Now the term ‘gay’, well that one would have to wait a while longer to enter popular culture in the US. It had started to be used in the 17^th century to describe someone who was addicted to sins of the flesh but at this point it was used for straight people who had trouble keep their pants up or skirts down, men and women respectively one would assume.

In 1922 Gertrude Stein may have made the first use of the term in a play to indicate lesbianism but she may have just as easily meant happiness. But a 1929 musical by Noel Coward was a bit clearer and had four dressed up dandies singing about pretty boys and talking about wearing a green carnation as symbol of being why the 1890s were gay. A hint about the way homosexual men in the 19^th century used specific items of attire to identify one another maybe?

In 1938 Cary Grant used it in a movie to clearly mean homosexual for the first time. And then it started to be used more and more in popular culture.  The word was still used in entertainment with traditional meanings but usage as a term for homosexually oriented became more and more common. By the 1960s it was starting to be heavily used in a general way as a term identifying people as having homosexual orientations.

As the term became more and more publicly identified with men who were exclusively homosexual in orientation the term became less functional as an umbrella term. Eventually lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people would increasingly become less willing to be identified by the use of this term and would work toward the use of more specific terms.