Lifted from Cargo, I know, Very Gay

The Seattle Seahawks' uniforms are gay. Monograms are gay. Colored iPod protectors are gay. Pleated shorts are extremely gay. The underhand cigarette hold, in which the thumb and middle finger are used like a pair of tweezers, is gay, and French exhaling is gay, gay, gay. The J in Michael J. Fox is gay.

Emotions are gay ;)

Ordering a Cosmopolitan at a bar, if you're a guy, is gay, and calling it a Cosmo is the gayest thing in the world.

However, and here's the tricky part, the guy who-orders that Cosmo is almost certainly not gay himself. No actual homosexual has done that since Sex and the City was on the air, and probably not even then.

Because when I say gay, I don't mean gay as in "He like to get with other guys." I mean it as in "Wow, that reindeer sweater you're wearing? So gay."

In other words, I mean it the way I did in seventh grade.

Now, I've learned a lot since then. Like, I've learned that reindeer sweaters do not have sex with men, and aren't at all likely to be worn by a man who does. So it makes no sense at all to call reindeer sweaters gay, but I'll do it anyway. And so would many, many people I hang around with. I asked one friend if she ever used gay in the sense of "an object or action that signifies profound inner uncoolness," and about eight seconds later she e-mailed me the following, which is just an excerpt from a much longer list:

"Dream catchers, or anything with noble-looking wolves on it. Framed Guinness posters. Knowing too much about your astrological sign, flipped-up polo-shirt collars, telling a chick that you 'don't dance', the Tasmanian devil, having an AOL e-mail address, ordering the medium size, using a coupon at a sit-down restaurant. Oh, and liking Dave Matthews. Also - reciting the plots of car commercials. Actually, that might be more 'retarded' than 'gay.'"

And we're back to seventh grade, when David Bolton would call me "retarded," or, more often, "gay," and then everybody would laugh until milk gushed out of someone's nose. We all know better now. We don't mock the mentally handicapped, unless we are the Farrelly brothers. We don't thing homosexual means stupid, objectionable, uncool. And yet we continue to use gay in this totally stupid, objectionable, and uncool way.

Last week I brought this up with a gay friend who is quite smart about linguistic nuance, and he confirmed what I already knew. Yes, he finds this usage "extremely offensive." He didn't just italicize the words when he spoke; he made them last about four minutes. Right. Got it.

But I know plenty of people - both gay and straight, I should point out- who still use the word this way. And we say it not because it's a dis on homosexuals, but because it isn't. The word gay, when applied to yoga mats, is asexual. Actually, it's pre-sexual. It dates back to our dumb, ignorant childhoods - that Neanderthal era before we learned what gay people did when they got naked, decided we were cool with that, stopped thinking they were freaks, and realized we preferred their company to that of most straight people we knew.

That's why I believe it's perfectly fine to use gay as an insult, as long as you're among friends, and as long as you're simply juvenile. If you call a Frappuccino gay, and it's supposed to be an insult because you think it's a beverage commonly drunk by the people you still call faggots, you're a bigoted asshole and I hope we never meet. But if you mean that Frappuccinos are as dopey as the other things you made fun of in the age of zits and training bras and Trapper Keepers, you're just an immature idiot, and therefore welcome to be my friend. You're saying that Frappuccino doesn't deserve any better than this adolescent put-down; a mature, intelligent insult would grant it a dignity it hasn't earned.

And I believe this so strongly that I'm publishing this essay under a fake name. Which is, without question, the gayest thing I've ever done. It's beyond gay. I think it might even be fagatronic.