Happy and Gay

The English word gay arrived from Old French around the fourteenth century with the meaning of joyful, bright and carefree. By the nineteenth century, however, dictionaries and commentators also record it for lives given over to pleasure, and sometimes for sexual looseness, as in the phrase gay woman. By the early twentieth century it was reported in use within some homosexual circles, long before it reached the newspapers.

The popular story of the word is a story of theft. An innocent word for happiness, the account runs, was taken over by one group and its old meaning was lost, so that a cheerful adjective can no longer be used without a smile or a flinch. But the word was never as innocent as the story requires, since pleasure and transgression had been travelling together in it for a century or more.

The decisive moment came when the word was chosen and not merely used. The term homosexual was coined in the nineteenth century and entered medical writing as the label for a condition, which meant that it was a name given by observers. After the Stonewall riots of 1969, activists in New York formed the Gay Liberation Front and took a name from the inside, a bright word in place of a diagnostic one. It was a political act dressed as a mood. A name chosen for its brightness had to carry a cheerfulness that no group should owe to anyone.

A name chosen for its brightness had to carry a cheerfulness that no group should owe to anyone.

That is where the pairing of happy and gay becomes difficult. The theorist Sara Ahmed, in The Promise of Happiness, has argued that happiness often works as a direction, pointing people towards approved objects and approved ways of living, and that those who do not follow are blamed for spoiling the mood. If so, a minority that adopts a name meaning happy may be accepting a demand as well as making a claim. It is asked to look content in order to be tolerated, and when it does not, it is told that it has brought the unhappiness on itself.

The obvious reply is that unhappiness among sexual minorities has been traced to external causes. Ilan Meyer, in a widely cited paper of 2003, argued that the higher rates of mental disorder reported in lesbian, gay and bisexual populations are explained in part by minority stress, the strain of prejudice, concealment and the expectation of rejection. On this view happiness is a reasonable goal, because it is what a fair society would produce. The reply is partly right. It shows that unhappiness is not an essence. But it does not touch the harder point, which is that a fair society would not need anyone to be happy on demand.

The word, then, carries two promises that do not sit easily together. One is that a stigma can be answered with joy, and the other is that joy should never be required as the price of belonging. History offers little help in choosing between them, since each generation that has used the word has meant something a little different by it. Perhaps the question that remains is whether a word for happiness can be kept without becoming a duty, or whether any name that promises a feeling will eventually be asked to deliver it.