Are You 'Gay' or 'Gay'?

Here's a pretty abrupt change in pace from all my talk of ANTM; buckle up.

After getting into a discussion with a friend about Zac Efron, and by extension High School Musical, I found myself staring down the barrel of an article listing a few reasons why HSM 2 is laced with homosexual-tolerant overtones. Taken at somebody's face value, they seem like totally legit claims (Who couldn't tell Ryan was light in the loafers at first sight?). But apparently, not everyone felt the same way; the comments section is rammed full of pre-teens defending their beloved movie, and they manage to invoke enough 'gay's to summon the Order of Standards & Practices.

Here's where things get interesting: in all of the 'gay's that I had to sift through in order to glean any sort of comprehension out of the comments, I routinely found myself flummoxed. "how can you call this movie gay? you're gay!!" (without a hint of irony, even though the blog itself is 'gay'), "don't say that, this movie is gay, it's good", "...so gay!! get a life", "gay's a sexuality, not a description", you get the picture. For the life of me, I could not make heads or tails of why they're saying it like 'gay' is a bad thing. And then, I realize that 'gay' IS a bad thing, thinking back to my days of referring to homework, work, or anything unpleasant as 'gay'. Juvenile and base, I know, but it's three letters and one syllable; why wouldn't you want to use it?

I've got an answer for that: because sooner or later, you'll end up in a situation (like above) where pre-teens and other ill-informed persons are slinging around a word with two vastly different meanings, and very little to aid in context clues, as if there's only one true meaning. The sheer scope of the usage of both meanings, and a dash of cultural homophobia, only exacerbates this problem. I'm not gonna pretend that I'm totally tuned into the gay community/umbrella/universe/whatever, or to the pre-teen slang that's in current usage, because I'm not at all, but if I can see that there's a problem with this, then there's definitely something amiss. It's very easy for two people to say, as an absolutely random example, "HSM is so gay", mean two totally different things, and become offended by each other for such brazen... offensiveness. There comes a point when you wonder, though, are they really saying two different things, or is it the same undercurrent with either interpretation?

Of course, it's not the only word with such a problem; there's still that other pesky word that won't sit down and shut up, nigger and its baby brother, nigga. The only thing missing here is the lack of context clues. It can be debated all fucking day and night why can or can't the word be appropriated by black people, white people, under what circumstances, if at all, etc. ad nauseum, but at the end of the day, there are people using it to say 'hello, good sir', and to say 'you're no good, and beneath me', and if those people ever meet, all hell will break loose. The usage itself isn't the problem (isn't the purpose of language to get ideas between people?), the problems are the values and definitions assigned to them by people.

To put it all back in terms of the original topic, the 'gay'ness of HSM, doesn't it seem a bit counterproductive to have a movie be described as 'gay' or homosexual-tolerant, when the only reaction that you can pull from people is of how HSM is "so not gay at all"?