical framework, to refuse the diagnosis, to claim your own vocabulary.

That was a coherent political move. But notice what it was not: it was not a move toward respectability. The Gay Liberation Front was a radical organization with decidedly left-wing, anti-war, and Black Power-aligned politics. It was not looking to assimilate. What Vines is now arguing — that “gay” means ordinary, dignified, non-threatening — is a retrospective rebranding of a word chosen for exactly the opposite reasons. Vines claims the gay rights movement succeeded by presenting homosexuality as “not a rebellion against ordinary life.” But Stonewall was precisely a rebellion against ordinary life. That’s the whole point of it. “Gay” became the word of the movement that night; assimilation is what “gay” morphed into later, once a different, more conservative wing of the movement took charge.

And it’s worth being specific about who was at Stonewall — who actually threw the first bottles at the police. They were not the upright middle-class activists who would later champion marriage equality. They were drag queens, hustlers, trans women, and people of color — the most marginalized people in a marginalized community. By Vines’s own lights, every one of them was queer, not gay. The rights he now wants to protect by narrowing the vocabulary were won on the backs of people his framing would prefer to leave unnamed.

Within ten years of Stonewall, the word had crossed into the mainstream press with astonishing speed. By 1980 it was routinely used to describe a cultural lifestyle and a political movement. The “happy” meaning effectively disappeared from American newspapers within a single decade. But the speed of the adoption also meant the community had limited control over what the word became once it left the subculture.

Vines treats “gay” as a stable, clear descriptor that “queer” is undermining. The record says otherwise on at least three counts.

First: “gay” was never an adequate umbrella. The word was always most naturally centered on men. Lesbian women have their own word, and many have resisted being subsumed under “gay” as a universal. Bisexual people were largely invisible in it. Trans people were invisible in it. The ever-lengthening acronym — from LGB to LGBT to LGBTQ to LGBTQ+ — is partly a record of “gay”’s ongoing failure as a comprehensive descriptor. Every letter added to the string is an acknowledgment that the word Vines is defending didn’t actually cover the people it was supposed to represent. Queer, whatever its baggage, at least has the capacity to name everyone in the room.

Second: in the 1980s and ’90s, “gay” developed a pejorative second life as an adolescent insult. “That’s so gay.” There is something particularly demoralizing about watching the word your community chose as its banner become a synonym for stupid and lame among exactly the generation that was supposed to inherit the movement. The schoolyard, it turned out, was not inclined to respect the political history of the word.

Third: Vines’s underlying argument — that the “born this way” framing is what moved public opinion toward acceptance — is shakier than he implies. A 2016 study in the Journal of Counseling Psychology found that “born this way” beliefs do not reliably reduce prejudice; people who believed sexual orientation was innate were still more likely to hold prejudicial attitudes if they also believed gay people were all the same. Rigid uniformity was never what did the persuading. Dignity and honesty moved people, and they can do so without asking anyone to erase themselves.

At the heart of Vines’s essay is a respectability-politics argument: the idea that marginalized groups can secure their rights by demonstrating they are acceptably like the majority. Be ordinary, be legible, be non-threatening, and straight America will eventually let you in. As a strategy it has a long civil rights history, and a mixed record at best.

Vines also misidentifies the enemy. As Brandan Robertson argued in a sharp Substack response, what’s driving the backlash against LGBTQ+ rights is not queer identity — it’s the Christian nationalism that has taken over the Republican Party, which has no interest in protecting any part of the LGBTQ+ community, including its most assimilationist members. Consider that Pat Buchanan announced these terms at the 1992 Republican National Convention, thirty-four years ago: “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” His views are now the Republican mainstream. The people Vines is trying to appease were never going to be appeased — not by the word “gay,” not by marriage equality, not by anything. Vines’s strategy asks the full community to narrow itself and stay quiet in exchange for a protection that those in power have no intention of providing. That is not a trade. It is a surrender.

But, returning to the initial question: how did we get stuck with it? The simple answer is: we chose it. The Gay Liberation Front named themselves and launched a vocabulary into the culture, and the culture did what it always does — borrowed it, distorted it, weaponized it, cheapened it, and eventually normalized it in ways nobody fully anticipated. That is what language always does. Words stop belonging to the people who chose them the moment they enter the world.

Vines is right that “gay” and “queer” don’t mean the same thing. Where he goes wrong is in concluding that the distinction makes “gay” the safe one. No word is safe. Words are contested, historical, and perpetually in motion. What protects a community is not its vocabulary but its solidarity — and solidarity, as the people who threw those first bottles at the Stonewall Inn understood, requires including everyone at risk. Not just the ones who are easiest to explain.

The Flintstones can keep their gay old time. The rest of us — gay, queer, and everyone the acronym keeps expanding to name — have more pressing business than policing which words we use to describe ourselves while the people who want to harm all of us are busy not making that distinction.

Editor”s note: This essay was researched and drafted with AI assistance.