Purpose: Some of my lesbian friends have recently taken me to task for using the ninth OED definition of gay (9D hereafter) in conversation. Here it is —

gay: A. adj. 9. slang (chiefly U.S.). Foolish, stupid, socially inappropriate or disapproved of; ‘lame’. derogatory (frequently considered offensive).

I take offense to the fact that people consider 9D to be offensive. 9D originated in the summer of 1978 at Minnehaha Springs, WV. I was there when it happened. And the kids that came up with it, who were between the ages 8–11, were themselves have gay sex with each other. It was intended as a separate and new use, not an extension of the sexual one. The analog today, prevalent since the late 1980s but originating in 1972, is lame. 9D and lame both mean outside high-value aesthetics. Thus a gay or lame sweater would be one that your grandmother would want you to wear in public when you were 12, but which you knew your peers would consider childish and unattractive.

Currently, 9D is the chief use of the word gay for Americans between ages 6–24, and the chief use of gays between 12–31. Are all these people really anti-gay? More importantly, do gay people take offense to 9D?

My critical lesbian friends claim that gay is now owned by gay men and that its use by non-gays is on a par with the use of nigger by non-blacks. In the latter case, the term has no other use than self-definition by people falling under its extension; moreover, it originated with that use, which we can call gay(0). But gay not only has other valid uses, it began with those uses. The analogy is false.

If you think this is a non-issue, a girl wrote Apple’s Tim Cook on 11/11/2013 to complain that the system dictionary includes the OED 9D among its definitions. Tim Cook, who is gay, kept the definition, and commenters to the article, also gay, defended 9D. Click here to see.

With that out of the way, I thought it would be fun to analyze 9D into seven shades or distinctions, which we may call the Seven Shades of Gay. These are:

I agree with LGBTQ scholars that gay should not be used to denote effeminate male appearance simpliciter. For that, my gay(0) friends use the term faggy. Faggy and gay(0) are independent. My gay(0) friend at Gold’s Gym in Austin made the difference easy to understand by using two familiar examples from pop culture, Vince Niel and Rob Halford.

Below are the exact pictures he pointed out to me on his phone (he sent me the links) —

Faggy: Vince Niel

Vince is usually faggy. It was a joke, but full of real marketing intent, which un-joked it and just made it … faggy.

There are similar artists (which Vince admittedly copied) who get close to faggy but aren’t really:

• Paul Stanley was pseudo-faggy, because he really extracted the glam from Glam Rock and inflected it in what really is a “classical” way—with a boa and a Hollywood star on his eye! (It’s almost archetypal.)
• David Lee Roth had a pseudo-faggy that was so self-consciously kitsch and so perfectly executed that for a decade he was the most non-faggy man in American consciousness. Roth was so witty and confident that he automatically transcended every trope and posture. Everything he did was an ironic wink.

Non-faggy (yet politically gay): Rob Halford