Have a Gay Old Time/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Examples of Have a Gay Old Time in Literature include:

  • In Alexander Pope's translation of The Iliad, Venus describes Paris as looking "Not like a warrior parted from the foe / But some gay dancer in the public show."
  • "Intercourse" used to mean "communication between individuals," and still does in many dictionaries. Therefore, in Pilgrims Progress, when in older editions Christian had "intercourse" with various individuals, including the three women at the gate. Likewise, when the Giant of Despair asks, "Who has come to molest me in my castle?", it may not mean what you think it means.
    • In A Christmas Carol, it is said that after changing his ways, Scrooge had no further intercourse with spirits, but lived upon the Total-Abstinence Principle. This was actually a pun (the Total-Abstinence Principle means staying away from "spirits", or alcohol).
    • A somewhat old-fashioned priest who wrote for a Catholic newspaper once innocently likened the sacrament of Communion to "intercourse with God." The firestorm on the letters page was epic.
    • Irene Kampen, returning to college in Due To Lack Of Interest Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled, marvels at how calmly her 1970 classmates take all the explicit sex discussions in psychology and literature class, while back in 1943 "The United States, in her intercourse with foreign nations" would have inspired snickers and blushes.
  • "Booby" meaning an endearingly silly man. Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse has "she did in her own heart infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations".
    • Which becomes more amusing if one knows that Woolf was bisexual.
  • In Heidi, the servants Sebastian and Johann are convinced there's a ghost, which turns out to be a homesick Heidi sleepwalking. In the translation used in the cheap Grossett unabridged version, Clara's father tells them they're "a pair of boobies", i.e., idiots.
  • The Famous Five, Secret Seven and similar books by Enid Blyton and her contemporary imitators would use "queer" to mean "strange" or "weird" a lot, since the central premise is about queer goings-on in the older sense of the word.
  • Blyton's Faraway Tree series features two main characters called Dick and Fanny. They climb up a long hard tree and enter magic worlds.
  • And Then There Were None describes a character as "queer" and "not straight."
  • Taken to extremes as a gag in the Doctor Who novel Human Nature, in which the Doctor's 26th century companion has a conversation with a woman from the 1910s who talks about her "coming-out party", then "cruising" with her mother who's "very gay". After a slight pause, Benny asks if they could start the conversation again, since she thinks they've been talking at cross-purposes. ("coming out" means a débutante being introduced to society; "cruising" means going on a cruise; and "gay" of course means light-hearted and fun.)
  • "The Gay Science" is an outmoded term for the art of poetry. Friedrich Nietzsche actually wrote a poetry compilation with this title.
    • Though that is only a case in English. The German term fröhlich didn't go the same route as gay.
  • In the final pages of The Hobbit, the narrator remarks that everyone in the Shire remembered Bilbo was an elf-friend and therefore thought him a queer fellow.
    • And one of the chapters is called "Queer Lodgings". The lodgings in question are inhabited by a large bearded man who can shapeshift into a bear.
    • Early in The Lord of the Rings, one of the Hobbits is throwing some "faggots" into his fireplace. Much later in the novel, "Frodo got a queer feeling as he threw another faggot on the fire."
    • "At last reluctantly Gandalf himself took a hand. Picking up a faggot, he held it aloft for a moment, and then with a word of command, naur an edraith ammen! he thrust the end of his staff into the midst of it."
    • As the Nine head up the snowy mountain of Caradhras, Aragorn orders that each member of the Fellowship bring with him "a faggot as big as he can carry."
    • Also in The Hobbit, one of the songs the Elves sing as Bilbo and the Dwarves enter Rivendell has the line "The faggots are reeking". (That's got yet another one in it, though not a funny one--"reek" meaning "smoke" rather than "stink".)
    • The double meaning of 'ass' can cause some trouble, too, with all those horribly wrong Slash Fics out there.

Pippin (to Merry): My dear ass, your pack is lying by your bed, and you had it on your back when I met you.

    • "Bag end is a queer place, and its folks are even queerer".
    • It doesn't come up much in the book, but how can we forget the swamp Wetwang??
    • This was lampshaded in Bored of the Rings: " 'This is indeed a queer river,' said Bromosel, as the water lapped at his thighs."
    • There are actually two elvish languages that Tolkien created as part of his insanely detailed backstory: Sindarin (the more common one), and Quenya (High Elvish, rarely appears). The lord of Lothlorien is generally known by the Sindarin form of his name, Celeborn (literally "silver-tree"), although the Quenya form shows up in some of the ancillary materials. In Quenya, "silver" is telep- instead of celeb-, and "tree" is orno instead of just orn. Put them together, and you get... Teleporno.
  • Darkness Visible makes much use of this trope to reinforce the gay-subtext. It is set in 1895 but was written in 2010, so when the author has one character say to another "Yes, this will be a much gayer house now you're on the mend", she knows exactly what she's doing...
  • In Anthony Hope's 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda, in which an Englishman is obliged to impersonate the King of Ruritania, the protagonist is at one point called upon to hold up the ruse by making love to the King's fiancée. In Simon Hawke's 1984 novel The Zenda Vendetta, in which a time-traveller is obliged to impersonate the Englishman impersonating the King, the corresponding scene has additional dialogue inserted to forestall any misapprehension on the part of the modern reader.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair: where the character of Jill Pole (a school-aged girl) is said to have "made love" to an entire castle full of giants:

""Gay," said Puddleglum with a deep sigh. "That's what we've got to be. Gay... I'll be gay. Like this" -- and he assumed a ghastly grin... Though her tongue was never still, you could hardly say she talked. She made love to everyone -- the grooms, the porters, the housemaids, the ladies-in-waiting, and the elderly giant lords whose hunting days were past. She submitted to being kissed and pawed about by any number of giantesses, many of whom seemed sorry for her and called her "a poor little thing" though none of them explained why. Scrubb and Puddleglum both did their best, but girls do that kind of thing better than boys. Even boys do it better than Marsh-wiggles."

  • Pride and Prejudice
    • Where Mr. Bennet says that Wickham (a rare male Vamp) 'simpers and smirks and makes love to us all'.
    • ?"On entering the drawing-room she found the whole party at loo, and was immediately invited to join them; but suspecting them to be playing high she declined it, ..." In contemporary English, it looks like Elizabeth is saying no to doing drugs in the bathroom (="loo" in British). Subsequent lines make clear that she's actually refusing to play cards because she's worried the stakes will be high.
    • Elizabeth frequently worries about members of her family, particularly her mother and younger sisters, "exposing themselves" in public. Mentally adding "as idiots" or "to ridicule" to the phrase will give more of an indication of Elizabeth's concerns - whatever the social offenses of the various Bennets aside from Jane and Elizabeth, public nudity isn't among them.
  • In Nicholas Nickleby, when Ralph has dinner with his friends and Kate, there is a line like "Poor old Kate, surrounded by gentlemen and wondering why no one's making love to her."
    • Of course, this may not have been innocent in Dickens' time either, given that the speaker - Sir Mulberry - spends the entire conversation sexually harassing Kate. (Some phrasing may belong to this trope, but it's definitely read as sexual harassment in-character, leading to several Heroic BSODs.)
    • A straighter example of this trope is his initial description, which reads like a series of innuendoes in modern slang: "Sir Mulberry Hawk was remarkable for his tact in ruining, by himself and his creatures, young gentlemen of fortune—a genteel and elegant profession, of which he had undoubtedly gained the head. ... his custom being, when he had gained the ascendancy over those he took in hand, rather to keep them down than to give them their own way; and to exercise his vivacity upon them openly, and without reserve. Thus, he made them butts, in a double sense, and while he emptied them with great address, caused them to ring with sundry well-administered taps, for the diversion of society."
    • It would be innocuous when Pip, referring to Herbert, mentions "we went to bed" in Great Expectations had their previous conversation not been a really bromantic one.
  • In The Pickwick Papers, Sam Weller comments that he might marry a rich young woman without a title, "if she made wery fierce love to me". Later, a woman proceeds to "titillate the nose" of another woman, who has just fainted.
  • Little Women contains this doozy:

Mothers are the best lovers in the world, but I don't mind whispering to Marmee that I'd like to try all kinds. It's very curious, but the more I try to satisfy myself with all sorts of natural affections, the more I seem to want.

    • As Alcott remarked in the beginning of part two: "I can only say with Mrs. March, 'What can you expect when you have four gay girls in the house?'"
  • In Emma by Jane Austen, Mr Elton "violently made love" to Emma in a carriage.
  • In Anne of Green Gables, Anne and her friends form a story-writing club. Anne comments that one girl "puts too much love-making in her stories" and that "too much is worse than too little", while another won't write any because she's too embarrassed to read it aloud.
  • In The Emily Books, another series by L. M. Montgomery, Kindly but childlike Cousin Jimmy comforts the recently orphaned Emily with a nickname, reminiscent of her slightly pointed ears and her love for cats: "Puss" or "pussy."
  • Anyone who's read 18th century literature has snickered at phrases like "he wanted the punishment of a headmaster" or "she wanted her mistress's soft hands". But "want" originally meant "lack" or "need"; the modern meaning of "desire" or "to wish for" didn't arise until the 19th century.
  • An intentional Discworld example comes in Making Money, when Moist and Bent discuss the architecture of the Royal Bank:

'Isn't the fornication wonderful?'
After quite a lengthy pause, Moist ventured: 'It is?'
'Don't you think so? There's more here than anywhere else in the city, I'm told.'
'Really?' said Moist, looking around nervously. 'Er, do you have to come down here at some special time?'
'Well, in banking hours usually, but we let groups in by appointment.'
'You know,' said Moist, 'I think this conversation has somehow gotten away from me...'
Bent waved vaguely at the ceiling. 'I refer to the wonderful vaulting,' he said. 'The word derives from fornix, meaning "arch".'
'Ah! Yes? Right!' said Moist. 'You know, I wouldn't be surprised if not many people knew that.'

    • Pratchett really likes this joke. At a reading of his that was held in an audience hall converted from a large old church with rather beautiful architecture, including a high, arched ceiling, Pratchett's first words on stepping onto stage were, "Fornication...is why we are all here today."
  • A book of Japanese fairy tales told of a kindly old man "collecting fags for the fire".
  • Clarissa: "Nor did it appear that [Lovelace] was so bad a man as had been represented; wild indeed, but it was at a gay time of life."
  • In William Thackeray's Pendennis, one of the supporting characters is named Harry Foker, supposedly because the person the character was based on was nicknamed "phoca" which is Greek or Latin for porpoise (he was rather obese). That the character is a womanizer suggests a less innocent meaning.
  • What's really a spit-take is when you're reading Sherlock Holmes and come across a line like this: '"Why, Holmes, it can't be!" Watson ejaculated.'
    • The first time this happens in the Sherlock Holmes canon, Holmes has just finished describing to Watson (who he is only just becoming friendly to) how he managed to deduce a man was a sergeant marine just from how he walked. '"Wonderful!" (Watson) ejaculated.' Yes ladies and gentlemen, Holmes is just THAT good.
    • "The Speckled Band" contains the line, "This ejaculation was drawn forth from my companion by ..."
    • In one of the stories from the same book, Watson is asleep when an "ejaculation" wakes him up.
    • Another Sherlock Holmes spit-take moment is found in 'The Speckled Band': Holmes apologises to Watson for 'knocking him up'. At the time, this meant to cause somebody to wake up (by knocking on their bedroom door), and did not have the modern meaning of 'to render pregnant'. Juuuuuust in case the Holmes/Watson relationship needed any more Ho Yay... or Mpreg...
    • It's worth another spit-take when Holmes goes on to explain that Mrs. Hudson has just knocked him up, after having been knocked up herself.
    • An additional Sherlock Holmes example is the use of "toilet," which at the time referred to one's personal grooming, washing, etc. ("...no one can glance at your toilet and attire without seeing that your disturbance dates from the moment of your waking.")
    • From 'The Adventure of the Empty House' (granted, Doyle probably wasn't going for a double meaning here):

"Ah, Colonel!" said Holmes, arranging his rumpled collar. "`Journeys end in lovers' meetings,' as the old play says. I don't think I have had the pleasure of seeing you since you favoured me with those attentions as I lay on the ledge above the Reichenbach Fall."

    • From 'Shoscombe Old Place', Watson describes Sir Robert Norberton as being:

"...so far down Queer Street that he may never find his way back again."

  • Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot often ejaculates his words as well. "Poirot ejaculated:" is sometimes on an entirely separate paragraph from both the speech itself and the preceding paragraph, so it really stands out and makes it unbelievably hard not to laugh out loud.
  • Bertie Wooster would often 'ejaculate', and then wonder if that was the word he wanted.
    • Don't forget his friend Stephanie Byng, nicknamed not Steffy, but Stiffy.
  • "Ejaculate" for "exclaim" is used completely straight in the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series.
    • The very first Hardy Boys book in the very first series was and is also rather educational: it tells us how "passing the queers" at that time was slang for fobbing off counterfeit money (hence the expression still used in some places today, "queer as a three dollar bill").
  • This kind of usage is parodied to hell and back in Mabel Maney's Nancy Clue/Hardly Boys trilogy—all the main characters will use the word "gay" to mean "happy", but they're all in same-sex relationships.
  • The authors of the disaster novel farce Earthdoom! would've been well aware of what they were doing when they made a race of slimeball aliens that communicated by encoding messages in emitted liquid, then used "ejaculate" as one of the tags for their speech.
  • "Ejaculate" for "exclaim" does appear in some modern books...such as Harry Potter, in which Ron and Slughorn both ejaculate their dialogue occasionally. To be fair, Ron is a teenage boy. We're not sure about Slughorn.
    • A stranger version is the Fat Lady's use of "Abstinence" as a password for Gryffindor Tower in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The meaning is the same, but the Fat Lady uses its obsolete definition as a reference to giving up alcohol (having just drunk her way through some very old mead), as opposed to the common usage of abstaining from sex.
  • A particularly unfortunate example from H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds: "His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing-gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating."
  • Often occurs in the Billy Bunter books, as in "'Hello, hello, hello,' ejaculated Bob Cherry cheerfully."
    • A less common example that might have modern readers looking up etymology is when the school's lone American student proclaims himself and other boys to be 'cute'.[1]
  • Parodied in lists of Appropriate Alternatives to "said", as in '"You're supposed to sprinkle sand on the roads when it's icy, you fool!" he gritted.' '"Oh my god I was so frightened when the geyser erupted," she gushed.' And obviously, '"I'm having an orgasm!" he ejaculated.'
  • Parodied in Robert Anton Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy- the final line in a scene full of Tom Swifties- "'I'm coming', he ejaculated."
  • And, as if it wasn't awkward enough to read Moby Dick and find the word "sperm" each five pages or so, there's also a strange example of this instance:

"(...)muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock".

    • Don't forget this passage: "Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, - Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness."
    • "Moby" has come to mean "large, immense or impressive," making the title sound even funnier to those who don't know the word came from the book.

Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he's queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he's queer, says Stubb; he's queer - queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time - queer, Sir - queer, queer, very queer. And here's his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here's his bedfellow!

  • It also was used in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Disturbingly, it's usually non-human characters who say it.
  • Not only do the characters in Stanley G. Weinbaum's science fiction classic A Martian Odyssey ejaculate frequently, one of them is named Putz. Weinbaum most likely did this intentionally.
  • In the original (Bram Stoker) Dracula, "Dr. Van Helsing rushed into the room, ejaculating furiously".
  • The Prince and the Pauper is full of "ejaculations" and "orgies."
  • In the 1930s Dr. Seuss illustrated The Pocket Book of Boners, a humorous collection of mistakes found in textbooks. As the Huffington Post put it, "If someone tells you they have a 'pocket book of boners,' you should probably turn and walk in the other direction. No wait, run."
  • This Emily Dickinson poem:

A Dying Tiger -- moaned for Drink --
I hunted all the Sand --
I caught the Dripping of a Rock
And bore it in my Hand --
His Mighty Balls -- in death were thick --
But searching -- I could see
A Vision on the Retina
Of Water -- and of me --

    • To clarify, Ms. Dickinson was referring to eyeballs.
  • The Bible has several, especially the older translations:
    • The word "thong" used to mean just a strip of leather and the word is used in some translations, when John the Baptist comments that he will not be fit even to untie the thongs of Jesus' sandals.
    • The double meaning of "ass". How can anyone not giggle when reading a Biblical passage involving a man riding an ass?
      • And also a man whose ass started talking to him...
      • Parodied in Discworld, where a town named for the fantasy equivalent to the animal in question is called... Badass.
    • Then there are pricks:
"And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks."
—Acts 26:14
      • The use of that word to represent the naughty bits was around back then (Shakespeare used it in such a manner, in fact). Of course, the translators of the KJV were more frumpy fuddy-duddies than ol' Bill, one would expect. They also liked to preserve the phrasing of older English translations where they could.
      • Nick Cave named an album "Kicking Against the Pricks" in honour of the verse, and it got banned from a lot of stores for the name alone. If they'd listened to it, they'd see it was a fairly innocuous collection of country and gospel covers.
      • George Orwell used the same phrase in his exposé of the bad living conditions of the unemployed in 1930's Britain, The Road to Wigan Pier. He mentions that people are getting accustomed to not objecting to their bad situation, or as he put it, "ceasing to kick against the pricks."
    • Acts 21:30 -- "The whole city was aroused"
    • Half a dozen places, including 1 Samuel 25:22, refer to men as "[he/any/all] that pisseth against the wall." Arguably an aversion since "piss" here means the same as it does today, but the word was clearly more socially acceptable then.
  • It was still possible to use 'pussy' as an innocent descriptive term in English literature until fairly late into the twentieth century. It gets bandied about a lot in Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books—leading to at least one retroactively hilarious sequence in which a group of police officials appreciatively discuss 'old pussies' in general before one mentions 'his particular pussy', Miss Marple. From the context, the original idea was clearly 'deceptively cozy'.
    • As the Barrison Sisters show, pussy meant all kinds of risqué things by the end of the 19th century.
    • Christie had lots of gay young people running around, and many people strike the main characters as queer.
    • Her book Death on the Nile might just be the king of this trope. Not only does a character hope that "this girl might be enough to turn the man straight", but one couple talks about "making whoopie" in a restaurant (from context, it seems to mean "living luxuriously") and one character expresses incredulity that "that dumb girl totes a dick?!" -- "dick" meaning Private Detective, obviously.
    • Murder on the Links makes a valiant attempt at the title, though, when a girl whom he later marries asks Hastings if he is in town with his boss. She phrases it thusly.

Are you down with the M.P., then? Doing the gay boy on the beach?

  • The characters in Damon Runyon's stories refer to their "straight monikers"—their real names, as opposed to nicknames like Harry the Horse.
  • There was a series of kids' mystery books called Something Queer Is Going On. Titles like that certainly wouldn't work today. The original books, perhaps understandably, seem to have fallen out of print. Author Elizabeth Levy has re-branded the newer titles in the series as The Fletcher Mysteries.
  • There is a Biggles book called Biggles Takes It Rough. It is about a hard journey across rough country, of course.
    • There's Biggles Gets His Men too. Biggles and his friends also ejaculate frequently.
  • This occurs in the Neil Gaiman short story Changes, where "change" is used to describe switching one's sex through the use of a drug originally intended as a cure for cancer. "Changing" eventually becomes seen as a sort of fetish. Schoolchildren giggle whenever they read "change" in one of their textbooks. The word itself eventually becomes so taboo that a man is prosecuted for wearing a t-shirt which reads "I'm a changed man!" Gaiman even mentions that spare change is eventually referred to as "coinage" to avoid problems.
  • "Dick", besides being a nickname for guys named "Richard", was also until fairly recently a slang term for "detective". Besides making jarring appearances in a lot of classic adult mystery literature, it appears quite frequently in the Hardy Boys and Three Investigators series of children's novels. This is why, in the case of the latter, one will now more often encounter the word "gumshoe" instead. Nothing that can help Richard, though.
    • The hero of the original novel The Blue Lagoon was called Dick. Needless to say, he was renamed Michael in the 1949 film and Richard in the 1980 film.
  • Apuleius' The Golden Ass is about a donkey, of course. It's probably best referred to as Metamorphoses, though.
  • In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, the heroine's name is Fanny Price. 'Fanny' once a very common name in the UK—short for 'Frances' -- but more familiar to modern audiences as a slang term for a certain woman's body part. In the USA, it means "a rear end," regardless of gender, and is innocent enough that a hip bag is referred to as a fanny pack with no double entendre intended. In the UK and Australia... well, it refers to the other side of a woman, shall we say. And is therefore much, much more adult.
    • Fanny gets "knocked up" in that book, and "intercourse" passes between the inhabitants of Mansfield and the Parsonage.
    • Henry Crawford also asks himself, of Fanny, "Is she queer?" In context, he's wondering why she isn't attracted to him.
    • The same applies, even more so, to the classic Fanny Hill, which is almost appropriate, given what the story's about.
    • Fanny Craddock was a famous television chef in Britain during the fifties and sixties. In one programme she taught viewers how to make ring doughnuts. After the programme, the announcer spoke a line still played on clip-shows to this day: 'I hope all your doughnuts come out like Fanny's.'
  • Thomas of Celano's Life of Saint Francis includes the following memorable description: 'Indeed, he was always occupied with Jesus; Jesus he bore in his heart, Jesus in his mouth, Jesus in his ears, Jesus in his eyes, Jesus in his hands, Jesus in the rest of his members.'
  • In the context of explaining why divorce is a bad thing, G. K. Chesterton was writing about how kids are better off if they are sure their parents aren't just waiting until the kids grow up so that the parents can get a divorce, and one of his examples was this:

"Children...cannot keep the feeling [of living in a secure home] for more than ten minutes, if there is an assumption...that Mrs. Brown may go off the moment that Miss Brown has "come out."

    • Referring to the daughter's "coming out," in the sense of being a debutante who comes of age.
  • The meaning of the word "hypochondria" has changed dramatically over the centuries. It derives from the word "hypochondrium", a Greek medical term for the abdomen, and was first used to describe pain arising from malarial infection of the liver and spleen. Centuries later the meaning had changed to "depression", which is how it was used all the way from the time of Davenant until that of Trollope. It was only in mid to late Victorian times that the word reached its current (and hotly debated) meaning.
    • In the mid-20th century, "hypochondria" was very frequently used in Real Life as a euphemism for other more serious mental illnesses, such as borderline personality disorder and hebephrenia. Contemporary literature mimicked this increase in use of the word without seemingly realizing it was being used euphemistically, creating far more literal hypochondriacs in fiction than were ever diagnosed in real life.
  • 'Orgy', believe it or not, technically describes any gross indulgence, but usage in any context besides the sexual is very rare nowadays. Thus, when the Kurt Vonnegut book Slapstick or Lonesome No More has a scene in which the main character and his twin sister have what the author calls an "orgy"...Yeah.
    • "Orgy" is also used in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when talking about what they will do when they are thieves, to which Huck Finn asks, "What are those?" Then Tom says, "Beats me! But we gotta have 'em!" Ugh.
    • There are a group of fairies coming home from an orgy in Peter Pan.

Tom Lehrer: "When correctly viewed,/Everything is lewd./(I could tell you things about Peter Pan,/And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)"

    • The word comes up a fair amount in H.P. Lovecraft as well. The orgies in question are generally left vague, but mostly don't sound sexual, and given the sort of lifeforms one encounters in Lovecraft's stories, we can really only hope.
  • Early on in A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man the narrator describes a washbasin with "cocks with printing on it" which is "queer".
  • Some candles were once made of spermaceti, a wax found in the head cavities of sperm whales, thusly these candles were known as sperm candles and the wax known as sperm. But modern readers familiar only with sperm's more common definition may double-take when reading passages from older works mentioning such candles, like this line from Bram Stoker's Dracula: "Holding the candle so that he could read the coffin plates, and so holding it that the sperm dropped in white patches which congealed as they touched the metal..."
    • Elsewhere in the same book, "Van Helsing rushed into the room, ejaculating furiously".
  • Also in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: "In addition, Benjamin discovered that he was becoming more and more attracted by the gay side of life." and "his thirst for gaiety grew stronger" and "there were gay hours in the cheerful room".
  • The Onion: Our Dumb Century has an entire page of this describing the 1906 San Francisco fire: "EARTH-QUAKE MARKS LEAST GAY DAY IN SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY -- 'Queen city on the Pacific' lies in ruins. Garment District still flaming."
  • Ray Bradbury is not immune to this, either. In the short horror story "The Skeleton", a Face Full of Alien Wingwong is described as being like "a hot-water douche". As in, a cleansing flood of liquid rushing into an orifice. Okay, That Came Out Wrong.
    • It helps if you remember that "douche" simply means "shower" in French, which used to be a common language for English speakers to borrow from. (The Spanish cognate, by the way, is ducha.) Hey, at least Bradbury didn't write "golden douche."
  • Welkin Weasels, a children's book series, runs into this. The story is about the weasels trying to find humans to repair the sea walls before the land of Welkin floods. The sea walls are persistently referred to as "dykes". Perfectly correct, but not used with that particular meaning very much these days ...
    • There's also the food fight, described as a "delightful orgy" (one participant has "cream dripping from his whiskers", which is just bog-standard Accidental Innuendo—and the only ones not taking part are the three priests, natch). And when Falshed is trapped by the Grand Inquisitor, he becomes worried that "these three fiends were going to have their way with him".
  • This happens about 3 times in the course of two pages in the Mary Shelley novel Frankenstein.

Victor Frankenstein: We returned to our college on Sunday afternoon: the peasants were dancing, and every one we met appeared to be gay
...
Alphonse Frankenstein: What would be your surprise, my son, when you expect a happy and gay welcome, to behold, on the contrary, tears and wretchedness?
...
Alphonse Frankenstein: William is dead!-that sweet child, whose smiles delighted and warmed my heart, who was so gentle, yet so gay!

  • In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Sissy calls all her husbands and lovers "John" for her convenience, and her family often refers to them as "Sissy's John" or "The John". No, she's not that kind of woman, as she'd be the first to insist. (However, for a book written in 1943, the meaning of "love-making" in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is much like the contemporary euphemism: it's described as sometimes involving a couch and likely to result in a child.
    • "John" also had its modern meaning in 1943. The choice of the word was almost certainly deliberate, not just on the part of the writer but also on the part of the characters.
      • Which might be why, in the film version, Sissy calls all her men "Bill".
  • Kenneth Roberts' 1934 novel Captain Caution concludes with the captain's French friend pinching another man's cheek and cheerfully announcing that "I am gay again!"
  • Gunby Hadath's magnificent 1913 novel "Schoolboy Grit". Wherein a scholarship boy is forced to admit that, being from a non-public school background he knows nothing of fagging (and is much derided for his ignorance), a teacher "kept crumpling the letters up and sending them to the wastepaper basket, accompanied by many grunts, groans and ejaculations" and, most perplexingly, a character is left far more 'light hearted and gay' after being 'smacked in the googlies' with a towel by another boy. (It's a cricketing term.)
  • The handbook for Alcoholics Anonymous, written in 1939, has many instances of this trope. For example:

One dismal afternoon he paced a hotel lobby wondering how his bill was to be paid. At one end of the room stood a glass covered directory of local churches. Down the lobby a door opened into an attractive bar. He could see the gay crowd inside. In there he would find companionship and release. Unless he took some drinks, he might not have the courage to scrape an acquaintance and he would have a lonely weekend.

  • Modern writer Patrick O'Brian has too much fun with this trope in a scene in the eighth book of his Aubrey-Maturin series, The Ionian Mission, set in pre-Victorian times, where Jack's former protegé Captain Babbington insist the women on his ship are all Lesbians, whom they rescued from pirates and are escorting to their home of Lesbos. Seriously, their conversation has to be read to be believed.
  • The Great Gatsby is very, very guilty of this. It only increases the Ho Yay.
    • "a promise that she had done gay exciting things just a while since and that there were gay exciting things hovering in the next hour"
    • Jordan tells the story of how the young Daisy had her little love affair with Gatsby and then missed her chance to say goodbye to him when he was shipped out. After that, she apparently gave up going out with soldiers, and "[b]y the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever."
  • New readers of Dune may find it a bit odd to see the night sky described as "a faggot of luminous gray".
  • First Amongst SEQUELS, the fifth of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, this is a significant plot point, after the literature parliament tries to get certain books banned.
  • In the Temeraire series, men of close acquaintance address each other as "my dear" (Particularly, Laurence to Temeraire and to his fellow captain, Granby). This was, apparently, a common form of address at the time the story is set (The Napoleonic Wars). To modern eyes, it's simply a signpost that says "Ho Yay Ahead".
    • At one point Granby apologizes for "acting the scrub." He was not being an annoying gamer or, in another modern sense, hanging out the passenger's side of his best friend's ride, trying to holler at you.
  • Poul Anderson's Time Travel novel There Will Be Time has a funny variant of this when the hero's new friend from the far future mentions that one of the primary amusements of her culture is "joking." Later, when the two are alone together for several months, he discovers "joking" is a way to pass time with someone you really like....
  • The Curlytops At Silver Lake has a subplot centered around a woman having her "queer" box stolen (queer of course used in the sense of "unusual", as it's from Japan and has a secret compartment with a special hidden latch).
  • The Secret Garden, typically for its time, has plenty of uses of "queer" ("Am I queer?" "Yes, very."), but also, due to Colin's perceived disability, does it with "straight" as well, such as when he stands up for the first time: '"He's as straight as I am!" cried Dickon. "He's as straight as any lad i' Yorkshire!"' (If this is good news, it may be dampened slightly a couple of paragraphs later when Ben Weatherstaff observes, "There's not a knob on thee.")

Her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people.

  • Like many examples in this list, A Song of Ice and Fire uses "queer" in its original sense. Unlike many examples in this list, it started doing so in 1996.
  • A novel written in the 20s about the Napoleonic wars had the line "the flaming city had a queer gayness to it".
  • In Edgar Allan Poe's day, a 'diddler' was roughly synonymous with 'swindler.' His essay on the characteristics of a diddler makes for, um, interesting reading to modern eyes: https://web.archive.org/web/20160414041026/http://books.eserver.org/fiction/poe/diddling.html
    • "What constitutes the essence, the nare, the principle of diddling is, in fact, peculiar to the class of creatures that wear coats and pantaloons. A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle is his destiny. "Man was made to mourn," says the poet. But not so:; he was made to diddle. This is his aim; his object- his end. And for this reason when a man's diddled we say he's "done.""
    • Your true diddler winds up all with a grin. But this nobody sees but himself. He grins when his daily work is done; when his allotted labors are accomplished; at night in his own closet, and altogether for his own private entertainment. He goes home. He locks his door. He divests himself of his clothes. He puts out his candle. He gets into bed. He places his head upon the pillow. All this done, and your diddler grins. This is no hypothesis. It is a matter of course. I reason a priori, and a diddle would be no diddle without a grin.
    • A very simple diddle, indeed, is this. The captain of a ship, which is about to sail, is presented by an official looking person with an unusually moderate bill of city charges. Glad to get off so easily, and confused by a hundred duties pressing upon him all at once, he discharges the claim forthwith.
  • Isaac Asimov uses "diddle" in a similar way in his Black Widowers stories, meaning to trick someone.
  • Nero Wolfe (Numerous references to 'dicks', ie. detectives [and as a fairly common male nickname of the time]. This becomes especially awkward when 'female dicks' Dol Bonner and Sally Corbett are introduced.)
    • Another example is in the short story "Method Three For Murder", where one suspect laments the death of the victim by saying "She was so gay. She was a gay person."
    • And a third example, recalling the Poe one above, is when Wolfe declares "I will not be diddled!" in the episode/short story "Before I Die."
    • And many were the occasions when Archie "got erect" rather than just standing up.
  • Although Daisy Miller contains plenty of intentional Double Entendres, some more are added thanks to this trope:

"He wondered what were the regular conditions and limitations of one's intercourse with a pretty American flirt. It presently became apparent that he was on the way to learn."

  • One of the main characters of Swallows and Amazons is a young girl named "Able-Seaman Titty". Nobody even considers the possibility that this might be funny.
    • Actually it gets worse, in later books a character called Richard who is universally called Dick is added. Add to this "Roger the Cabin boy", the main characters boat being the Swallow, most characters being described as Seamen (Salty Seaman is I believe used at one point), the word tackle crops up a lot as well which has connotations, Captain Flint's cannon being described as his mighty weapon and the fact that bird watching is a major part of the series with its attending Tits and Boobies has lead to a lot of unintended mirth.
      • Titty or Tiddy was once a nickname for Elizabeth, and occasionally for Margaret.
  • In The Growing Pains Of Adrian Mole the homosexual Nigel forms a "Gay Club" at school. When Principal Scruton tries to get it shut down seeing as he doesn't want the gym used for "immoral purposes", Nigel plays dumb and claims the club is for people to have a joyous and good time. Scruton then informs Nigel that the definition of "gay" has changed but remains silent when Nigel asks him what it is.
  • Appears intentionally in Stephen King's The Dark Tower, where Eddie Dean, who came from 1987 meets Odetta Holmes, who is from 1964. Odetta objects to being referred as "black", because in her time, the neutral word was "Negro".
    • And "black" was an insult, worse than motherfucker.
  • The term gay is used frequently in Atlas Shrugged, including Hank Rearden proclaiming that “he liked to see people being gay, even if he didn't understand this kind of enjoyment”. This kind of enjoyment referred to the party his wife was throwing.
    • Dagny Taggart finds Francisco d'Anconia “sitting on the floor playing with his marbles”.
    • Many events and items (like Galt's motor) are queer.
    • Oh and Orren Boyle's personal spin doctor is overly fond of children.
  • The father in The Great Brain series edits the town paper, The Adenville Weekly Advocate. Tom wants to be a journalist and is eager to work at The Advocate.
  • Inverted in The Court Of The Air, where the inhabitants of Middlesteel use the term "flash mob" to refer to street gangs. This term was actually used in real-world 19th century Tasmania, in reference to a female subculture, but there's little doubt that author Stephen Hunt was playing up the in-verse usage's incongruity with modern definition.
  • Not quite an example, but pretty close: in Redwall, the vermin use the term "mate" to mean either friend or spouse, depending on context. Note the distinct lack of any female vermin in the first few books, and ... well. Also, the latest book is entitled The Sable Quean, spelling intentional. Mr Jacques gave the definition of "quean" in interviews as "wicked woman", but inspection of the dictionary proves it actually means "prostitute". He can't possibly NOT know this, right?
    • He might be Getting Crap Past the Radar, but the writer is also showing his work quite cleverly here. "Prostitute" was originally an obfuscating Tudor euphemism for "wicked woman". "Wicked woman" was originally itself a euphemism (for "whore", of course) but by the 1500s it had become as tarnished as the original.
    • There's a line about making daisy chains in the first book.
  • In Christopher Moore's Coyote Blue, one character is named "Yiffer". While a "yiffer" can be defined as a stout pole used in scaffolding, anyone the least bit familiar with the Furry Fandom is likely to see a completely different meaning.
  • In H.P. Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark, the hero "seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will". I can't be the only one who finds this unutterably hilarious.
    • Another example from Lovecraft, but less humorous, in The Whisper in Darkness. Azathoth, one of the great Old Ones, is described as "the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space." Nuclear refers to central (as in nucleus), and not the modern connotation of nuclear energy or atomic bombs. Latter authors took advantage of this, and made Azathoth the patron of radiation.
  • The '60s Czech translations of the Swallows and Amazons books casually use the word "šukat" to mean "to walk about" (the literal meaning is - I believe - "to push along"). Nowadays, the word means "to fuck".
  • This one isn't dirty so much as it's just odd, but Anna Karenina's description of one of the characters "making his toilet" may count.
    • The outdatedness of that expression was taken advantage of in an early Stephen Fry monologue, where in the midst of a Hurricane of Puns the narrator "made [his] toilet, sat on it and then went down to breakfast."
    • And in Anna Karenina, page 87 in my printing, Anna says something or other with a "gay twinkle". This after a paragraph on the preceding page about how Kitty is in love with Anna in the way girls sometimes are with older women.
    • Better yet, there's also this gem: "as if tears were the necessary lubricant without which mutual intercourse between the two sisters could not work successfully."
  • Some English translations of chapter 17 of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio have this. One describes the title character as "running and rushing about the room as gay and as lively as a young cock." Another has "him run and jump around the room gay as a bird on wing."
  • Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, while a recent book, is deliberately written with a somewhat antiquated style and word choice. While it avoids some of the more obvious instances, it tends to use the word "intimacy" where nowadays we would probably say "friendship", introducing Ho and Lesyay implications into apparently platonic relationships. It also uses the older meaning of "toilet".
  • Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls features this little gem:

Golz was gay and he had wanted him to be gay too before he left, but he hadn't been.

All the best ones, when you thought it over, were gay. It was much better to be gay and it was a sign of something too. It was like having immortality while you were still alive. That was a complicated one. There were not many of them left though. No, there were not many of the gay ones left. There were very damned few of them left. And if you keep on thinking like that, my boy, you won't be left either. Turn off the thinking now, old timer, old comrade. You're a bridge-blower now. Not a thinker. Man, I'm hungry, he thought. I hope Pablo eats well.

They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles further when on a sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front, rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck themselves against it.

With what bitterness did he behold his whole erection of glory and of poetry crumble away bit by bit!

  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is fond of using the phrase "get up and hump yourself". Considering how it's common School Study Media, the classroom snickering is inevitable.
  • The Railway Series has the word gay used in its original context a number of times. The series did begin in the mid-1940s after all. The word was left in each time for the later televised adaptation, with no reference to the modern meaning at all. Just casually used in its original context.
  • Karl R. Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, at one point arrives at the conclusion that, "Thus we can say that we owe reason, like our language, to intercourse with other men."
  • Not really an example, but hard to explain otherwise: John Irving's very long novel A Prayer for Owen Meany (the book on which the movie Simon Birch was rather loosely based) has the narrator, Johnny, relating many anecdotes unrelated to the main plot, such as how a girl named Hester he and his friends used to play with grew up to become a shock rocker named "Hester the Molester." (Johnny's a fan of hers, and has some of her albums.) Hester obviously meant "molester" in the current, kinky sense instead of simply "one who bothers people" - but considering that she and Johnny were born in the 1940s, grew up during The Fifties, and came of age in The Sixties, it's unclear how she would have picked up on the modern definition.
    • It's a pun on the old Hustler comic "Chester the Molester", in which the title character molests both women and prepubescent girls. The comic debuted in 1975 but the phrase might be earlier.
  • The 1933 novel Better Angel is about a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality—which if anything makes it funnier when you have things like Kurt's mother being grateful that her son is "straight" (i.e. without physical deformity) and Kurt, as a child, imagining himself in a "gay pirate outfit". ("Queer" as "strange" also shows up a lot, but given that the word is occasionally used in its more modern sense, those double entendres may be intentional.)
  • In one of the 2010 reissues of The Baby Sitters Club series, the term "thongs" was changed to "flip-flops" in order to curb some odd imagery for those who associate thongs with something else.
  • In Up The Down Staircase, Sylvia is warned never to give a lesson on "lie and lay" and not to teach the poem that begins "There is no frigate like a book". Sylvia says if she teaches that poem she'll substitute the word "steamship".
  • In Tom Sawyer Huckleberry Finn calls Tom's idea of playing robbers as "gay, mighty gay". Nowadays it'll have the exact opposite meaning.
  • Richard Matheson has a short story, SRL AD in which a personal ad describes the person as "tender and gay altogether." The person who replies describes himself as "gay altogether," as well. Matheson adds in a note after the story, "the word 'gay' did not mean what it does today."
  • In Roald Dahl's version of "Cinderella" (included in the picture book Revolting Rhymes), Prince Charming exclaims "Who's this dirty slut? Off with her nut! Off with her nut!" after decapitating the ugly sisters - by "dirty slut" he meant simply that Cinderella was slobbish, not sexually promiscuous. A number of online reviewers condemn the book as unsuitable for children because of this one word, despite apparently being fine with the beheadings occuring immediately beforehand.
  • In Beverly Cleary's Dear Mr Henshaw, the main character sees a sign that reads "$50 fine for molesting butterflies" and wonders why anyone would want to molest a butterfly. It's pretty obvious the word isn't being used in the sense readers are most familiar with, but the character's thoughts could prove otherwise...
  • In Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, the main character, who is on his honeymoon, describes himself as "gay and confused." While it obviously means that he's happy and a bit shocked at his own luck, to a modern ear it sounds like he's not sure how he feels because he just realized he's homosexual.
  • In the American Girl mystery "The Crystal Ball", a paragraph mentions "the gay crowds". On one hand, the story takes place in the 1910's, when "gay" did mean "joyful". On the other hand, the story was published in 2012- and today's average tween and young teen reading this book aimed for her demographic will likely be more familiar with a different meaning for the word "gay".
  • How They Found Pussy. (It's about a cat.)
  • Similarly, in Five Children and It, Jane's nickname is "Pussy" (and Cyril assigns her the Nom De Guerre "Wild Cat" at one point).
  1. ↑ as in shrewd and perceptive, of course
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