THE WORD

Gay. The word comoted too closely a participation-in what the "outsiders" called the world of fairies and queers. And to my timid friend and me any such inference to ourselves was brutal, unwarranted, and absolutely true; hence, the problem of finding another derivative in order best to avoid complications. We sought the perfoot word to tag the gay man or woman without at the same time revealing so much as a normal curiosity.

Nonetheless, a normal curiosity we didn't lack, and it became imperative that in order to satisfy same we must come up with a word, be it Hindu, Hebrew, or plain Hoboken, that'd fulfill our need. First we'd thought colors. Blue? Somehow it has a kinship with gay, due, I would say, to its very contrariness. How can you feel blue and be gay? or feel gay and be blue? Green. He's a green? That didn't seem sensible, somehow.

Perhaps & shape. The hipster uses the word square, doesn't ho? But the word "round" sounded ridiculous in that sense. We scratched it off. (Try using rectangle. There's a sound of confusion about it--tangled wrecks or something.)

A few days of search went by (about sixty). It occurred to us that to coin a word wouldn't do, either, the reason being that if we should say something like she's a "kokopandoon," we'd arouse that normal curiosity I was talking about. And for a word like "kokopandoon" how else can two normal people like my timid friend and me interpret it to mean anything but gay?

All else chucked from the list, we were nearly at the end of our hope when by some fluke we had the good fortune of moeting a friend of a friend who, it would see hailed from Bos ton. The good for tune had little, if anything, to do with either the character or the personality of th friend of a friend but that indeed he hailed from Fcston. Not that there was anything unique about that. It was even true (anybody would've

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