figlet – a program for making large letters out of ordinary text

Etymology excerpt: [Middle English gai, lighthearted, brightly colored, from Old French, possibly of Germanic origin.]

I don't believe that the present time is actually more open and safe for different folk. When I grew up nobody but nobody would dare to speak of anyone's sexuality let alone make a point of it and assaulting up a homosexual man would land you on hospital when the neighbours reacted in horror at the effective attack on the man's mother (I confess to typing on gay men living with their mothers but I didn't know one exception until moving to London in the late 80s. Mining towns in Yorkshire were probably the safest place to be gay ever. You wouldn't be "out" only because nobody's private lives were on display. The untold horror of the Thatcher breaking of the National Union of Miners is the fractures through communities unravelled the most intricate social support web and exposed the most vulnerable people to possibly the most heightened emotional communal period in post war England. The miner's union was also a huge contributor to the widows most likely to have their gay sons looking after them and the collapse in union finances forced many ill prepared and not still young gay men to seek better economic possibility. Sending ca 40 yr old highly protected parochial gay men who would do anything for their mums or the mere idea of their mothers, into late 80s cities in search of suitable work, was just the most terrible consequence.

I am totally for the general public recapturing the word gay because of the positive effect this will transfer to historic derogation and separate identification of homosexual men as gay.

First, I think this is well appreciated now, different folk reappropriated the word gay from pejorative connotation.

But it only worked so far.

Gay was a prejorative quite without any sexual inflection or connotation. "Don't be gay man" criticising the way someone is digging a trench for the vegetable garden, is entirely valid and non assimilative of personal sexuality Derogation. That phrase is akin to "we're not digging up the begonia bed lad, this is our potatoes for the whole year and if you don't do that double trench properly the first frosts will have the lot ". I have obviously expanded and provided explanatory context. There's nothing gay about double trenching potatoes in late fall at the same londitude as Moscow.

If I had to define the derogatory use of gay, my own experience would make me place far more emphasis on the adduced insult to be ineffectual or unnecessarily fancy and therefore wasteful and inefficient. From there to get to mean not very manly seems to me a much easier etymological path.