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In India, while Tellis says the use of the word gay to mean homosexuals started in the 1970s and ’80s with Indian men who travelled to the West and came back, Rao and writer Hoshang Merchant say the word started getting used here in the 1990s after the setting up of Bombay Dost, the country’s first LGBT magazine, by activist Ashok Row Kavi.
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In the beginning, gay was also an acronym for ‘Good As You’.” It was around this time that the community started using the word gay to identify itself.
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R Raj Rao, writer and professor of English at Pune University, adds: “The Stonewall Riots (a series of violent confrontations between members of the LGBT community and the police in New York in 1969) are the beginning of most gay-rights movements in the world.
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While some books and websites on the history of the global homosexual movement claim the word gay was used as a secret code by homosexuals to identify themselves even as far back as the early twentieth century, professor Ashley Tellis says “it was in the 1960s that the word came to be popularly associated with the community”. According to both dictionaries, in English the use of ‘gay’ to mean happy, excited, merry, carefree or bright started in the Middle English period that stretches between the 12th and the 16th century. Merriam Webster takes it further back to a Germanic origin “akin to the Old High German Gahi” that meant “quick or sudden”. The Oxford English dictionary traces the history of the word ‘gay’ to the French word Gai. But while Nandy’s choice of word was bang on that day, how did a word that had originally meant light-hearted, carefree or cheerful, become associated with a community whose life has been often been anything but? “I am so Gay today…” he wrote in a coming-out post that has since gone viral. On Thursday, as the Supreme Court decriminalised homosexuality, reading down the controversial British-era section 377 of the penal code, Mumbai-based Arnab Nandy took to social media to express his joy, as many across the country and the world were doing.