Bringing Up Baby - Use of Word "gay"

Use of Word "gay"

It is debated whether Bringing Up Baby is the first work of fiction, aside from pornography, to use the word "gay" in a homosexual context. In the scene in question, Cary Grant's character is wearing a woman's marabou-trimmed négligée, and when asked why replies, in an exasperated tone, "Because I just went gay all of a sudden!", leaping into the air on the word "gay". It is not certain whether the word is being used in its older sense of "happy", or whether it was intentionally a joking reference to homosexuality.

According to Robert Chapman's The Dictionary of American Slang, the adjective "gay" was used by homosexuals, among themselves, in this sense since at least 1920. Donald Webster Cory writes in The Homosexual in America (1951) that "Psychoanalysts have informed me that their homosexual patients were calling themselves gay in the nineteen-twenties, and certainly by the nineteen-thirties it was the most common word in use by homosexuals themselves." It was not, however, in common usage. Cory continues that it was such an insiders' term that "an advertisement for a roommate can actually ask for a gay youth, but could not possibly call for a homosexual." The term "gay" did not become widely familiar to the general public until the Stonewall riots in 1969.

In the film, the word "gay" was an ad-lib by Grant and was not in any version of the original script. According to Vito Russo in the book The Celluloid Closet (1981, revised 1987), the script originally had Grant's character say "I... I suppose you think it's odd, my wearing this. I realize it looks odd... I don't usually... I mean, I don't own one of these." Russo suggests that this indicates that people in Hollywood, at least in Grant's circles, were already familiar with the slang connotations of the word. However, neither Grant himself nor anyone involved in the film ever suggested this.