About being gay
Recently I unearthed my paperback copy of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. This book, as you’ll see from the cover, cost me five shillings and is the fifth reprint (1968) of an edition first published in 1962 by J. M. Dent and Sons. The front shows a picture of the poet in profile with his trademark cigarette protruding from his mouth.
The back cover is given over to extracts of reviews from a number of different journals; and this is one of them.
It’s always a bit of surprise to see the word “gay” portrayed in its original meaning, but this one also gave me a bit of a chuckle. To associate a macho, hard-drinking heterosexual, such as Thomas, with anything remotely “gay” is, (to me anyway), quite comical.
It would be interesting to know if the next reprint retained the same quote, because it was at about this time that the word was adopted by the homosexual community. The consensus seems to be that its modern connotation came into common usage around 1970.
Strange, isn’t it? Anybody aged about 40 or younger (probably half the English-speaking population of the world), has never known the word to have any other meaning!
Certainly, by 1985, when Microholics was published we were well into the gay=homosexual scenario. In The Future section of the book, there was this one:
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People we love to hate
Today we turn our attention to Estate Agents. If you live outside the UK, of course, they’re called Real Estate Agents. Why the need for the prefix “real”, I’ve never understood. Is it to distinguish real estate from virtual estate - whatever that may be? And while we’re on the subject, the word “estate” is pretty misleading in itself. Estate is something associated with opulence and grandeur as in, “You must come down to my estate for the weekend, old boy, for a spot of shooting and fishing”. A grubby cockroach-infested bed-sitting room in a run-down tenement block can hardly be classified as an “estate”!
Maybe we should have done with it and just call them “property pimps”.
As you see, the estate agent has always been a favourite bête noir, whipping-boy and general figure of fun for satirists and cartoonists. Still, you can’t help feeling just a little sorry for them since the “credit crunch” and slump in the housing market took effect. And for the time being, at least, they have been toppled from the leading position of Most Reviled Professions by - you’ve guessed - THE BANKER.
In 1985, when this was done however, estate agents were up there occupying No. 1 position:
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