More on the Origins of “Gay”
To the Editor:
I enjoyed Hugh Hagius’ essay on the lexicon of homosexuality [Nov.-Dec. 2025]. Perhaps I can add a bit of history to “gay.”
As Mr. Hagius noted, the word had been adopted by the community by the 1930s. But it was still something of a “secret code” through the 1940s, at times slyly inserted into news copy by hip journalists. (A 1948 item in a Long Beach paper described a scandalous same-sex “mock wedding” as “a gay afternoon soiree.”) Its alternative meaning appears to have first been exposed to the general public on December 2, 1950, by The New York Age, a Harlem-based paper serving the Black community, in a shock piece titled “New York’s ‘Gay’ Men: Society’s Strays Are All Alone.”
The word reached a much broader audience the following year via “The Homosexual in America,” written by sociologist Edward Sagarin under the penname Donald Webster Cory. (One book reviewer lamented: “What they have done to the word ‘gay’ just shouldn’t happen to the language!”). But the Miami Herald wasn’t paying attention: in 1952, they erroneously reported that “gay” was a code word for drag shows, a source of much angst in Florida at the time. In 1954, San Francisco papers began using the word, in quotes, in their coverage of the police raid on Tommy’s Place, a popular lesbian bar. Meanwhile, Hollywood studios and film critics (who surely knew the score) were attaching it to virtually every lavish musical of the era—though in that case maybe both definitions were equally valid!
In 1958, in the case of ONE, Inc. v. Olesen, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that material presenting a positive view of homosexuality is not in and of itself obscene. As openly gay media proliferated and found space above the counters of mainstream newsstands over the following decade, the meaning of the word became clear to all.
Denny Nivens, Hermosa Beach, CA
My Ethnographic Journey with the Wanja
To the Editor:
Thank you for your excellent “Ethnographic Journeys” issue [Nov.-Dec. 2025].
Many years ago, decades before I came out, I worked as a fundamentalist missionary in Papua New Guinea (PNG). For more than five years I lived among the Wanja people, who are part of a language group known as the Anga. It was my assignment to learn their unwritten language well enough to preach the Gospel to them.
As with some of the other Anga groups, the Wanja practiced “ritualized homosexuality.” As has been documented by multiple anthropologists regarding the Simbari and the Baruya people, both being language groups bordering the Wanja territory, the Wanja believed adolescent boys were infertile. To remedy this, they were required to fellate and ingest the ejaculation of men who had successfully impregnated their wives. So, in a very real sense, homosexuality played an important role in the Wanja’s beliefs regarding procreation.
Today, homosexuality remains illegal in PNG per the laws implemented by its British colonizers via the Queensland Criminal Code of Australia. Although I was not by any means “out” while I was living among the Wanja people, I never expressed any negative judgments regarding their homosexual practices. Indeed, in my deeply held admiration for the life of Christ as I saw he had lived it in the Bible, my abiding goal was to present the love of God in all of my interactions.
As it happened, I failed to learn the Wanja language well enough preach the Gospel to them. Thanks to a very long dark night of the soul, I gave up on Christianity and my work in the ministry. Now I am happily married to a man of Canadian First Nation and Filipino descent. Today, I do maintenance work in assisted living facilities. To those who ask about my previous line of work, I tell them I’ve gone from saving souls to saving bowls, i.e., toilet bowls!
Mike Cordle, Bremerton, WA
