More on the 'gay' joke -- WITH EVIDENCE!! :)

Because I hate to see my brilliant arguments lost in the monster thread below, I'm putting them in their own thread. :) This isn't to start another argument -- we've been through that -- but just to make this info a little more accessible to those who haven't, or don't want to, read the huge thread titled: "The word 'gay' in the film referenced homosexuals... "

I don't understand why this is such a controversy. To me, it seems clear that Cary Grant's adlib joke about suddenly going gay means exactly what it still means to our ears in 2008.

I feel certain that Grant slipped in a gay-subtext in-joke, and the director let it stand. How many people in the audience got it, and how many just thought it was a weird line and then dismissed it as the film's rapid-fire dialogue kept going, we'll never know. It doesn't mean that Cary Grant was gay or even bi, just that he was in the know about certain slang. And no, we can't know beyond the slightest shadow of the teensiest doubt that that's how he meant it, but all evidence points that way.

First of all, the traditional use of the word does not equal a funny joke. Then there's all the other evidence:

"Gay" as a code word for homosexual men was in use WAY before 1938. George Chauncey's excellent and award-winning history book "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940" documents just how pervasive its use was in the first part of the 20th century. Here's what he says about its origins (p. 17): "Originally referring simply to things pleasurable, by the seventeenth century 'gay' had come to refer more specifically to a life of immoral pleasures and dissipation (and by the nineteenth century to prostitution, when applied to women), a meaning that [gay men] could easily have drawn on to refer to the homosexual life. 'Gay' also referred to something brightly colored or someone showily dressed - and thus could easily be used to describe the flamboyant costumes adopted by many fairies, as well as things at once brilliant and specious, the epitome of camp."

Gay men (the fairy stereotype) also showed up on Hollywood screens in the twenties prior to the Production Code (see Chauncey and also the documentary called "The Celluloid Closet" -- a great film), so it's not like Hollywood people didn't know that gay men existed or had no contact with gay subculture. They did. The first paperback novels about gay men starting getting published in the early thirties, too.

Also, the idea that Grant couldn't be making a gay joke because he was only cross-dressing is pretty ludicrous. Since the beginning of the 20th century, and even way before, men-who-like-men have been associated with effeminate behavior and female dress. Gay men have a long and rich history of doing drag and dressing in women's clothing, and this was definitely known in 1938. Again, Chauncey gives amazing evidence of drag balls in NYC, which were attended by THOUSANDS of people and which were covered by the newspapers. Being a gay man and wearing female clothing were definitely associated with each other, even if it wasn't (and isn't) true for every gay man.

(Here's a quote from Chauncey about the drag balls (p. 292): "As the New York Herald Tribune reported in its account of a 1934 Greenwich Village ball: . . . 'Men danced with women in men's clothes. Women danced with men in women's clothes. And strange androgynous couples careened about the floor oblivious to the workings of society and nature.' ")

Why is it so hard to understand or believe that a word can be used two ways at once? That it can have a traditional or dominant meaning AND a subcultural one at the same time? A modern example would be the word 'sick.' To the dominant culture, 'sick' means either physically ill or perverted (diseased, ill, unhealthy). To certain teen groups, skater cultures, extreme sports communities, 'sick' means something positive, amazing, as in "That jump was sick." The world hasn't exploded because the word is used simultaneously in two different ways. People used "gay" in both the traditional AND the gay-subtext way up through the fifties - it's not an either/or situation. Just because there are examples of 'gay' being used in the traditional sense after this movie doesn't mean that people weren't also using the word as slang to connote homosexuality. They were.

I will concede that 'fairy' was a word much more commonly known to reference homosexuals in the 30's, but 'gay' being a lesser-known word makes more sense as to why the censorship board let the line stay in -- they didn't understand what it meant. Why would Grant and Hawks put in a joke that 99% of the audience might not get? Well, no one knows exactly how audiences read this joke, or how many of them might have gotten the gay subtext. And as has been pointed out in other threads, the fast pace of dialogue and action meant that not everyone was going to get every joke in the film anyway, and a lot of sexual subtext could get by the censors. Also - many filmmakers and actors put 'in-jokes' into their films for themselves, and not necessarily for general audiences. This could be an example of that.



And again, the joke's just not funny unless Grant knows what he's talking about.