When did homosexuals become gay?

[dudley_rush]

When did homosexuals first start using the term gay?

[Clanad]

One site suggests:

The word gay has had a sexual orientation meaning since at least the nineteenth century, and possibly earlier. Sometimes, specifically extracted histories of word origins are incomplete and not useful to communicating modern meanings of socioculturally potent words.

A quote from Gertrude Stein's Miss Furr & Mrs. Skeene (1922) is possibly the first traceable use of the word, though it is not altogether clear whether she uses the word to mean lesbianism or happiness.

They were ...gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, ... they were quite regularly gay.
Noel Coward's 1929 musical Bitter Sweet has the first uncontested use of the word: in the song "Green Carnation", four overdressed, 1890s dandies sing:

Pretty boys, witty boys, You may sneer
At our disintegration.
Haughty boys, naughty boys,
Dear, dear, dear!
Swooning with affectation...
And as we are the reason
For the "Nineties" being gay,
We all wear a green carnation.
Coward uses the "gay nineties" as a double entendre. The song title alludes to the gay playwright Oscar Wilde, who famously wore a green carnation himself.

[jno]

in movies, Cary Grant in Bringing up Baby ('I just went gay all of a sudden'). But as with most early usages it's difficult, in retrospect, to be 100% sure that homosexuality is being talked about.

[Peter Pedant]

gay has always had a louche connotation.

When Queen Elizabeth called Drake 'a gay dog' she was not saying that she thought  - "he whistleth the livelong day"

[jno]

a Friend of Dorothy, IAP?

[libertie]

Think the comedian - and I use the word loosely - Larry Grayson sort of made it more everyday with sayings such as ~ Oh What A Gay Day!

[JudgeJ]

Just as an aside, dudley_rush, you're not associated with the Dudley Rush from "Keep it in the Family", a 1980s sit-com, are you?

The plot was centred around Dudley who was a cartoonist drawing, I think, Barney the Bulldog.

It was amusing in its own way, but I seem to be the only one of my friends to remember it.