Why does gay mean ‘rubbish’?, asks Rob Lyons

Apparently the term ‘gay’ is now in common usage among young people to mean ‘lame’ or ‘rubbish’. This has caused some controversy, especially among gay rights groups who don’t like the idea that being called ‘gay’ is now seen as something negative. Last year Radio 1 presenter Chris Moyles was the subject of an internal BBC inquiry after he described a ringtone on air as ‘gay’. Leaving aside the question of why there has to be an inquiry every time a broadcaster says something un-PC, it is reasonable to ask: where could young people have got the idea that ‘gay = rubbish’?

How about from another term, very closely associated with gay culture: ‘camp’. ‘Camp’, as Stephen Bayley argued in his scratch-their-eyes-out book on New Labour, Labour Camp, is just a synonym for rubbish. Or, as Susan Sontag observed in Notes on Camp, first published in 1964, ‘The ultimate Camp statement [is] it’s good because it’s awful...’ Sontag noted that Camp culture tends to emphasise ‘texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content’; and that ‘homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard - and the most articulate audience - of Camp’.

It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to re-work ‘camp’ as ‘gay’, especially when so many gay celebrities tend to wallow in kitsch. If you, like many people both straight and gay, think Graham Norton and Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (now there’s a show that emphasises ‘style at the expense of content’) are pretty dreadful, then surely no one could blame you for associating ‘gay’, at least in its cultural sense, with ‘rubbish’.