How can a swan be gay?

It was one of those moments when you find yourself hopelessly straddled over the muddy ditch that separates then from now.

It happened one evening while I was reading to my Things. The book was The Trumpet of the Swan by EB White, famed writer of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.

First published in 1942, it’s the story Louis, the dysfunctional trumpeter swan who couldn’t trumpet like the other swans. It’s a sweet little tale packed with universal themes about fitting in, following your dreams and dealing with overachieving parents. (Apparently they existed in 40s-era swan communities too.)

All was going well with our story until we reached the troubling passage on page 74. It’s a quotation from Louis’s overachieving dad who’s responding to news that his son has been rebuffed by a girl swan. Louis’s dad is incensed. No son of his will be treated this way. Something will have to be done.

“I shall act,” Louis dad declares. “Louis is a Trumpeter Swan, noblest of all the waterfowl. He is gay, cheerful, strong, powerful …” The little speech continues, but my reading of is interrupted by my two gobsmacked Things.

“Excuse me?” exclaims Thing 1. “Did you say gay?”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Thing 2 says. “You’re not telling me they had gay swans back then? When was this book written?”

“It was written in 1942,” I reply, using that old politician’s trick of answering only the question that suits me. With that, I continue the reading. “He is gay, cheerful, strong, powerful, lusty, good…”

But my Things aren’t about to let this one go. “Mummy!” Thing 1 insists. “The book just said the swan was gay. What’s this book about?” At nine years old, she’s old enough to know, but not quite old enough to know better.

And so I put the book down and have one of those talks a parent occasionally has with a child. I explain that there was a time when the word gay meant happy and cheerful, but that over the years it’s evolved a new meaning, one that isn’t quite what EB White meant in 1942 when he wrote The Trumpet of the Swan.

“You mean gay didn’t mean gay back then?” said Thing 2. “What’s up with that?”

Well, my darlings, what’s up with that is the English language, that’s what.
I then went on to explain that there was also a time when Madonna was a Christian icon, not an identity-morphing pop icon who will go down in history for her external presentation of conicals.

There was a time when a mouse was a little rodent that scurried about your house causing certain people to stand on chairs and scream.

A queer person was an odd or unusual individual. A queer might also have been gay, but not in the sense of today. A hard drive was a long journey on a sweltering day in a car full of cranky kids.

A web was the weapon Spiderman used to fight the baddies. A wireless was something the whole family gathered round in wartime to hear news bulletins on our boys Europe.

And imagine this: There was a time when a thong was a mere poolside flip flop, nothing more, nothing less.

My Things were fascinated, amused and surprised by these antiquarian meanings. But to their great disappointment, the next word I introduced to our little discussion hasn’t evolved one bit: bedtime.


glethbridge@herald.ca