Remember When Gay Meant Happy?
Remember when the word “gay” meant “happy”? According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, GAY still means that—joyous.
1.1a: happily excited: MERRY <in a gay mood>b: keenly alive and exuberant: having or inducing high spirits <a bird's gay spring song
2.2a: BRIGHT, LIVELY <gay sunny meadows>b: brilliant in color
3.3: given to social pleasures; also: LICENTIOUS
When gay still meant happy, the term was commonly used in the great black-and-white films from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Movie stars like Fred Astaire and Myrna Loy used the word gay in sentences that automatically told you they meant “happy”; otherwise, it would make no sense.
"What a gay evening we had.”
"This party is so gay; I’d love another Manhattan.”
As recently as the 1960’s Fred and Barney from The Flintstones were still having “a gay old time.” But only in a happy way, of course. Did Hanna- Barbera research and discover that cave dwellers or troglodytes were happy gays as opposed to gay gay? Anyway, I can assure you that the moviegoers of the 1930s and ‘40s did not write angry letters to Louis B Mayer demanding that MGM pull their films from theaters over their use of the word gay or fuming that because Fred Astaire and Myrna Loy were slighting homosexuals. Let’s face it; when Fred Astaire starred in The Gay Divorcee, he was not getting divorced because he realized he was gay. He was just happy to be single again and dancing with Ginger Rogers.
Homosexuals are lucky to be called gay, although they don’t start as a happy bunch. Only once they step out of the closet and embrace the third meaning of the word “gay,” according to Merriam-Webster (see above), and once they begin to live a licentious or a very gay lifestyle do they achieve happiness.
Everything changed in the 1970s when activists in the Gay Rights Movement effectively positioned themselves as freedom fighters. “Gay” took on a new meaning as the gays raged for equality and became the rage, along with disco dancing and Levis 501 Button Fly Jeans (for easy access). By the 20th century, gay marriage was still an oxymoron on the precipice of becoming a remote possibility and, worse...a reality. Gay marriage became the cause du jour, the battle against power worth fighting, and a Civil Right.
Gay Marriage took on a life of its own, and before you could even say, “You go, girl,” gays got their civil rights and can now get trapped into loveless marriages just like the straights. Case in point: my two sisters both ended up getting divorced. They were a lesson in what not to do in matters of the heart. The straight people's divorce rate has become alarmingly high. Fifty percent of all straight unions end in divorce, which is where gay marriage enters the picture. Only time will tell whether the gay divorce rate will climb to those heights, as with straight unions. With gay couples adopting boatloads of kids, the other question is, will bevies of adorable multiracial children be shuttled back and forth between two well-decorated homes once the gay couples split up, one moving to West Hollywood, the other staying in their Tribeca loft? Now that gays got what they fought for; they will someday wonder, “What was it worth?”
The trend of lost dreams and broken promises or, in this case, divorce is not reversing anytime soon. The number of straight marriages is declining while the rate of divorces is steady. Now I’m no mathematician, but that doesn’t sound like good odds for an institution of such high regard, especially among right-wing zealots. With the rise of bridezillas and horrible reality shows like Say Yes To The Dress, the only hope for the institution of marriage IS gay marriage. But try to explain that to a friggin Republican.
And before some gay Log Cabin Republican chimes in to argue with me, I admit that until time passes and we see long-term statistics, we will not know the overall success and result of gay marriage. We’ll wait and see how long it takes for gay couples to get completely bored with each other, and gay divorce becomes the likely conclusion. It’s too soon to tell. I’m not a gay marriage naysayer, but I prefer to stay cautious and hope for the best.
Without gays, there is little hope for the formerly booming marriage industry. Now that gays are getting married in droves, florists, caterers, and fancy cake bakers are having a field day with a few exceptions in states where a gay shouldn’t live anyway. The whole idea of being gay is to break free from the confines of the narrow-minded town where you were raised and quickly move out of Dodge, maybe to Hell’s Kitchen or West Hollywood or somewhere else, anywhere but Dodge.
I attended my first gay wedding in Montecito, California, in the summer of 2000. It was a poetic affair held at a grand, sprawling estate from the Gilded Age owned by a friend in real estate. He was a magician at flipping the most exclusive properties in Southern California. While updating those palatial digs, he decided to make it the venue for his wedding to a queen he met online. By coincidence, I’d slept with him years earlier when I lived in New York City and when he had more hair and was fifteen pounds lighter. I don’t know about your experience with online dating, but heat-seeking for true romance by trolling the Internet’s M4M chat rooms rarely makes for a happily ever after ending, especially after you both have “happy endings.” This was before the triumphant rise of online dating services like Match, Christian Mingle, and E-Harmony, a tad different from M4M chat rooms from the late 1990s. The wedding was an overtly spiritual affair with one hundred of the couple’s best-est-est friends in attendance sipping Negronis and Aperol Spritzes. We nibbled on lovely canapés with caviar and smoked salmon, real crab cocktail parfaits, and avocado toast rounds. Limoncello Jell-O shots were passed as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean. The mountains of Montecito must be the “purple mountains majesties” that we sing about in America the Beautiful. Love was in the air...especially after three Negronis and two Limoncello shots.
A triangular dinner bell rang, summoning the guests to assemble for the “symbolic” sunset ceremony about to begin. On the spacious front lawn, we formed a large circle as the groom and groom went from guest to guest, one by one, face to face, searing eye contact and all, telling us why we were so unique in their lives and that they loved us. I was standing next to one of the stars of The Sopranos. We had connected during the cocktail hour—she being another true, sarcastic New Yorker—who side-eyed me as the groom we didn’t know (well, I did biblically but dared not say a word) approached. We’d both hinted over Negronis that it seemed like a shotgun wedding for no apparent reason since they’d recently met and lived on different coasts. Now the two grooms were close enough to smell their freshly rosewater-bathed bodies, and we began to choke back the giggles.
The cocktails had taken effect, and we tried—to no avail—to refrain from bursting out in hysterics as they approached us full frontal. The more politically correct types in the circle began giving us dirty looks of judgment, but we couldn’t hold back the tears and laughed. Our friend joined the laughter, as did the others, and soon enough, the awkward part of the ceremony ended. The evening was lovely, as hokey as it may sound. An elegant dinner was served while flutes and violins serenaded the two long tables of fifty guests that intersected like a cross; yes, that cross, which the groom said, was representative of their paths crossing. More side eyes, more choking back the giggles, more booze. One hundred glasses of Veuve Cliquot Brut were raised to toast the happy couple, followed by disco dancing under the stars and the full moonlight that continued to the wee hours.
Six months to the day after, I went to my first gay divorce at the same estate. The property was not selling, creating financial problems for the not-so-happy couple. My trick, the husband had already moved back to New York. It wasn’t quite the same joyous occasion, but a few snarky one-liners led to plenty of giggles. A baker’s dozen of those who had attended the nuptials came to pay Matrimonial Shiva, as it were, and we spent the evening pawing through legal documents trying to find a loophole so he could get out of paying alimony. We drank whisky and ordered in Chinese and finally found the key sentence that got him out of paying “that schmuck” alimony. Now he could begin to live happily ever after.
Since I’m not a betting man, having lost my shirt at 19 years old on vacation to Nassau in the Bahamas, a long story for another time, I would not bet my life on the fact that I will “live happily ever after” with only one person. What does that expression even mean? I interpret living happily ever after as living for eternity, defying mortality, like a vampire. Happily or otherwise is secondary to wanting to live “ever after,” which in my mind is forever. But if that’s not part of the deal, I might stay single. And if happily ever after only means “till death do you part,” that sounds depressing, and I now opt for only “ever after.” Having survived an 11-year relationship, I’m single again and, so far, fairly happily ever after. For now, anyway. I believe in love, but not necessarily in the traditional sense. And sure, who doesn’t love going to weddings, away or otherwise, hence I support everyone’s right to become a bridezilla. But the notion of a gay bridezilla is scarier than Godzilla himself. One thing is to knock down a building in one fell swoop; the other is to be an out-of-control bitchy queen making all your vendors crazy because you’re dropping coins, having dropped trou for the rich lover who’s given you carte blanche for the sacred affair. After seeing how heinous straight female bridezillas can be, imagine a reality show featuring gay male bridezillas. Listen up, Andy Cohen from the Bravo network! The franchise will evolve to the Real Gay Househusbands of New York, West Hollywood, Palm Springs, and San Francisco. (#RGHNY, #RGHWH, #RGHPS, #RGHSF)
The notion of gay marriage never came up in conversation with my ex-lover in our eleven years together. Instinctively we knew it was best just to end it and remain friends as opposed to the possibility of one of us being convicted of a felony for murder in the first degree. L’amour, l’amour.
EPILOGUE: Believe it or not, I got married to someone that I was introduced to after a year of dating in January 2020. That’s a story for another time when you consider that the COVID lockdown started two months after that—taking it a day at a time.
Peace…
Abe - Won’t Be Silent
💋
Jungle red!